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Doctor (title)
Doctor is an academic title that originates from the Latin word of the same spelling and meaning. The word is originally an agentive noun of the Latin verb 'to teach'. It has been used as an academic title in Europe since the 13th century, when the first doctorates were awarded at the University of Bologna and the University of Paris. Having become established in European universities, this usage spread around the world. Contracted "Dr" or "Dr.", it is used as a designation for a person who has obtained a doctorate (e.g. PhD). In many parts of the world it is also used by medical practitioners, regardless of whether or not they hold a doctoral-level degree.
The doctorate () appeared in medieval Europe as a license to teach () at a medieval university. Its roots can be traced to the early church when the term "doctor" referred to the Apostles, church fathers and other Christian authorities who taught and interpreted the Bible. The right to grant a "licentia docendi" was originally reserved to the church which required the applicant to pass a test, take an Oath of allegiance and pay a fee. The Third Council of the Lateran of 1179 guaranteed the access – now largely free of charge – of all able applicants, who were, however, still tested for aptitude by the ecclesiastic scholastic. This right remained a bone of contention between the church authorities and the slowly emancipating universities, but was granted by the pope to the University of Paris in 1213 where it became a universal license to teach ("licentia ubiquie docendi"). However, while the licentia continued to hold a higher prestige than the bachelor's degree ("Baccalaureus"), it was ultimately reduced to an intermediate step to the Magister and doctorate, both of which now became the exclusive qualification for teaching.
The earliest doctoral degrees (theology, law, and medicine) reflected the historical separation of all university study into these three fields. Over time the D.D. has gradually become less common and studies outside theology, law, and medicine have become more common (such studies were then called "philosophy", but are now classified as sciences and humanities – however this usage survives in the degree of Doctor of Philosophy).
The Ph.D. was originally a degree granted by a university to learned individuals who had achieved the approval of their peers and who had demonstrated a long and productive career in the field of philosophy (in the broad sense of the term, meaning the pursuit of knowledge). The appellation of "Doctor" (from Latin: teacher) was usually awarded only when the individual was in middle age. It indicated a life dedicated to learning, knowledge, and the spread of knowledge. The Ph.D. entered widespread use in the 19th century at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin as a degree to be granted to someone who had undertaken original research in the sciences or humanities. Prior to the formal degree, the contemporary doctorate (PhD), arguably, arose in Leipzig as a successor to the Master's (MA) degree in 1652 (Dr. habil).
In some European countries, such as Italy and Portugal, Doctor became a title given to all or most degree holders, not just those with doctorates.
As a result, the title is now used by many professionals in these countries, including those such as lawyers who are not normally granted the title elsewhere. The title is also used for lawyers in South America, where they have traditionally earned doctoral degrees, as well as in the former Portuguese territory of Macau in China.
The primary meaning of "Doctor" in English has historically been with reference to the holder of a doctoral degree. These particularly referred to the ancient faculties of divinity, law and medicine, sometimes with the addition of music, which were the only doctoral degrees offered until the 19th century. During the 19th century, Ph.D.s became increasingly common in Britain, although to obtain the degree it was necessary to travel to continental Europe or (from 1861) to the United States, as the degree was not awarded in the UK until 1917.
However, the title, not being protected by law, was adopted by quacks. As a result, by the mid 19th century, it was normal in the UK to omit the title "Dr" when addressing letters to those holding doctoral degrees, and instead write the abbreviated form of the degree after the name, e.g. "The Reverend Robert Phelps, D.D.", "Thomas Elliotson, Esq. M.D.", or "John Lindsey, Esq. Ph.D.", in order to avoid classing academic doctors "with the village apothecary and the farrier" and various "quacks in literature, science, or art". In the US it similarly became customary to use post-nominals rather than the title of Doctor when addressing letters. All those with doctoral degrees continued to use the title professionally and socially.
Despite being historically associated with doctorates in law, the title of "doctor" for lawyers has not customarily been used in English-speaking countries, where lawyers were traditionally not required to have a university degree and were trained by other lawyers by apprenticeship or in the Inns of Court. The exception being those areas where, up to the 19th century, civil law rather than common law was the governing tradition, including admiralty law, probate and ecclesiastical law: such cases were heard in the Doctor's Commons, and argued by advocates who held degrees either of doctor of civil law at Oxford or doctor of law at Cambridge. As such, lawyers practicing common law in England were not doctoral candidates and had not earned a doctorate. When university degrees became more common for those wanting to qualify as a lawyer in England, the degree awarded was the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.). Similarly in the US, even though degrees became standard for lawyers much earlier, the degree was again the LL.B., only becoming the Juris Doctor generally in the latter half of the 20th century.
In many English-speaking countries, it is common to refer to physicians by the title of doctor, even when they do not hold a doctoral level qualification. The word "Doctor" has long had a secondary meaning in English of physician, e.g. in Johnson's Dictionary, which quotes its use with this meaning by Shakespeare. In the US, the medical societies established the proprietary medical colleges in the 19th century to award their own MDs, but in the UK and the British Empire, where degree granting was strictly controlled, this was not an option. The usage of the title to refer to medical practitioners, even when they didn't hold doctoral degrees, was common by the mid 18th century. However, the first official recognition of Doctor being applied as a title to medical practitioners regardless of whether they held a doctoral degree was in 1838, when the Royal College of Physicians resolved that it would "regard in the same light, and address by the same appellation, all who have obtained its diploma, whether they have graduated elsewhere or not."
The Medical Act 1858 made it illegal for anyone not qualified in medicine to use a title that implied they were. This led to prosecutions of people making unauthorised use of the title "Dr". However, it also called into question the use of the title by licentiates of the Colleges of Physicians – all of whom were, under the new act, allowed to practice throughout the UK. In 1859, the London College reversed its earlier decision, resolving "That the title of Doctor shall not be given in any official document issued from this College to any person who is not possessed of the Degree of Doctor of Medicine". This was followed up in 1860 by new bylaws that stated "No Fellow, Member, or Licentiate of the College shall assume the title of Doctor of Medicine, or use any other name, title, designation or distinction implying that he is a Graduate in Medicine of an University, unless he be a Graduate in Medicine of an University". In Ireland, the question of whether the license of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland granted the title of Doctor of Medicine led to a court case in 1861, with the conclusion that it did not. The "British Medical Journal" ("BMJ") observed, however, that anyone wanting the right to the title of "Doctor" could gain it "with a five-shilling degree of Doctor of Philosophy" from abroad, or could simply assume the title, as only "Doctor of Medicine" was actually protected. Debate continued as to the use of "Doctor" as a courtesy title by those who did not use it by right as holders of doctoral degrees, with the "BMJ" noting in 1876 that "We have again a sort of flood of letters for and against the use of the title of Doctor by physicians" and in 1882 that "There is not any other subject which appears to excite so wide spread an interest as this". In February 1876, a report recommended that the Royal College of Physicians should use the courtesy title of Doctor for all fellows and members, but this was rejected. Then in April of the same year, the College amended its bylaws to forbid any fellow, member, extra-licentiate or licentiate from using the title of Doctor unless they had a doctorate in medicine from a recognised university – closing the loophole the "BMJ" had identified. It was not until the early 20th century that this was reversed. In 1905 the Royal College of Surgeons passed a motion instructing their council "to take the necessary steps in conjunction with the Royal College of Physicians to ensure that all persons who pass the Conjoint examination shall be legally entitled to call themselves Doctors". The council of the surgeons' College felt it to be impractical to secure the legal right to the title as this would mean gaining the right to award M.D.s, but noted that the title had been used by the public to refer to medics for generations and was used without any legal right by Bachelors of Medicine – the only obstacle to licentiates of both colleges doing the same was the prohibition in the physicians' bylaws. On this occasion the College of Physicians refused to act, but they did finally relent in 1912, removing the clause forbidding the assumption of the title of Doctor. This was described in the American press as "the British apostles of red-tape have been forced to bow to the popular will".
Regulation of the medical profession also took place in the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, preventing quacks from using the title of Doctor. However, medical usage of the title was far from exclusive, with it being acknowledged that other doctorate holders could use the title and that dentists and veterinarians frequently did. "The Etiquette of To-day", published in 1913, recommended addressing letters to physicians "(full name), M.D." and those to other people holding doctorates "Dr. (full name)", although both were "Dr." in the salutation and only physicians were explicitly said to include their title on their visiting card. By the 1920s there were a great variety of doctorates in the US, many of them taking entrants directly from high school, and ranging from the Doctor of Chiropractic (DC), which (at the time) required only two or three years of college-level education, up to the PhD. All doctoral degree holders, with the exception of the JD, were customarily addressed as "Doctor", but the title was also regularly used, without doctoral degrees, by pharmacists, ministers of religion, teachers and chiropodists, and sometimes by other professions such as beauty practitioners, patent medicine manufacturers, etc.
By the 1940s, the widespread usage of the title in the US was under threat. A 1944 article claimed that "the Ph.D. has immediate and far-reaching value of social as well as economic nature" due to America's "national fondness for the tinsel of titles", but went on to note that some universities were moving away from using the title, concluding that "it is ungracious in most environments not to render unto the Doctor of Philosophy his 'Doctor' title". The same writer noted in a letter to the "Journal of Higher Education" in 1948 that Alfred University had banned the use of the title for faculty (while retaining it for the president and deans) "in a strange move professedly designed to uphold and promote 'democracy' and 'Americanism. However, it was noted in 1959 that professors with PhDs were now generally addressed as "Doctor", with the title of "Professor" sometimes being substituted for those without doctorates, leading to a decline in the perceived value of that title.
In the 1960s the inconsistent usage at American universities and colleges was mentioned in the "New York Times Book Review" and the editor of "Science" noted that: "In some universities, administrators call all Ph.D.'s 'Mister,' but students and colleagues call them 'Doctor.' Often, but not always, Ph.D.'s are 'Misters' socially. In industry and government, both socially and professionally, they are 'Doctors,' as they are also in the pages of the "New Yorker", "Time", the "Saturday Review", and the New York "Times"." In 1965, the League of Women Voters designated medical doctors "Dr." and PhDs "Mr." at a hustings in Princeton, leading to a letter of protest in "Science"; it was reported that the League believed PhDs would be embarrassed by the title, and that etiquette writers differed in whether PhDs used the title. In 1970, reverse snobbism in the face of the rising number of "discount doctorates" was linked to professors at prestigious universities wanting to be called "mister".
In the late 1960s the rising number of American law schools awarding Juris Doctor (JD) degrees led to debate over whether lawyers could ethically use the title "Doctor". Initial informal ethics opinions, based on the Canons of Professional Ethics then in force, came down against this. These were then reinforced with a full ethics opinion that maintained the ban on using the title in legal practice as a form of self-laudation (except when dealing with countries where the use of "Doctor" by lawyers was standard practice), but allowed the use of the title in academia "if the school of graduation thinks of the J.D. degree as a doctor's degree". These opinions led to further debate. The introduction of the new Code of Professional Responsibility in 1969 seemed to settle the question – in states where this was adopted – in favour of allowing the use of the title. There was some dispute over whether only the PhD-level Doctor of Juridical Science should properly be seen as granting the title, but ethics opinions made it clear that the new Code allowed JD-holders to be called "Doctor", while reaffirming that the older Canons did not. As not all state bars adopted the new Code, and some omitted the clause permitting the use of the title, confusion over whether lawyers could ethically use the title "Doctor" continued. The introduction of further professional doctorates in the US at ISCED level 7, the same as the MD and JD, has led to continuing debate about the use of the title by holders of such degrees, particularly in medical contexts.
In 2018, a decision by "The Globe and Mail" newspaper in Canada to update its style guide so as to restrict the use of the title Doctor to medics led to a backlash on Twitter, particularly by women with PhDs, using the #ImmodestWomen hashtag. This was widely reported on internationally and led to "The Globe and Mail" reverting to its earlier style of using Doctor for both physicians and PhD holders. The Canadian University of Calgary also announced that it would adopt the use of Doctor for those with doctoral degrees, breaking with the style recommended by the Canadian Press.
Throughout much of the academic world, the term "Doctor" refers to someone who has earned a doctoral degree (highest degree) from a university. This is normally the Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD (sometimes Ph.D. in North America) from the Latin "Philosophiae Doctor" or DPhil from its English name, or equivalent research doctorates at level 8 of the International Standard Classification of Education 2011 classifications (ISCED 2011) or level 6 of the ISCED 1997 classifications. Beyond academia (but specifically in the Anglo-Saxon world), "Doctor" as a noun normally refers to a medical practitioner, who would usually hold a qualification at level 7 of ISCED 2011/level 5 of ISCED 1997 such as the British MBBS or the American MD.
When addressing several people, each of whom holds a doctoral title, one may use the plural contraction "Drs" (or "Drs." in American English) – or in some languages (for example, German) "Dres." (from the Latin doctores) may be used – for example, instead of Dr. Miller and Dr. Rubinstein: Drs. Miller and Rubinstein. When referring to relatives with the same surname the form "The Doctors Smith" can be used. The abbreviation Drs. can also refer to doctorandus, a Dutch academic title that was replaced with the master title with the introduction of the master system.
In English, Dr is not usually combined with other titles, except for The Reverend in "The Revd Dr" before the surname of a minister of religion, e.g., "The Revd Dr Smith" or "The Revd John Smith, DD", and similarly "Rabbi Dr". In Caribbean English, the usage "Dr. the Honourable" is common for politicians holding doctoral degrees. Usage in many other languages is similar to English but some, notably German, allow for the stacking of titles.
In the United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ghana, and other countries whose cultures were recently linked to the UK, the title "Dr" is generally used both for those who hold doctoral degrees and for registered medical practitioners. History has dictated the use of the courtesy title "Dr" by physicians and general practitioners. However, surgeons do not use the title of "Dr" and, due to the origins of surgery with the barber surgeons, instead use "Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss", etc. This custom applies to surgeons of any grade who have passed the appropriate exams and is not the exclusive province of consultant-level surgeons. In recent times, other surgically orientated specialists, such as gynaecologists, have also adopted these prefixes. A surgeon who is also a professor is usually known as "Professor" and, similarly, a surgeon who has been ennobled, knighted, created a baronet or appointed a dame uses the corresponding title (Lord, Sir, Dame). Physicians, on the other hand, when they pass their "MRCP(UK)" examinations, or equivalent, do not drop "Dr" but retain it, even as consultants. The status and rank of consultant surgeons, addressed as "Mister", and consultant physicians, addressed as "Doctor", is equivalent.
In Bangladesh, use of the title of Doctor (Dr.) is permitted for Ph.D. degree holders and registered medical practitioners. According to an amendment, universities are allowed to approve or reject any subject proposed for a thesis by a candidate for the degree of "Doctor" in any subject. For registered medical practitioners, only MBBS and BDS degree holders are allowed to use the title "Dr." and be called "Medical Doctors". Registered veterinary practitioners may use the title "Dr." after earning the "Doctor of Veterinary Medicine" (DVM) degree. However, Registered Homeopath practitioners also use the title "Dr." even though, according to Homeopathic Practitioners Ordinance 1983, they are only permitted to use "Homeopath". Currently, Physiotherapy has no separate council and no authorized act at present permits the use of the prefix "Dr." for physiotherapist. According to Bangladesh Unani & Ayurvedic Practitioners Ordinance 1983, practitioners of the Unani system are called "Tabib" or "Hakim" and are strictly prohibited from using the title "Dr."; similarly, practitioners of Ayurvedic system are called "Vaid" or "Kabiraj" and are also strictly prohibited from using "Dr.". Currently, medical practitioners having MBBS degree or dental surgeons having BDS are legally permitted to use "Dr." prefix. Using "Dr." for other medical practitioners remains controversial.
Hong Kong follows British practice in calling physicians "Doctor" even though many of them hold only a degree of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS or MBChB). An attempt by their professional body to prevent chiropractors from calling themselves "Doctor" failed in the courts, in part because it was pointed out that practicing chiropractors may hold an academic doctorate in their discipline, and it would be anomalous to prevent them using the title when holders of doctorates in non-medical disciplines faced no such restriction.
In India, the title is used by qualified professional medical practitioners in the fields of allopathic medicine (MBBS), Ayurveda (BAMS), Unani (BUMS) , Siddha (BSMS), and Homeopathy (BHMS), as well as by holders of doctoral degrees, including PhDs and pharmacists with PharmDs.
The usage by pharmacists is legally disputed, while the Supreme Court of India has ruled against the use of the title by physiotherapists.
The Indonesian titles "dr." is used in front of the name of medical doctor who holds a specification as general practitioner, also when the doctor already holds his specialization to ___, such as "Sp.THT" or "Spesialis Telinga, Hidung, Tenggorokan" (ENT or Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialist).
Dr. is used in front of the name as the title "Doktor" for doctorate title, the same level as Ph.D. title.
In Pakistan, the title of Doctor (Dr.) can be used by Ph.D. degree holders as well as medical, dental and veterinary doctors with MBBS, BDS and DVM degrees respectively. Usage by pharmacists and physiotherapists with PharmD and DPT degrees respectively is disputed, with the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council saying they should not use the title, but the Pharmacy Council of Pakistan (the regulatory body for pharmacists) and the Higher Education Commission permitting and encouraging its use.
In the Philippines, titles and names of occupations usually follow Spanish naming conventions which utilize gender-specific terms. ""Doktór"" is the masculine form, which retains the abbreviation "Dr."; the feminine form is ""Doktóra"", and is abbreviated usually as ""Dra.""; others, however, some being Anglophones who wish to sound modern and Westernised (or were raised in an almost exclusively English-speaking family environment), or some who advocate gender equality, would dispense with the distinction altogether. There does exist in Filipino an equivalent, gender-neutral term for the professional that carries the more general notion of "healer", traditional (for example, an "albuláryo") or otherwise: "manggagámot".
In Sri Lanka the title doctor "Dr." is used for both physicians (including dentists and veterinarians) and Ph.D. holders. However, when addressing in native Sinhalese a physician is addressed as "Vaidya" (වෛද්ය) or "Dosthara" (දොස්තර) while a Ph.D. holder is addressed as "Aacharya" (ආචාර්ය).
The usage of Doctor (ดอกเตอร์) or Dr (ดร.) has been borrowed from English. It can be seen as a title in academic circles and in the mass media. In contrast to other academic titles (Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor), the use of Doctor as a title has not been recognized by the Royal Institute of Thailand. Therefore, this title, in theory, cannot be used officially. For example, in court of justice where strictly formal Thai language is used, Dr cannot be mentioned as a person's title.
The 'doctor' title is used by individuals holding a PhD degree. 'Doctor' is also used as a deferential title in Brazilian Portuguese.
Canada lies somewhere between British and American usage of the degree and terminology of "doctor". Holders of research doctorates – PhDs and similar degrees – commonly use the title "doctor". A number of medical professionals also use the title; in Ontario these are limited by law to physicians, dentists, psychologists, optometrists, chiropractors, and social workers (who hold a Doctorate in Social Work). In Alberta, Registered Nurses or Nurse Practitioners with an earned doctoral degree may use the title "doctor" in conjunction with professional practice. Some professionals earn degrees with the title of doctor but which are considered, despite their name, to be at bachelor's-level, e.g. DDS, MD, JD. In Ontario, registered naturopathic doctors may only use the title "doctor" in written format if they also use the phrase, "naturopathic doctor" immediately following their name, while a 2006 amendment that would allow practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine to use the title has not, , entered into force.
The usage of the French "Docteur" and "Docteure", and their abbreviated forms "Dr", "Dre", "D" and "D", is controlled by the "Code des professions". As a pre-nominal title it can be used without any further explication by physicians, veterinarians, and dentists. It can also be used prenominally, when accompanied by the name of the profession immediately after the name, by professionals who require a doctorate for their professional licence, such as psychology, and chiropractic, e.g. "Dr X, psychologue" or "Dr Y, chiropraticien". Academic doctors, where the doctorate is not required to practice, bear the title only after their name; this is not abbreviated, e.g. "M. Z, docteur en philosophie" not "M. Z, Ph.D."
In the United States, the use of the title "Doctor" is dependent upon the setting. The title is commonly used socially by physicians and those holding doctoral degrees; however, there was formerly a division between Letitia Baldrige and Miss Manners on its social usage by those who are not physicians. Baldrige saw this usage as acceptable, while in contrast, Miss Manners wrote that "only people of the medical profession correctly use the title of doctor socially," but supports those who wish to use it in social contexts in the spirit of addressing people according to their wishes. Miss Manners has since softened her approach, noting in her "The Washington Post" column that there are two approaches: "having been earned, it should be used" and "that level of education being assumed, it need not be expressly mentioned"; while she maintains that everyone should be addressed according to their wishes, she no longer states that only medical professionals use the title correctly but instead acknowledges that the title has been earned by those with Ph.D.s. The Emily Post Institute similarly advises that "Socially as well as professionally, medical doctors, dentists, and other professionals are addressed by, and introduced with, their titles. People who have earned a Ph.D. or any other academic, nonmedical doctoral degree have the choice of whether to use "Dr." both professionally and socially." Other advice columns have also noted that "it has become common to see someone with a Ph.D. addressed on the envelope as Dr., and as a consequence, deviation from convention has become acceptable." The 2017 book "Etiquette Rules!" gives identical forms for addressing a "doctor of medicine (MD), dental surgery (DDS), veterinary medicine (DVM), etc.", and the holder of a Ph.D., advising in both cases the use of initials after the name for formal correspondence and Dr. before the name for social correspondence. Although the usage of the title by Ph.D. graduates has become common, its use socially by holders of professional doctorates (other than those noted) is neither explicitly endorsed nor explicitly discouraged by writers on etiquette. Miss Manners has, however, stated that a physician who has had their license revoked should be addressed by their former preferred honorific (i.e. not according to their M.D. degree). It is unusual for those who hold honorary doctorates to use the title "Doctor".
Publications from the office of the President of the United States of America also refer to Ph.D. holders as Dr. Soandso,
and Second Lady Jill Biden used the style "Dr. Jill Biden" after earning her Ph.D. For addresses (defined as "the conventional forms of address as determined by social and official custom"), NASA uses "Dr. (full name)" in addresses for Ph.D. holders while for physicians it uses "(full name), MD", although both are addressed as "Dr. (surname)" in the salutation (which is described as "informal"). The National Institutes of Health similarly use "Dr. (surname)" in salutations for people with an M.D., Ph.D. or D.D.S. They advise using full name followed by degrees in addressees, explicitly stating not to use the title "Dr.", although an example in the following paragraph does, in fact, use the title rather than giving degrees.
Most newspapers in the US follow the AP Stylebook and reserve the title for medical doctors in their house styles; notable exceptions include "The New York Times", which follows the preference of the individual when referring to PhD holders (although the title is not used for those with honorary doctorates),
and the Wall Street Journal, which similarly prefers "Dr." for Ph.D. holders and physicians (if this is the person's choice) while stating explicitly that the title is not used for lawyers with J.D.s or people with honorary doctorates. Until 1989, The Washington Post used the title for "practitioners of the healing arts (including chiropractors and osteopaths) but not for holders of PhDs or honorary degrees", after which it dropped its use entirely. Some sources state that AP style allows the use of Dr. for holders of non-medical doctoral degrees as long as their speciality is given.
The expansion of professional doctorates in clinical fields in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has led to disputes between physicians and other medical professions over who can use the title in a clinical context. This has been interpreted by some as part of larger battles within medicine, such as who gets to treat patients first and who has prescribing authority. The American Medical Association calls for non-physicians (those not holding an M.D. or D.O.) who use the title "Doctor" and are in direct contact with patients to clarify that they are not physicians and to "define the nature of their doctorate degree", while the American Osteopathic Association opposes the use of the title by non-physicians in clinical settings absolutely as (in their view) "such use deceives the public". Contrary to this, the Emergency Nurses Association has adopted as a position statement that "1. Nurses are entitled to have their educational degrees recognized and acknowledged in the same manner as other professions. 2. The proper title protection and use of accurate credentials is appropriate in the clinical setting. 3. When being addressed or introduced as doctor in the clinical environment, it is responsible practice for all healthcare providers to clarify their professional role. 4. Patients, families and the general public have a right and expectation to be informed regarding the credentials of their caregivers, including the use of the title “doctor”."
The American Medical Association launched a campaign in 2011 for states to adopt "truth in advertising" legislation. As a result, many states now have laws in place that protect the title of doctor when offering medical services. In some jurisdictions, the use of the title in health care is limited to those who have both a doctorate and are licensed to practice medicine, and there is a requirement that the field of the doctorate be disclosed. Some other jurisdictions require the practitioner to hold a doctorate and to disclose the field, but make no stipulations as to licensing. Professional boards may also place limits on its use by the practitioners they regulate, e.g. requiring either a Ph.D. in psychology or a Doctor of Psychology degree to use the title while practicing as a psychologist. Some states require name badges to be worn in medical facilities giving first name, licensure status, and staff position, although these laws may not explicitly address the use of the title "Doctor".
Although lawyers in the United States do not customarily use the title, the law degree in that country is the Juris Doctor, a professional doctorate. Some J.D. holders in the United States use the title of doctor in professional situations, although ethics board decisions have varied on whether this is permissible or might mislead the public into believing the lawyer was medically qualified or had a PhD. It is also sometimes used by J.D. holders in academic situations. In 2011, "Mother Jones" published an article claiming that Michele Bachmann was misrepresenting her qualifications by using the "bogus" title Dr. based on her J.D. The article was later amended to note that the use of the title by lawyers "is a (begrudgingly) accepted practice in some states and not in others", although they maintained that it was rarely used as it "suggests that you're a medical doctor or a Ph.D.—and therefore conveys a false level of expertise".
Ecclesiastical seminaries and entitled churches award their own doctorates in the United States, e.g. the "Doctor of Religious Science" (Dr. sc. rel.), the "Doctor of Divinity" (D.D.), the "Doctor of Biblical Studies" (D.B.S.) or the "Doctor of Metaphysics" (Dr. mph.). These titles are most commonly awarded to meritorious clerics for their outstanding work or another achievement in the field of religious and biblical studies.
American professional doctorates are not generally considered doctoral level degrees internationally, instead being classified as bachelor's or master's level. The ISCED mapping for these degrees, developed collaboratively between the US and UNESCO, places them at master's level. As a result, holders of MD, JD, PharmD, etc. may not be permitted to use the title of Doctor in countries such as Germany where this is strictly controlled.
In the European Union, the title of "doctor" refers primarily to holders of post-graduate research doctorates, such as the PhD. In many European languages the term "doctor" is distinct from a medical practitioner, which can be referred to as e.g. "läkare" in Swedish, "Arzt" in German, "dokter" or "arts" in Dutch, or "lääkäri" in Finnish.
Standardisation of degrees into the three cycles of bachelor's–master's–doctorate across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is being carried out through the Bologna process, although not all EHEA member states have fully conformed to the 1999 Bologna declaration in favour of their own historic customs. With respect to the title "doctor", the Bologna process makes no prescriptions regarding the names of degrees nor the titles they may confer. However, under the Lisbon Recognition Convention, recognition of a foreign degree allows "the use of an academic title, subject to the laws and regulations of the country in which recognition is sought". According to the "Explanatory report", this means that: "The competent authorities of the Parties may grant the right to use the title in the exact form in which it was awarded in the Party concerned or in any other form. They may alternatively grant the right to use the corresponding title of the country in which recognition is sought."
In Austria, the degree "Doktor" is granted to holders of research degrees (ISCED 8) with a denoting latin particle being added (Dr. techn., Dr. phil., Dr. rer. nat., Dr.iur., Dr.theol. etc.). Newer study programmes award a Ph.D., but they exist alongside since many prefer obtaining a "Dr." to a "Ph.D.". They take 3-4 years full-time and are organised in doctoral schools.
In addition, the academic degree "Doktor" (ISCED 7) is granted to physicians (Dr. med. univ.) and dentists (Dr. med. dent.), who since 2002 do not possess doctorate degrees (ISCED 8) anymore, but Master's level 6 year-training (360 ECTS), much similar to an American M.D. or DDS. Every student is awarded this degree upon graduation; writing a "Diplomarbeit" (thesis, 50-100 p) is mandatory. A research doctorate (Dr. scient. med. or PhD) can be obtained after a three years full-time post-graduate study at a medical university.
All doctors may be addressed as "Doktor _____"; the title is usually contracted to "Dr. _____", oftentimes they are just addressed as "Herr/Frau Doktor" (Mr./Ms.), omitting the family name unless they are introduced to someone.
Contrary to popular belief, "Dr." is not part of the name or a specific honour but a just degree like "BSc/BA", "Mag." (MA/MSc) or "Dipl.-Ing." (MEng.) It is not mandatory to use it, although it may be added to official documents (e.g. driver's licence, passport), if desired
In Finland, the title of "tohtori" or "doktor" denotes holder of a research doctorate comparable to a PhD. Getting the doctorate requires advanced studies after the master's degree, writing a thesis, nowadays often a thesis by publication, and publicly defending the thesis. Customary doctorates do not exist even in the field of medicine: physicians hold the degree of "lääketieteen lisensiaatti" (Licentiate of Medicine), and are referred to simply as "lääkäri" (physician); "tohtori" would be rustic or old-fashioned. A research doctorate in medicine, "lääketieteen tohtori", requires further research work and a separate doctoral thesis, and is not taken by all medical graduates. Regardless, in Finnish usage, the use of titles is uncommon and restricted to only the most formal of contexts.
In France, the title of "Docteur" is only used generally for physicians ("médecin") but can also be used by holders of research doctorates. Medical professionals do not normally hold a doctorate, which in France always refers to a research doctorate, but a "State Diploma of Doctor of Medicine" ("Diplôme d'État de docteur en médecine").
The law in France allows the title of Dr to be used professionally by holders of research doctorates, with the field of their speciality being mentioned after the name. The courts have ruled that stating the specialisation is not necessary except in circumstances specifically related to professional practice; at other times the title alone may be used. The courts have also determined that questioning the right of the holder of a research doctorate to use the title Dr is a form of libel. The National Union of Hospital Scientists ("Syndicat National des Scientifiques Hospitaliers") launched a campaign in 2015 to raise awareness of the right of scientists to use the title.
In German language-speaking countries, the word "Doktor" refers to a doctorate awardee in formal language (similar to a PhD). It is distinct from "Arzt", since a doctoral degree is not a requirement for medical practitioners, though colloquial use of the word "Doktor" for physician is common and ordinary people often incorrectly assume that only Doktors may practice medicine. For this reason, 80% of all students in medicine write "doctoral" dissertations, often comparable to a master's thesis in science, alongside their undergraduate studies to obtain a Dr. med. degree. The European Research Council decided in 2010 that those Dr. med. doctorates do not meet the international standards of a PhD research degree.
In Germany, the most common doctoral degrees are "Dr. med." (medicine), "Dr. med. dent." (dentistry), "Dr. med. vet." (veterinary medicine), "Dr. rer. nat." (natural sciences), "Dr. phil." (humanities), "Dr. iur." (law), "Dr. rer. pol." (economic and political sciences, also as Dr. rer. oec. in Switzerland), "Dr.-Ing." (engineering), and "Dr. theol." (theology). All holders of doctoral degrees are appropriately addressed as "Herr/Frau Dr. _____" in all social situations.
In Germany, double doctorates are indicated in the title by ""Dr. Dr."" or ""DDr."" and triple doctorates as ""Dr. Dr. Dr."" or ""DDDr."". More doctorates are indicated by the addition of ""mult."", such as ""Dr. mult."". Honorary titles are shown with the addition of ""h.c."", which stands for ""honoris causa"". Example: ""Dr. h.c. mult."". Some honorary titles are shown by addition of German equivalents of ""h.c."", like ""e.h."", ""E.h."", or ""eh."", which stand for ""ehrenhalber"" (honorary). Example: ""Dr. e.h. mult."".
All people holding a doctorate from an EU member state are, since 2001, entitled to use "Doctor" or "Dr." in all formal, legal and published communications without any further addenda. For academics with doctorates from non-EU member states, the qualification must be recognised formally ("validated") by the Federal Educational Ministry in Bonn. The recognition process can be done by the employer or employee and may be part of the official bureaucracy for confirming professional status and is dependent on individual bilateral agreements between Germany and other countries and, since 2007, the Lisbon Recognition Convention. An example of mutual recognition of Doctor titles among EU countries is the "Bonn Agreement of November 14, 1994", signed between Germany and Spain (prior to the general recognition of EU doctorates).
In 2008, The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany extended their 2001 decision to recognise EU PhDs to cover PhDs that were awarded in Australia, Israel, Japan, Canada, and some American universities. It was announced in 2012 that this would be further extended to cover PhDs awarded in New Zealand. PhDs that were awarded in the United States are recognized if the awarding institution is classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a "Research University (high research activity)" or as a "Research University (very high research activity)." Permission to use the title covers only scientific research degrees and does not extend to professional degrees such as the M.D. or J.D.
In Greece, doctor "Διδάκτωρ" ("didaktōr") is indicated in the title as Δρ and it is used for holders of doctoral degrees. Other alternative names are also used, namely «δόκτωρ» και «δόκτορας», derived from the French "docteur". The term "Ιατρός" ("iatros") indicates medical practitioners.
In Hungary, graduates of six-year medical schools ("dr. med."), five-year dentistry schools ("dr. med. dent."), five-year law schools ("dr. jur.") and five-year veterinary medical schools ("dr. vet.") receive the title of a "doctor" at the end of their studies, after completing and successfully defending their thesis; their undergraduate studies must have lasted for a minimum of three years. Completing a PhD research programme (or DLA in arts and music) also leads to the doctor title. Since 2008, also those who graduated of five-year pharmacy schools have the right to use the title "dr" ("dr. pharm.").
A large part of Hungarians with doctor titles received their titles for research in the old academic system before PhD was introduced in Hungary. Since the introduction of PhD title (1993), the "dr. univ" title (given before 1993). The CSc "Candidate of Science" title was a scientific title in the old academic system and is now treated as an equivalent of PhD. CSc titles were awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The highest level doctoral degree in Hungary is DSc "Doctor of Sciences", awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It is also called "Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences".
The title of doctor used to become a part of the name and was added as such to personal identity documents. This practice is still common and graduates after receiving their diploma would usually change their personal documents in order to officially indicate the achievement.
Usage in Ireland is similar to that in the UK. The title of doctor is used for holders of doctoral degrees as well as for medical practitioners (except surgeons), dentists, and vets. The title is also used in Ireland for Catholic bishops, who are styled "The Most Reverend Dr X, Bishop of Y" on envelopes.
The first university of Western civilization, the University of Bologna, is located in Italy, where until modern times the only degree granted was that of the doctorate, and all other Italian universities followed that model. During the 20th century Italian universities introduced more advanced research degrees, such as the Ph.D., and now that it is part of the E.U. Bologna Process, a new three-year first degree, or "laurea" (equivalent to a B.A. of other countries, EQF & ISCED 2011 Level 6), has been introduced. The old-style "laurea" is now known as "laurea magistrale/specialistica" (Bologna Process second cycle/EQF & ISCED 2011 Level 7). For historical reasons, even to this day, the title of "dottore/dottoressa" (abbrev. both as dott/dott.ssa or as dr./dr.ssa ) is awarded even to those who have studied for a "laurea"(EQF & ISCED 2011 Level 6). Upper levels of degree are anyway shown in the title, as those who obtain a master's degree can be referred to as "dottore/dottoressa magistrale" ("masterly doctor", EQF & ISCED 2011 Level 7) while those who achieve the relatively new program of "dottorato di ricerca" (research doctorate, equivalent of a "Ph.D." in English-speaking or "Doktor" ("Dr.") in German-speaking Countries, EQF & ISCED 2011 Level 8), carry the title of "dottore/dottoressa di ricerca" (research doctor), which can be abbreviated as "Dott. Ric." or "Ph.D."
In Malta, the title of Doctor is used by academic doctors (with Ph.D.s), medical practitioners, dentists and lawyers. Its use by lawyers is due to the qualifying degree for practicing law having been the LLD until reforms in 2014, and has been described as "historical baggage" by the Dean of the University of Malta's law school. Lawyers do not generally use the title when practicing outside of Malta.
In the Dutch language the word "dokter" refers to a physician, whereas "doctor" refers to the academic title. The doctor title is abbreviated as dr. placed before the holders name (note the lowercase).
To enter a Dutch doctoral defense, the candidate must hold a validated master's degree (a master's degree of an acknowledged university, or a master equivalent degree validated on a case by case basis by the Dutch government). In some cases the candidate can be granted special dispensation if no master's degree is held.
There is no specific notation of the discipline in which the doctorate is obtained. Once the doctorate is obtained the preceding master's degree is generally no longer reported. Exceptions only exist for the disciplines with specific master titles of engineering "ir." ("ingenieur", i.e. Engineer) and law "mr." ("meester", i.e. Master of Law) where the title dr. is added to the original master title. For these disciplines, the original master's degree abbreviation is combined with the dr. abbreviation thus resulting in for example "dr. ir. Familyman". The dr. title is always placed in front of the ir. title. In the case of a PhD in law, the original mr. title is placed before the dr. title (mr. dr., see e.g. Jan Peter Balkenende). For a person having a law master's degree, but holding a PhD in another field than law the mr. title is placed after the dr. title (dr. mr.). No specific notation or title for the medical disciplines exists in the Netherlands. Although a physician is usually referred to as "dokter" (note the spelling difference) this does not necessarily imply the physician holds a doctoral degree; nor does it give the physician a title equivalent to that of PhD.
Confusion can be caused by the original Dutch Master level title "drs." (for all non-engineering and non-law master's degrees). This abbreviation stands for the Dutch title doctorandus Latin for "he who should become a doctor" (female form is "doctoranda"). Dutch drs. should not be confused with the plural 'doctorates': having a PhD in multiple disciplines. Once a doctorate is achieved the doctorandus is promoted to doctor, and no longer uses the drs. abbreviation.
Stacking of multiples titles of the same level, as seen in countries like for example Germany (Dr. Dr. Dr. Musterfrau) is highly uncommon in the Netherlands (although stacking of titles with different levels is common: prof. dr. ir. Appelmans). Those who have multiple doctor titles may use dr.mult. before their name, although this is rarely used.
After obtaining a doctorate successfully, Dutch doctors may bear either the title dr. (lower case) before, or the letter D (rarely in practice) behind their name, but not both simultaneously. In the Netherlands, Academic titles are used exclusively within academia. Holding a PhD title has become a standard requirement for a university career. The doctor title has little to no meaning or implications for public life outside academia. It cannot be added to documentation (e.g. passport, drivers licence), and is used infrequently in daily practice.
Historically, The Netherlands used their own academic degree nomenclature, but for many years now have recognised and implemented the Bologna declaration. In everyday practice, the Anglo Saxon titles (e.g. PhD) are frequently used. Dutch academic titles are legally protected. PhD degrees can only be granted by recognised (research) universities. Illegal use is considered a misdemeanor and subject to legal prosecution.
In Portugal, up to recent times after the completion of an undergraduate degree – except in architecture and engineering – a person was referred to as "doutor (Dr.) – male" or "doutora (Dra.) – female". The architects and engineers were referred by their professional titles: "arquitecto" (Arq.) and "engenheiro" (Eng.). Nurses are also referred to as "nurse", "enfermeiro" (male) or "enfermeira" (female), the title being "Enf." for both.
Nowadays Portugal is a signatory to the Bologna process and according to the current legislation the title of Doctor ("doutor, doutora") is reserved for graduate holders of an academic doctorate. Professions such as physicians, attorneys, pharmacists, veterinarians, and few others are usually referred to by the title Dr. (doutor) even if they have not been awarded a doctoral degree.
However, custom gives the legislation little strength and most graduates use the Dr. title in its abbreviated form, although use of the full "Doutor" is normally restricted to those with doctorates.. Those who are both holders of an academic doctorate and Professors at a college level are generally referred to as Professor Doutor.
The social standing of Doctors in Spain is evidenced by the fact that only Ph.D. holders, Grandees and Dukes can take seat and cover their heads in the presence of the King.
Ph.D. Degrees are regulated by Royal Decree (R.D. 1393/2007), "Real Decreto" (in Spanish). They are granted by the University on behalf of the King, and its Diploma has the force of a public document. The Ministry of Science keeps a national database of doctoral theses called TESEO. Any person who uses the Spanish title of "doctor/doctora" (or "Dr./Dra.") without being included in this Government database can be prosecuted for fraud. However, the Spanish Royal Academy recognises that it is used colloquially to describe medics, even without doctoral degrees, as well as (in the feminine form, "doctora", abbreviated "Dra.") the wives of doctors (i.e. holders of doctoral degrees) and medics, as well as "women who shine with wisdom and understanding".
Unlike other countries, until recently Spain has registered a comparatively small number of Doctor degree holders, but the tendency is changing. According to the Spanish Statistical Office (INE), less than 5% of M.Sc. degree holders are admitted to Ph.D. programs. This reinforces the prestige that Doctors have historically enjoyed in Spain's society.
Doctor is commonly used in the United Kingdom as the title for a person who has received a doctoral degree or, as courtesy title, for a qualified medical practitioner or dentist who does not have a doctorate. There are no restrictions on the use of the title "Doctor" in the United Kingdom, except where, in commercial advertising, it might imply that the user holds a general medical qualification. The UK government allows medical doctors and holders of doctorates to have the title recorded on the observations page of their UK passport. The lack of legal restrictions was confirmed in Parliament in 1996 by health minister Gerald Malone, who noted that the title doctor had never been restricted by law to either medical practitioners or those with doctoral degrees in the UK, although the titles "physician, doctor of medicine, licentiate in medicine and surgery, bachelor of medicine, surgeon, general practitioner and apothecary" were protected.
According to the etiquette guide, Debrett's, holders of doctoral degrees and medical doctors (but not surgeons) should be addressed as "Doctor". For medical doctors, "Doctor" is a professional title rather than an academic one: it is due to their being a medical practitioner rather than their having gained a doctoral degree. The Quality Assurance Agency states that "The use of the title 'Dr' by medical doctors is a historical abbreviation for the profession; it does not indicate a qualification at doctoral level". On guest lists and seating plans for formal events, holders of academic doctorates (but not medical doctors or other people using the title as a courtesy title) are listed either as "Dr John Smith" or "John Smith, Esq, PhD", while untitled men (other than those holding doctorates) are shown as either "Mr John Smith" or "John Smith, Esq" (as appropriate to ensure the styling remains consistent). The title "Dr" is also used on visiting cards.
Medical students in the UK normally complete a course of study leading to the degree of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS, BMBS or MBChB). The MD degree is not a qualifying degree in the UK, but can be either a professional doctorate (at the same academic level as a PhD), a doctorate by thesis, or a higher doctorate, depending on the university. To be eligible for an MD degree in the UK one must already hold an entry level medical degree (for example, MBBS, MBChB, BMed, or a North American MD degree) and usually must have had at least 5 years of postgraduate training and experience. Trainee doctors are permitted to use the title Doctor once they have started their post-graduation "Foundation Programme".
Debrett's states that medical doctors (except surgeons) should be addressed on envelopes as "Dr (full name), (medical qualifications)", e.g. "Dr John Smith, MD", "Dr Anne Jones, MB BS, FRCP", "Dr David Evans, MB ChB", contrary to the normal rule of not mixing titles and post-nominals. Surgeons (and dentists, if not holding a doctoral degree) should be "(full name), Esq, (medical/dental qualifications)", e.g. "John Smith, Esq, MS, FRCS", "David Evans, Esq., BDS", but "Dr Anne Jones, DDS, FDS RCS". By contrast, those holding (non medical or dental) doctoral degrees, if not surgeons, should be "Dr (full name)" without post-nominals on envelopes, e.g. "Dr John Smith".
A & C Black's "Titles and Forms of Address" diverges from Debrett's on how to address envelopes to medical doctors, omitting the pre-nominal title of Dr (e.g. John Smith, Esq, MD; John Smith, MD; John Smith, MB) except in Scotland and for general practitioners, where the post-nominals are instead usually omitted (e.g. Dr John Smith). Black's also state that it is down to individual choice whether non-medical doctors are addressed on envelopes as "Dr John Smith" or "John Smith, Esq, PhD" (or appropriate letters for the doctorate held), with the exception of doctors of divinity, who would be "The Rev. J. Smith, DD" on the envelope and "Reverend Sir" in a formal salutation (informally in the salutation "Dear Dr Smith", and "Dr Smith" in speech).
The custom of not referring to surgeons (members and fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons) as Dr has been commented on in the "British Medical Journal" and may stem from the historical origins of the profession such as that some barbers also used to function as surgeons. In 2005, the then-president of the Royal College of Surgeons called upon surgeons to use the title of Dr, saying that the use of Mr or Miss was confusing to patients. Black's note that gynaecologists are addressed as surgeons in England and Wales but as doctors elsewhere.
In a similar manner to the medical MBBS, dentists qualify with a Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) and vets with a Bachelor of Veterinary Science (BVSc), Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVetMed) or Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery (BVMS). All of these are, like the MBBS, master's level qualifications that bear bachelor's designations for historical reasons.
Dentists have traditionally (as dental surgeons) been referred to in the same way as surgeons, but since 1995 the General Dental Council have permitted dentists to use the title "Doctor", though many do not choose to do this, thereby stressing their surgeon status. However, Debrett's continues to advises that dentists are normally addressed as surgeons and that the title "Doctor" is usually only used for dentists who have a doctoral degree.
On 5 March 2015 the council of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) voted to permit its members to use the courtesy title of "Doctor". Guidance from the RCVS says the title should be used either with the description "veterinary surgeon" or the postnominals "MRCVS" to ensure there is no confusion with doctors of human medicine or holders of doctoral degrees.
Optometrists are not permitted to use the title "Doctor" based on their initial qualification (BOptom or BSc (Optom)). Optometrists can earn PhDs or Doctor of Optometry degrees (in the UK a PhD-level qualification for qualified optometrists with experience in practice). Ophthalmologists are fully qualified medical doctors. However, ophthalmology is considered a branch of surgery, thus ophthalmologists, like other surgeons in the UK, do not use the title "Doctor".
The General Chiropractic Council permits registered chiropractors to use the title "Doctor", although it advises chiropractors to avoid using the title in advertising or, if they do, to spell out that they are "Doctors of Chiropractic". The Committee of Advertising Practice advises, however, that "references to 'DC' or 'doctor of chiropractic' are unlikely to dispel that misleading impression [of being a medical practitioner], when used in conjunction with unqualified references to the prefix 'Dr, saying that the use of the title by chiropractors may be acceptable in advertising if "clearly and prominently qualified with additional text which makes clear it is a courtesy title and that the practitioner does not hold a general medical qualification".
The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine should not use the title doctor in adverts unless they hold a general medical qualification and are registered with the General Medical Council. It similarly advises that osteopaths should not use the title unless holding a general medical qualification. There have also been rulings that an advert for an osteomyologist which referred to him as a doctor was misleading, as was an advert which used the title "Dr" and the post-nominals "PhD" on the basis of a PhD from an unaccredited university.
Holders of honorary doctorates in the UK have the right, in most cases, to use the title of Doctor, although holders are encouraged to refrain from doing so. Black's says that "The same rules apply as to other holders", although notes that the post-nominals would not normally be used.
In some circumstances, "doctor" may be used on its own as a form of address rather than as a title before a name. This is limited to when the person is being addressed by their job title and so is only used for medical doctors.
Wales follows UK usage in English. In Welsh, the holder of a doctoral degree is "doethur" while a medical doctor is "doctor" or "meddyg". The title ""y Doethur"" is used by those holding doctorates, e.g. "y Doethur Brinley Jones", "y Doethur John Elfed Jones", which can be abbreviated "Dr". Medical doctors use, as in English, the title "Doctor", also abbreviated "Dr".
In countries that were formerly Yugoslavian republics, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia the title formally belongs to holders of academic doctoral degree such as "PhD" or pre-Bologna "dr.sc." (Doctor scientiae) degree. The distinction is not formally accentuated (much like pre-Bologna "mr.sc." i.e. "Magister scientiae" versus the Bologna "mag."/"M.A."/"M.Sc.". which is informally often referred to as "masters") between holders of two titles irrespective of the difference in years of study and required academic achievement which were both higher for earlier degrees. Informally it is not uncommon to accentuate that someone is holding a post-Bologna doctorate by using the PhD title, which was not used prior to Bologna, whereas holders of pre-Bologna degrees are common to use the earlier formal abbreviation of "dr.sc." that is not common in post-Bologna doctorates.
Informally, the title, in both its full and abbreviated form (i.e. "dr.") is used honorifically to address medical doctors even in more formal environment like in lectored media texts, however officially it is reserved only for the holders of academic degrees. Formally the professional title for medical doctor is "lijekar" in Bosnian and Montenegrin, "liječnik" in Croatian, "lekar/лекар" in Macedonian and Serbian and "zdravnik" in Slovenian and they can hold different academic degrees, as well as additional honorific title of "Primarius" that is given to distinguished specialists with exemplary reputation and achievements.
With the introduction of National Health Practitioner registration legislation on 1 July 2010, the title "doctor" is not restricted in any Australian state. The title "medical practitioner" is restricted for use by registered medical practitioners, while the title "doctor" is not restricted by law. Despite this, the Medical Board of Australia advises that practitioners who are not medical practitioners who choose to use the title 'Doctor' (or 'Dr') should clearly state their profession in advertisements, even if they hold a PhD or another doctoral degree, e.g. 'Dr Smith (Dentist)' or 'Dr Jones (Chiropodist)'. The Psychology Board of Australia prohibits psychologists from using the title, to avoid confusion with psychiatrists, unless they hold a doctoral degree, in which case they must make it clear that they are not a medical practitioner or psychiatrist, e.g. by putting '(Psychologist)' after their name. The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) defines doctoral degrees as being at Level 10 of the framework; it specifies that: "Individuals who have been awarded a Doctoral Degree at Level 10 on the AQF are entitled to use the title 'Doctor'. The title 'Doctor' will not be used by those who hold an honorary award." The name 'Doctor' is also used in the name of some extended master's degrees at Level 9 (e.g. Juris Doctor and Doctor of Medicine); these are not considered doctoral degrees.
Doctor is abbreviated "Dr" in British English and "Dr." in North American English. The plural abbreviation is "Drs".
In British English it is not necessary to indicate an abbreviation with a full stop after the abbreviation, when the first and last letters of the abbreviation are the same as for the unabbreviated word, i.e. the abbreviation is a contraction, as in the case for "Doctor".
In the United Kingdom, it is normal also to omit stops from postnominal letters, thus the usual abbreviation for "Doctor of Philosophy" is "PhD" (or "DPhil", where this is used). The fully punctuated "Ph.D." or "D.Phil." is anachronistic and, where the abbreviated form of the degree is defined by regulation rather than custom (e.g. Oxford), may be technically incorrect.
American English makes no distinction between abbreviations that are contractions and abbreviations that are not. A period is used: the abbreviation of Doctor is usually written as "Dr." in North America. However, the US Postal Service prefers punctuation to be omitted from addresses.
An honorary doctorate is a doctoral degree awarded for service to the institution or the wider community. It may also be awarded for outstanding achievement in a particular field. This service or achievement does not need to be academic in nature. Often, the same set of degrees is used for higher doctorates, but they are distinguished as being "honoris causa": in comprehensive lists, the lettering used to indicate the possession of a higher doctorate is often adjusted to indicate this, for example, "Hon. Sc.D.", as opposed to the earned research doctorate "Sc.D.". The degrees of Doctor of the University (D.Univ.) and Doctor of Humane Letters (D.H.L.), however, are only awarded as honorary degrees.
By convention, recipients of honorary doctorates do not use the title "Dr" in general correspondence, although in formal correspondence from the university issuing the honorary degree it is normal to address the recipient by the title. However, this social convention is not always scrupulously observed; notable people who defied social convention and used the honorary prefix include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8881 |
Danse Macabre
The Danse Macabre (, ) (from the French language), also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Danse Macabre unites all.
The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or a personification of death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and laborer. It was produced as "memento mori", to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now-lost mural at Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425.
Francis Rapp writes that "Christians were moved by the sight of the Infant Jesus playing on his mother's knee; their hearts were touched by the Pietà; and patron saints reassured them by their presence. But, all the while, the "danse macabre" urged them not to forget the end of all earthly things." This "danse macabre" was enacted at village pageants and at court masques, with people "dressing up as corpses from various strata of society", and may have been the origin of costumes worn during Allhallowtide.
The earliest recorded visual example is the lost mural on the south wall of the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris, which was painted in 1424–25 during the regency of John, Duke of Bedford: with its emphatic inclusion of a dead crowned king at a time when France did not have a crowned king, the mural may well have had a political subtext. There were also painted schemes in Basel (the earliest dating from ); a series of paintings on canvas by Bernt Notke, in Lübeck (1463); the initial fragment of the original Bernt Notke painting "Danse Macabre" (accomplished at the end of the 15th century) in the St Nicholas' Church, Tallinn, Estonia; the painting at the back wall of the chapel of Sv. Marija na Škrilinama in the Istrian town of Beram (1471), painted by Vincent of Kastav; the painting in the Holy Trinity Church of Hrastovlje, Istria by John of Kastav (1490).
A notable example was painted on the cemetery walls of the Dominican Abbey in Bern by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch in 1516/7. This work was destroyed when the wall was torn down in 1660, but a 1649 copy by Albrecht Kauw is extant. There was also a "Dance of Death" painted around 1430 and displayed on the walls of Pardon Churchyard at Old St Paul's Cathedral, London, with texts by John Lydgate, known as the 'Dauce of (St) Poulys', which was destroyed in 1549.
The deathly horrors of the 14th century such as recurring famines, the Hundred Years' War in France, and, most of all, the Black Death, were culturally assimilated throughout Europe. The omnipresent possibility of sudden and painful death increased the religious desire for penance, but it also evoked a hysterical desire for amusement while still possible; a last dance as cold comfort. The danse macabre combines both desires: in many ways similar to the mediaeval mystery plays, the dance-with-death allegory was originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared at all times for death (see "memento mori" and "Ars moriendi").
Short verse dialogues between Death and each of its victims, which could have been performed as plays, can be found in the direct aftermath of the Black Death in Germany and in Spain (where it was known as the "Totentanz" and "la Danza de la Muerte", respectively). The French term "danse macabre" may derive from the Latin "Chorea Machabæorum", literally "dance of the Maccabees." In 2 Maccabees, a deuterocanonical book of the Bible, the grim martyrdom of a mother and her seven sons is described and was a well-known mediaeval subject. It is possible that the Maccabean Martyrs were commemorated in some early French plays or that people just associated the book's vivid descriptions of the martyrdom with the interaction between Death and its prey.
An alternative explanation is that the term entered France via Spain, the , "maqabir" (pl., "cemeteries") being the root of the word. Both the dialogues and the evolving paintings were ostensive penitential lessons that even illiterate people (who were the overwhelming majority) could understand.
Frescoes and murals dealing with death had a long tradition and were widespread, e.g. the legend of the "Three Living and the Three Dead": on a ride or hunt, three young gentlemen meet three cadavers (sometimes described as their ancestors) who warn them, "Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis" ("What we were, you are; what we are, you will be"). Numerous mural versions of that legend from the 13th century onwards have survived (for instance, in the of Wismar or the residential Longthorpe Tower outside Peterborough). Since they showed pictorial sequences of men and corpses covered with shrouds, those paintings are sometimes regarded as cultural precursors of the new genre.
A "danse macabre" painting may show a round dance headed by Death or a chain of alternating dead and live dancers. From the highest ranks of the mediaeval hierarchy (usually pope and emperor) descending to its lowest (beggar, peasant, and child), each mortal's hand is taken by a skeleton or an extremely decayed body. The famous "Totentanz" by Bernt Notke in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck (destroyed during the Allied bombing of Lübeck in World War II), presented the dead dancers as very lively and agile, making the impression that they were actually dancing, whereas their living dancing partners looked clumsy and passive. The apparent class distinction in almost all of these paintings is completely neutralized by Death as the ultimate equalizer, so that a sociocritical element is subtly inherent to the whole genre. The "Totentanz" of Metnitz, for example, shows how a pope crowned with his mitre is being led into Hell by the dancing Death.
Usually, a short dialogue is attached to each victim, in which Death is summoning him (or, more rarely, her) to dance and the summoned is moaning about impending death. In the first printed "Totentanz" textbook (Anon.: "Vierzeiliger oberdeutscher Totentanz", Heidelberger Blockbuch, ), Death addresses, for example, the emperor:
At the lower end of the "Totentanz", Death calls, for example, the peasant to dance, who answers:
The famous designs by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) for his "Dance of Death" series were drawn in 1526 while he was in Basel. They were cut in wood by the accomplished Formschneider (block cutter) Hans Lützelburger. William Ivins (quoting W. J. Linton) writes of Lützelburger's work: "'Nothing indeed, by knife or by graver, is of higher quality than this man's doing,' for by common acclaim the originals are technically the most marvelous woodcuts ever made." These woodcuts soon appeared in proofs with titles in German. The first book edition, containing forty-one woodcuts, was published at Lyons by the Treschsel brothers in 1538. The popularity of the work and the currency of its message are underscored by the fact that there were eleven editions before 1562 and over the sixteenth century perhaps as many as a hundred unauthorized editions and imitations. Ten further designs were added in later editions.
The "Dance of Death" (1523–26) refashions the late-medieval allegory of the "danse macabre" as a reformist satire, and one can see the beginnings of a gradual shift from traditional to reformed religion. That shift had many permutations however, and in a study Natalie Zemon Davis has shown that the contemporary reception and afterlife of Holbein's designs lent themselves to neither purely Catholic or Protestant doctrine, but could be outfitted with different surrounding prefaces and sermons as printers and writers of different political and religious leanings took them up. Most importantly, "The pictures and the Bible quotations above them were the main attractions […] Both Catholics and Protestants wished, through the pictures, to turn men's thoughts to a Christian preparation for death.".
The 1538 edition which contained Latin quotations from the Bible above Holbein's designs, and a French quatrain below composed by Gilles Corrozet, actually did not credit Holbein as the artist. It bore the title: Les simulachres & / HISTORIEES FACES / DE LA MORT, AUTANT ELE/gammēt pourtraictes, que artifi/ciellement imaginées. / A Lyon. / Soubz l'escu de COLOIGNE. / M.D. XXXVIII. ("Images and Illustrated facets of Death, as elegantly depicted as they are artfully conceived.") These images and workings of death as captured in the phrase "historiees faces" of the title "are the particular exemplification of the way death works, the individual scenes in which the lessons of mortality are brought home to people of every station."
In his preface to the work Jean de Vauzèle, the Prior of Montrosier, addresses Jehanne de Tourzelle, the Abbess of the Convent at St. Peter at Lyons, and names Holbein's attempts to capture the ever-present, but never directly seen, abstract images of death "simulachres." He writes: "[…] simulachres les dis ie vrayement, pour ce que simulachre vient de simuler, & faindre ce que n'est point." ("Simulachres they are most correctly called, for simulachre derives from the verb to simulate and to feign that which is not really there.") He next employs a trope from the memento mori (remember we all must die) tradition and a metaphor from printing which well captures the undertakings of Death, the artist, and the printed book before us in which these simulachres of death barge in on the living: "Et pourtant qu'on n'a peu trouver chose plus approchante a la similitude de Mort, que la personne morte, on d'icelle effigie simulachres, & faces de Mort, pour en nos pensees imprimer la memoire de Mort plus au vis, que ne pourroient toutes les rhetoriques descriptiones de orateurs." ("And yet we cannot discover any one thing more near the likeness of Death than the dead themselves, whence come these simulated effigies and images of Death's affairs, which imprint the memory of Death with more force than all the rhetorical descriptions of the orators ever could.").
Holbein's series shows the figure of "Death" in many disguises, confronting individuals from all walks of life. None escape Death's skeletal clutches, not even the pious. As Davis writes, "Holbein's pictures are independent dramas in which Death comes upon his victim in the midst of the latter's own surroundings and activities. This is perhaps nowhere more strikingly captured than in the wonderful blocks showing the plowman earning his bread by the sweat of his brow only to have his horses speed him to his end by Death. The Latin from the 1549 Italian edition pictured here reads: "In sudore vultus tui, vesceris pane tuo." ("Through the sweat of thy brow you shall eat your bread"), quoting Genesis 3.19. The Italian verses below translate: ("Miserable in the sweat of your brow,/ It is necessary that you acquire the bread you need eat,/ But, may it not displease you to come with me,/ If you are desirous of rest."). Or there is the nice balance in composition Holbein achieves between the heavy-laden traveling salesman insisting that he must still go to market while Death tugs at his sleeve to put down his wares once and for all: "Venite ad me, qui onerati estis." ("Come to me, all ye who [labor and] are heavy laden"), quoting Matthew 11.28. The Italian here translates: ("Come with me, wretch, who are weighed down,/ Since I am the dame who rules the whole world:/ Come and hear my advice,/ Because I wish to lighten you of this load.").
Musical settings of the motif include:
The "Death and the Maiden motif", known from paintings since the early 16th century, is related to, and may have been derived from, the "Danse Macabre". It has received numerous treatments in various media—most prominently Schubert's lied "Der Tod und das Mädchen" (1817) and the String Quartet No. 14 "Death and the Maiden", partly derived from its musical material. Further developments of the "Danse Macabre" motif include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8884 |
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is an approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who defined the term variously throughout his career. In its simplest form it can be regarded as a criticism of Platonism and the idea of true forms, or essences, which take precedence over appearances. Deconstruction instead places the emphasis on appearance, or suggests, at least, that essence is to be found in appearance. Derrida would say that the difference is "undecidable", in that it cannot be discerned in everyday experiences.
Deconstruction perceives that language, especially ideal concepts such as truth and justice, is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible to determine. Many debates in continental philosophy surrounding ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language refer to Derrida's observations. Since the 1980s, these observations have inspired a range of theoretical enterprises in the humanities, including the disciplines of law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and feminism. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art, music, and literary criticism.
Jacques Derrida's 1967 book "Of Grammatology" introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction. Derrida published a number of other works directly relevant to the concept of deconstruction. Books showing deconstruction in action or defining it more completely include "Différance", "Speech and Phenomena", and "Writing and Difference".
According to Derrida and taking inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs. As Richard Rorty contends, "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)". As a consequence, meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the belief—in this view, mistaken—that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence. A concept, then, must be understood in the context of its opposite, such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing, etc.
Further, Derrida contends that "in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand": signified over signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech over writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction would be to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts; but the final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions, because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense. The oppositions simply cannot be suspended once and for all. The hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Deconstruction only points to the necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and arbitrary violence intrinsic to all texts.
Finally, Derrida argues that it is not enough to expose and deconstruct the way oppositions work and then stop there in a nihilistic or cynical position, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively". To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but from the necessity of analysis. Derrida called undecidables—that is, unities of simulacrum—"false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition. Instead, they inhabit philosophical oppositions—resisting and organizing them—without ever constituting a third term or leaving room for a solution in the form of a Hegelian dialectic (e.g., différance, archi-writing, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing).
Derrida's theories on deconstruction were themselves influenced by the work of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (whose writings on semiotics also became a cornerstone of structuralist theory in the mid-20th century) and literary theorists such as Roland Barthes (whose works were an investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought). Derrida's views on deconstruction stood in opposition to the theories of structuralists such as psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. However, Derrida resisted attempts to label his work as "post-structuralist".
In order to understand Derrida's motivation, one must refer to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy.
Nietzsche's project began with Orpheus, the man underground. This foil to Platonic light was deliberately and self-consciously lauded in "Daybreak", when Nietzsche announces, albeit retrospectively, "In this work you will discover a subterranean man at work", and then goes on to map the project of unreason: "All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?".
Nietzsche's point in "Daybreak" is that standing at the end of modern history, modern thinkers know too much to be deceived by the illusion of reason any more. Reason, logic, philosophy and science are no longer solely sufficient as the royal roads to truth. And so Nietzsche decides to throw it in our faces, and uncover the truth of Plato, that he—unlike Orpheus—just happened to discover his true love in the light instead of in the dark. This being merely one historical event amongst many, Nietzsche proposes that we revisualize the history of the West as the history of a series of political moves, that is, a manifestation of the will to power, that at bottom have no greater or lesser claim to truth in any noumenal (absolute) sense. By calling our attention to the fact that he has assumed the role of Orpheus, the man underground, in dialectical opposition to Plato, Nietzsche hopes to sensitize us to the political and cultural context, and the political influences that impact authorship. For example, the political influences that led one author to choose philosophy over poetry (or at least "portray" himself as having made such a choice), and another to make a different choice.
The problem with Nietzsche, as Derrida sees it, is that he did not go far enough. That he missed the fact that this will to power is itself but a manifestation of the operation of writing. Therefore, Derrida wishes to help us step beyond Nietzsche's penultimate revaluation of all western values, to the ultimate, which is the final appreciation of "the role of writing in the production of knowledge".
Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all discourse has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of difference inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text is influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure is considered one of the fathers of structuralism when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language:
In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.
Saussure explicitly suggested that linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, a science of signs in general, human codes being only one part. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, Saussure made linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone". Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling into what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and to speak of "mark" rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else.
Derrida's original use of the word "deconstruction" was a translation of "Destruktion", a concept from the work of Martin Heidegger that Derrida sought to apply to textual reading. Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them.
Derrida's concerns flow from a consideration of several issues:
To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern philosophers, who look backwards to Plato and his influence on the Western metaphysical tradition. Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato of dissimulation in the service of a political project, namely the education, through critical reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically positioned to influence the polis. However, like Nietzsche, Derrida is not satisfied merely with such a political interpretation of Plato, because of the particular dilemma modern humans find themselves in. His Platonic reflections are inseparably part of his critique of modernity, hence the attempt to be something beyond the modern, because of this Nietzschean sense that the modern has lost its way and become mired in nihilism.
Différance is the observation that the meanings of words come from their synchrony with other words within the language and their diachrony between contemporary and historical definitions of a word. Understanding language, according to Derrida, requires an understanding of both viewpoints of linguistic analysis. The focus on diachrony has led to accusations against Derrida of engaging in the etymological fallacy.
There is one statement by Derrida—in an essay on Rousseau in "Of Grammatology"—which has been of great interest to his opponents. It is the assertion that "there is no outside-text" ("il n'y a pas de hors-texte"), which is often mistranslated as "there is nothing outside of the text". The mistranslation is often used to suggest Derrida believes that nothing exists but words. Michel Foucault, for instance, famously misattributed to Derrida the very different phrase "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" for this purpose. According to Derrida, his statement simply refers to the unavoidability of context that is at the heart of différance.
For example, the word "house" derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from "shed", "mansion", "hotel", "building", etc. (Form of Content, that Louis Hjelmslev distinguished from Form of Expression) than how the word "house" may be tied to a certain image of a traditional house (i.e., the relationship between signified and signifier), with each term being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by an ostensive description or definition: when can we talk about a "house" or a "mansion" or a "shed"? The same can be said about verbs, in all the languages in the world: when should we stop saying "walk" and start saying "run"? The same happens, of course, with adjectives: when must we stop saying "yellow" and start saying "orange", or exchange "past" for "present"? Not only are the topological differences between the words relevant here, but the differentials between what is signified is also covered by différance.
Thus, complete meaning is always "differential" and "postponed" in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries. Such a process would never end.
Derrida describes the task of deconstruction as the identification of metaphysics of presence, or "logocentrism" in western philosophy. Metaphysics of presence is the desire for immediate access to meaning, the privileging of presence over absence. This means that there is an assumed bias in certain binary oppositions where one side is placed in a position over another, such as good over bad, speech over the written word, male over female. Derrida writes,
To Derrida, the central bias of logocentrism was the now being placed as more important than the future or past. This argument is largely based on the earlier work of Heidegger, who, in "Being and Time", claimed that the theoretical attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more originary involvement with the world in concepts such as ready-to-hand and being-with.
In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is to not collapse into Hegel's dialectic, where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic that has the purpose of resolving it into a synthesis. The presence of Hegelian dialectics was enormous in the intellectual life of France during the second half of the 20th century, with the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, but also with the impact of dialectics based on contradiction developed by Marxists, and including the existentialism of Sartre, etc. This explains Derrida's concern to always distinguish his procedure from Hegel's, since Hegelianism believes binary oppositions would produce a synthesis, while Derrida saw binary oppositions as incapable of collapsing into a synthesis free from the original contradiction.
There have been problems defining deconstruction. Derrida claimed that all of his essays were attempts to define what deconstruction is, and that deconstruction is necessarily complicated and difficult to explain since it actively criticises the very language needed to explain it.
Derrida has been more forthcoming with negative (apophatic) than with positive descriptions of deconstruction. When asked by Toshihiko Izutsu some preliminary considerations on how to translate "deconstruction" in Japanese, in order to at least prevent using a Japanese term contrary to deconstruction's actual meaning, Derrida began his response by saying that such a question amounts to "what deconstruction is not, or rather "ought" not to be".
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method in the traditional sense that philosophy understands these terms. In these negative descriptions of deconstruction, Derrida is seeking to "multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts". This does not mean that deconstruction has absolutely nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method, because while Derrida distances deconstruction from these terms, he reaffirms "the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure". Derrida's necessity of returning to a term under erasure means that even though these terms are problematic we must use them until they can be effectively reformulated or replaced. The relevance of the tradition of negative theology to Derrida's preference for negative descriptions of deconstruction is the notion that a positive description of deconstruction would over-determine the idea of deconstruction and would close off the openness that Derrida wishes to preserve for deconstruction. If Derrida were to positively define deconstruction—as, for example, a critique—then this would make the concept of critique immune to itself being deconstructed. Some new philosophy beyond deconstruction would then be required in order to encompass the notion of critique.
Derrida states that "Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one". This is because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation. Derrida warns against considering deconstruction as a mechanical operation, when he states that "It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological "metaphor" that seems necessarily attached to the very word 'deconstruction' has been able to seduce or lead astray". Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that:
Derrida is careful to avoid this term [method] because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided "how" to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida [...] this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political implications, would appear to go directly against the current of Derrida's philosophical adventure.
Beardsworth here explains that it would be irresponsible to undertake a deconstruction with a complete set of rules that need only be applied as a method to the object of deconstruction, because this understanding would reduce deconstruction to a thesis of the reader that the text is then made to fit. This would be an irresponsible act of reading, because it becomes a prejudicial procedure that only finds what it sets out to find.
Derrida states that deconstruction is not a critique in the Kantian sense. This is because Kant defines the term critique as the opposite of dogmatism. For Derrida, it is not possible to escape the dogmatic baggage of the language we use in order to perform a pure critique in the Kantian sense. Language is dogmatic because it is inescapably metaphysical. Derrida argues that language is inescapably metaphysical because it is made up of signifiers that only refer to that which transcends them—the signified. In addition, Derrida asks rhetorically "Is not the idea of knowledge and of the acquisition of knowledge in itself metaphysical?" By this, Derrida means that all claims to know something necessarily involve an assertion of the metaphysical type that something "is" the case somewhere. For Derrida the concept of neutrality is suspect and dogmatism is therefore involved in everything to a certain degree. Deconstruction can challenge a particular dogmatism and hence de-sediment dogmatism in general, but it cannot escape all dogmatism all at once.
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis in the traditional sense. This is because the possibility of analysis is predicated on the possibility of breaking up the text being analysed into elemental component parts. Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a text, because individual words or sentences in a text can only be properly understood in terms of how they fit into the larger structure of the text and language itself. For more on Derrida's theory of meaning see the article on différance.
Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which "structuralism was dominant" and deconstruction's meaning is within this context. Derrida states that deconstruction is an "antistructuralist gesture" because "[s]tructures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented". At the same time, deconstruction is also a "structuralist gesture" because it is concerned with the structure of texts. So, deconstruction involves "a certain attention to structures" and tries to "understand how an 'ensemble' was constituted". As both a structuralist and an antistructuralist gesture, deconstruction is tied up with what Derrida calls the "structural problematic". The structural problematic for Derrida is the tension between genesis, that which is "in the essential mode of creation or movement", and structure: "systems, or complexes, or static configurations". An example of genesis would be the sensory ideas from which knowledge is then derived in the empirical epistemology. An example of structure would be a binary opposition such as good and evil where the meaning of each element is established, at least partly, through its relationship to the other element.
It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from post-structuralism, a term that would suggest that philosophy could simply go beyond structuralism. Derrida states that "the motif of deconstruction has been associated with 'post-structuralism, but that this term was "a word unknown in France until its 'return' from the United States". In his deconstruction of Edmund Husserl, Derrida actually argues the contamination of pure origins by the structures of language and temporality. Manfred Frank has even referred to Derrida's work as "neostructuralism", identifying a "distaste for the metaphysical concepts of domination and system".
The popularity of the term deconstruction, combined with the technical difficulty of Derrida's primary material on deconstruction and his reluctance to elaborate his understanding of the term, has meant that many secondary sources have attempted to give a more straightforward explanation than Derrida himself ever attempted. Secondary definitions are therefore an interpretation of deconstruction by the person offering them rather than a summary of Derrida's actual position.
A survey of the secondary literature reveals a wide range of heterogeneous arguments. Particularly problematic are the attempts to give neat introductions to deconstruction by people trained in literary criticism who sometimes have little or no expertise in the relevant areas of philosophy in which Derrida is working. These secondary works (e.g. "Deconstruction for Beginners" and "Deconstructions: A User's Guide") have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized for being too far removed from the original texts and Derrida's actual position.
Derrida's observations have greatly influenced literary criticism and post-structuralism.
Derrida's method consisted of demonstrating all the forms and varieties of the originary complexity of semiotics, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.
Deconstruction denotes the pursuing of the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded—supposedly showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in literary analysis, and even in the analysis of scientific writings. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an "aporia" in the text; thus, deconstructive reading is termed "aporetic." He insists that meaning is made possible by the relations of a word to other words within the network of structures that language is.
Derrida initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name "deconstruction", on the grounds that it was a precise technical term that could not be used to characterize his work generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more general way.
Derrida's deconstruction strategy is also used by postmodernists to locate meaning in a text rather than discover meaning due to the position that it has multiple readings. There is a focus on the deconstruction that denotes the tearing apart of a text to find arbitrary hierarchies and presuppositions for the purpose of tracing contradictions that shadow a text's coherence. Here, the meaning of a text does not reside with the author or the author's intentions because it is dependent on the interaction between reader and text. Even the process of translation is also seen as transformative since it "modifies the original even as it modifies the translating language."
Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins University, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences", often appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. Structuralism viewed language as a number of signs, composed of a signified (the meaning) and a signifier (the word itself). Derrida proposed that signs always referred to other signs, existing only in relation to each other, and there was therefore no ultimate foundation or centre. This is the basis of différance.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, many thinkers were influenced by deconstruction, including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism. Derrida and Hillis Miller were subsequently affiliated with the University of California, Irvine.
Miller has described deconstruction this way: "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock, but thin air."
Arguing that law and politics cannot be separated, the founders of the "Critical Legal Studies Movement" found it necessary to criticize the absence of the recognition of this inseparability at the level of theory. To demonstrate the indeterminacy of legal doctrine, these scholars often adopt a method, such as structuralism in linguistics, or deconstruction in Continental philosophy, to make explicit the deep structure of categories and tensions at work in legal texts and talk. The aim was to deconstruct the tensions and procedures by which they are constructed, expressed, and deployed.
For example, Duncan Kennedy, in explicit reference to semiotics and deconstruction procedures, maintains that various legal doctrines are constructed around the binary pairs of opposed concepts, each of which has a claim upon intuitive and formal forms of reasoning that must be made explicit in their meaning and relative value, and criticized. Self and other, private and public, subjective and objective, freedom and control are examples of such pairs demonstrating the influence of opposing concepts on the development of legal doctrines throughout history.
Deconstructive readings of history and sources have changed the entire discipline of history. In "Deconstructing History", Alun Munslow examines history in what he argues is a postmodern age. He provides an introduction to the debates and issues of postmodernist history. He also surveys the latest research into the relationship between the past, history, and historical practice, as well as articulating his own theoretical challenges.
Jean-Luc Nancy argues, in his 1982 book "The Inoperative Community", for an understanding of community and society that is undeconstructable because it is prior to conceptualisation. Nancy's work is an important development of deconstruction because it takes the challenge of deconstruction seriously and attempts to develop an understanding of political terms that is undeconstructable and therefore suitable for a philosophy after Derrida.
Simon Critchley argues, in his 1992 book "The Ethics of Deconstruction", that Derrida's deconstruction is an intrinsically ethical practice. Critchley argues that deconstruction involves an openness to the Other that makes it ethical in the Levinasian understanding of the term.
Jacques Derrida has had a great influence on contemporary political theory and political philosophy. Derrida's thinking has inspired Slavoj Zizek, Richard Rorty, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler and many more contemporary theorists who have developed a deconstructive approach to politics. Because deconstruction examines the internal logic of any given text or discourse it has helped many authors to analyse the contradictions inherent in all schools of thought; and, as such, it has proved revolutionary in political analysis, particularly ideology critiques.
Richard Beardsworth, developing from Critchley's "Ethics of Deconstruction", argues, in his 1996 "Derrida and the Political", that deconstruction is an intrinsically political practice. He further argues that the future of deconstruction faces a perhaps undecidable choice between a theological approach and a technological approach, represented first of all by the work of Bernard Stiegler.
Derrida was involved in a number of high-profile disagreements with prominent philosophers, including Michel Foucault, John Searle, Willard Van Orman Quine, Peter Kreeft, and Jürgen Habermas. Most of the criticism of deconstruction were first articulated by these philosophers then repeated elsewhere.
In the early 1970s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida regarding speech-act theory. The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points. Searle was particularly hostile to Derrida's deconstructionist framework and much later refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection "Limited Inc". Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy, or even intelligible writing, and argued that he did not want to legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by paying any attention to it. Consequently, some critics have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand. The level of hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the 'reply' to which I can subscribe". Commentators have frequently interpreted the exchange as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytic and continental philosophies.
The debate began in 1972, when, in his paper "Signature Event Context", Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act. While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. Derrida argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" (the words that are left unsaid due to contextual constraints) and by "iterability" (the constraints on what can be said, imposed by what has been said in the past). Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech-act theory was misguided because intentionality is restricted to that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious, or "parasitic" speech, wondering whether this exclusion was because Austin had considered these speech genres as governed by different structures of meaning, or hadn't considered them due to a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and meaning when its aim was much narrower. Searle considered the omission of parasitic discourse forms to be justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry. Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus. This, in turn, caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality. Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on Derrida's having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction and having failed to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics have suggested that Searle, by being so grounded in the analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with Derrida's continental phenomenological tradition, was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of the exchange.
Derrida, in his response to Searle ( in "Limited Inc"), ridiculed Searle's positions. Claiming that a clear sender of Searle's message could not be established, Derrida suggested that Searle had formed with Austin a "société à responsabilité limitée" (a "limited liability company") due to the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of his reply. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic.
In the debate, Derrida praised Austin's work, but argued that Austin is wrong to banish what Austin calls "infelicities" from the "normal" operation of language. One "infelicity", for instance, occurs when it cannot be known whether a given speech act is "sincere" or "merely citational" (and therefore possibly ironic). Derrida argues that every iteration is necessarily "citational", due to the graphematic nature of speech and writing, and that language could not work at all without the ever-present and ineradicable possibility of such alternate readings. Derrida takes Searle to task for attempting to get around this issue by grounding final authority in the speaker's inaccessible "intention". Derrida argues that intention cannot possibly govern how an iteration signifies, once it becomes hearable or readable. All speech acts borrow from a language whose significance is determined by historical-linguistic context, and by the alternate possibilities that this context makes possible. This significance, Derrida argues, cannot be altered or governed by the whims of intention.
Derrida argued against the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition of which Austin and Searle were paradigmatic examples.
Derrida argued that it was problematic to establish the relation between "nonfiction or standard discourse" and "fiction," defined as its "parasite," "for part of the most originary essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place—and in so doing to 'de-essentialize' itself as it were".
He would finally argue that the indispensable question would then become:
In 1995, Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in "The Construction of Social Reality". He called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts..." Searle's reference here is not to anything forwarded in the debate, but to a mistranslation of the phrase ""il n'y a pas dehors du texte"," ("There is no outside-text") which appears in Derrida's "Of Grammatology".
In "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity", Jürgen Habermas criticized what he considered Derrida's opposition to rational discourse. Further, in an essay on religion and religious language, Habermas criticized Derrida's emphasis on etymology and philology (see "Etymological fallacy").
The American philosopher Walter A. Davis, in "Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud", argues that both deconstruction and structuralism are prematurely arrested moments of a dialectical movement that issues from Hegelian "unhappy consciousness".
Popular criticism of deconstruction intensified following the Sokal affair, which many people took as an indicator of the quality of deconstruction as a whole, despite the absence of Derrida from Sokal's follow-up book "Impostures Intellectuelles".
Chip Morningstar holds a view critical of deconstruction, believing it to be "epistemologically challenged". He claims the humanities are subject to isolation and genetic drift due to their unaccountability to the world outside academia. During the Second International Conference on Cyberspace (Santa Cruz, California, 1991), he reportedly heckled deconstructionists off the stage. He subsequently presented his views in the article "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything", where he stated, "Contrary to the report given in the 'Hype List' column of issue #1 of Wired ('Po-Mo Gets Tek-No', page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8886 |
Direct product
In mathematics, one can often define a direct product of objects already known, giving a new one. This generalizes the Cartesian product of the underlying sets, together with a suitably defined structure on the product set. More abstractly, one talks about the product in category theory, which formalizes these notions.
Examples are the product of sets, groups (described below), rings, and other algebraic structures. The product of topological spaces is another instance.
There is also the direct sum – in some areas this is used interchangeably, while in others it is a different concept.
In a similar manner, we can talk about the direct product of finitely many algebraic structures, e.g. formula_17. This relies on the fact that the direct product is associative up to isomorphism. That is, formula_18 for any algebraic structures formula_19, formula_20, and formula_21 of the same kind. The direct product is also commutative up to isomorphism, i.e. formula_22 for any algebraic structures formula_19 and formula_20 of the same kind. We can even talk about the direct product of infinitely many algebraic structures; for example we can take the direct product of countably many copies of formula_25, which we write as formula_26.
In group theory one can define the direct product of two groups ("G", ∘) and ("H", ∙), denoted by "G" × "H". For abelian groups which are written additively, it may also be called the direct sum of two groups, denoted by formula_27.
It is defined as follows:
(Note that ("G", ∘) may be the same as ("H", ∙))
This construction gives a new group. It has a normal subgroup isomorphic to "G" (given by the elements of the form ("g", 1)), and one isomorphic to "H" (comprising the elements (1, "h")).
The reverse also holds, there is the following recognition theorem: If a group "K" contains two normal subgroups "G" and "H", such that "K"= "GH" and the intersection of "G" and "H" contains only the identity, then "K" is isomorphic to "G" × "H". A relaxation of these conditions, requiring only one subgroup to be normal, gives the semidirect product.
As an example, take as "G" and "H" two copies of the unique (up to isomorphisms) group of order 2, "C"2: say {1, "a"} and {1, "b"}. Then "C"2×"C"2 = {(1,1), (1,"b"), ("a",1), ("a","b")}, with the operation element by element. For instance, (1,"b")*("a",1) = (1*"a", "b"*1) = ("a","b"), and (1,"b")*(1,"b") = (1,"b"2) = (1,1).
With a direct product, we get some natural group homomorphisms for free: the projection maps define by
called the coordinate functions.
Also, every homomorphism "f" to the direct product is totally determined by its component functions
formula_29.
For any group ("G", ∘) and any integer "n" ≥ 0, repeated application of the direct product gives the group of all "n"-tuples "G""n" (for "n" = 0 we get the trivial group), for example Z"n" and R"n".
The direct product for modules (not to be confused with the tensor product) is very similar to the one defined for groups above, using the Cartesian product with the operation of addition being componentwise, and the scalar multiplication just distributing over all the components. Starting from R we get Euclidean space R"n", the prototypical example of a real "n"-dimensional vector space. The direct product of R"m" and R"n" is R"m"+"n".
Note that a direct product for a finite index formula_30 is identical to the direct sum formula_31. The direct sum and direct product differ only for infinite indices, where the elements of a direct sum are zero for all but for a finite number of entries. They are dual in the sense of category theory: the direct sum is the coproduct, while the direct product is the product.
For example, consider formula_32 and formula_33, the infinite direct product and direct sum of the real numbers. Only sequences with a finite number of non-zero elements are in "Y". For example, (1,0,0,0...) is in "Y" but (1,1,1,1...) is not. Both of these sequences are in the direct product "X"; in fact, "Y" is a proper subset of "X" (that is, "Y" ⊂ "X").
The direct product for a collection of topological spaces "Xi" for "i" in "I", some index set, once again makes use of the Cartesian product
Defining the topology is a little tricky. For finitely many factors, this is the obvious and natural thing to do: simply take as a basis of open sets to be the collection of all Cartesian products of open subsets from each factor:
This topology is called the product topology. For example, directly defining the product topology on R2 by the open sets of R (disjoint unions of open intervals), the basis for this topology would consist of all disjoint unions of open rectangles in the plane (as it turns out, it coincides with the usual metric topology).
The product topology for infinite products has a twist, and this has to do with being able to make all the projection maps continuous and to make all functions into the product continuous if and only if all its component functions are continuous (i.e. to satisfy the categorical definition of product: the morphisms here are continuous functions): we take as a basis of open sets to be the collection of all Cartesian products of open subsets from each factor, as before, with the proviso that all but finitely many of the open subsets are the entire factor:
The more natural-sounding topology would be, in this case, to take products of infinitely many open subsets as before, and this does yield a somewhat interesting topology, the box topology. However it is not too difficult to find an example of bunch of continuous component functions whose product function is not continuous (see the separate entry box topology for an example and more). The problem which makes the twist necessary is ultimately rooted in the fact that the intersection of open sets is only guaranteed to be open for finitely many sets in the definition of topology.
Products (with the product topology) are nice with respect to preserving properties of their factors; for example, the product of Hausdorff spaces is Hausdorff; the product of connected spaces is connected, and the product of compact spaces is compact. That last one, called Tychonoff's theorem, is yet another equivalence to the axiom of choice.
For more properties and equivalent formulations, see the separate entry product topology.
On the Cartesian product of two sets with binary relations R and S, define ("a", "b")T("c", "d") as "a"R"c" and "b"S"d". If R and S are both reflexive, irreflexive, transitive, symmetric, or antisymmetric, then T will be also. Combining properties it follows that this also applies for being a preorder and being an equivalence relation. However if R and S are total relations, T is in not general total.
If Σ is a fixed signature, "I" is an arbitrary (possibly infinite) index set, and (A"i")"i"∈"I" is an indexed family of Σ algebras, the direct product A = ∏"i"∈"I" A"i" is a Σ algebra defined as follows:
For each , the "i"th projection is defined by . It is a surjective homomorphism between the Σ algebras A and A"i".
As a special case, if the index set the direct product of two Σ algebras A1 and A2 is obtained, written as . If Σ just contains one binary operation "f", the above definition of the direct product of groups is obtained, using the notation , , , , and . Similarly, the definition of the direct product of modules is subsumed here.
The direct product can be abstracted to an arbitrary category. In a general category, given a collection of objects "Ai" "and" a collection of morphisms "pi" from "A" to "Ai" with "i" ranging in some index set "I", an object "A" is said to be a categorical product in the category if, for any object "B" and any collection of morphisms "fi" from "B" to "Ai", there exists a unique morphism "f" from "B" to "A" such that "fi = pi f" and this object "A" is unique. This not only works for two factors, but arbitrarily (even infinitely) many.
For groups we similarly define the direct product of a more general, arbitrary collection of groups "Gi" for "i" in "I", "I" an index set. Denoting the Cartesian product of the groups by "G" we define multiplication on "G" with the operation of componentwise multiplication; and corresponding to the "pi" in the definition above are the projection maps
the functions that take formula_38 to its "i"th component "gi".
Some authors draw a distinction between an internal direct product and an external direct product. If formula_39 and formula_40, then we say that "X" is an "internal" direct product of "A" and "B", while if "A" and "B" are not subobjects then we say that this is an "external" direct product.
A metric on a Cartesian product of metric spaces, and a norm on a direct product of normed vector spaces, can be defined in various ways, see for example p-norm. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8887 |
Déjà vu
Déjà vu ( ; ) is the feeling that one has lived through the present situation before. The phrase translates literally as "already seen". Although some interpret déjà vu in a paranormal context, mainstream scientific approaches reject the explanation of "déjà vu" as "precognition" or "prophecy". Rather, they explain it as the feeling that one has lived through the present situation before. It is an anomaly of memory whereby, despite the strong sense of recollection, the time, place, and practical context of the "previous" experience are uncertain or believed to be impossible. Two types of "déjà vu" are recognized: the pathological "déjà vu" usually associated with epilepsy or that which, when unusually prolonged or frequent, or associated with other symptoms such as hallucinations, may be an indicator of neurological or psychiatric illness, and the non-pathological type characteristic of healthy people, about two-thirds of whom have had "déjà vu" experiences. People who travel more or watch more movies are more likely to experience "déjà vu" than others. Furthermore, people also tend to experience "déjà vu" more in fragile conditions or under high pressure, and research shows that the experience of "déjà vu" also decreases with age.
"Déjà vu" is associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. This experience is a neurological anomaly related to epileptic electrical discharge in the brain, creating a strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past.
Migraine with Aura is also associated with deja vu.
Early researchers tried to establish a link between "déjà vu" and mental disorders such as anxiety, dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia but failed to find correlations of any diagnostic value. No special association has been found between déjà vu and schizophrenia. A 2008 study found that "déjà vu" experiences are unlikely to be pathological dissociative experiences.
Some research has looked into genetics when considering "déjà vu". Although there is not currently a gene associated with "déjà vu", the LGII gene on chromosome 10 is being studied for a possible link. Certain forms of the gene are associated with a mild form of epilepsy, and, though by no means a certainty, "déjà vu", along with jamais vu, occurs often enough during seizures (such as simple partial seizures) that researchers have reason to suspect a link.
Certain drugs increase the chances of "déjà vu" occurring in the user, resulting in a strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past. Some pharmaceutical drugs, when taken together, have also been implicated in the cause of "déjà vu". Taiminen and Jääskeläinen (2001) reported the case of an otherwise healthy male who started experiencing intense and recurrent sensations of "déjà vu" upon taking the drugs amantadine and phenylpropanolamine together to relieve flu symptoms. He found the experience so interesting that he completed the full course of his treatment and reported it to the psychologists to write up as a case study. Because of the dopaminergic action of the drugs and previous findings from electrode stimulation of the brain (e.g. Bancaud, Brunet-Bourgin, Chauvel, & Halgren, 1994), Tamminen and Jääskeläinen speculate that "déjà vu" occurs as a result of hyperdopaminergic action in the mesial temporal areas of the brain.
Déjà vu may happen if a person experienced the current sensory twice successively. The first input experience is brief, degraded, occluded, or distracted. Immediately followed by that, the second perception might be familiar because the person naturally related it to the first input. One possibility behind this mechanism is that the first input experience involves shallow processing, which means that only some superficial physical attributes are extracted from the stimulus.
Implicit memory
Research has associated "déjà vu" experiences with good memory functions. Recognition memory enables people to realize the event or activity that they are experiencing has happened before. When people experience "déjà vu", they may have their recognition memory triggered by certain situations which they have never encountered.
The similarity between a "déjà-vu"-eliciting stimulus and an existing, or non-existing but different, memory trace may lead to the sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past. Thus, encountering something that evokes the implicit associations of an experience or sensation that "cannot be remembered" may lead to "déjà vu". In an effort to reproduce the sensation experimentally, Banister and Zangwill (1941) used hypnosis to give participants posthypnotic amnesia for material they had already seen. When this was later re-encountered, the restricted activation caused thereafter by the posthypnotic amnesia resulted in 3 of the 10 participants reporting what the authors termed "paramnesias".
Two approaches are used by researchers to study feelings of previous experience, with the process of recollection and familiarity. Recollection-based recognition refers to the realization of the current situation has occurred before. Familiarity-based recognition refers to the feeling of familiarity with the current situation without identifying anything.
In 2010, O’Connor, Moulin, and Conway developed another laboratory analog of déjà vu based on two contrast groups of carefully selected participants, a group under posthypnotic amnesia condition (PHA) and a group under posthypnotic familiarity condition (PHF). The idea of PHA group was based on the work done by Banister and Zangwill (1941), and the PHF group was built on the research results of O’Connor, Moulin, and Conway (2007). They applied the same puzzle game for both groups, “Railroad Rush Hour”, which is a game aims for sliding the red car through the exit by rearranging and shifting other blocking trucks and cars on the road. After completing the puzzle, each participant in the PHA group received a posthypnotic amnesia suggestion to forget the game in the hypnosis. On the other hand, each participant in the PHF group was not given the puzzle but received a posthypnotic familiarity suggestion that they would feel familiar with this game during the hypnosis. After the hypnosis, all participants were asked to play the puzzle (the second time for PHA group) and reported the feelings of playing.
In the PHA condition, if a participant reported no memory of completing the puzzle game during hypnosis, researchers scored the participant as passing the suggestion. In the PHF condition, if participants reported that the puzzle game felt familiar, researchers would score the participant as passing the suggestion. It turns out that, both in the PHA and PHF conditions, 5 participants passed the suggestion and 1 did not, which is 83.33% of the total sample. More participants in PHF group felt strong sense of familiarity, for instance, commenting like “I think I have done this several years ago”. Furthermore, more participants in PHF group experienced a strong déjà vu, for example, describing like “I think I have done the exact puzzle before.” Only 3 out of 6 participants in PHA group felt a sense of déjà vu, and none of them experienced a strong sense of déjà vu. These figures are consistent with Banister and Zangwill’s findings. Some participants in PHA group related the familiarity when completing the puzzle with an exact event that happened before, which is more likely to be a phenomenon of source amnesia. Other participants started to realize that they may have completed the puzzle game during hypnosis, which is more akin to the phenomenon of breaching. In contrast, participants in PHF group reported that they felt confused about the strong familiarity of this puzzle but the feeling of play it just sliding across their mind. Overall, the experiences of participants in PHF group is more likely to be the déjà vu in life, while the experiences of participants in PHA group is unlike to be the real déjà vu.
A 2012 study in the journal "Consciousness and Cognition", that used virtual reality technology to study reported "déjà vu" experiences, supported this idea. This virtual reality investigation suggested that similarity between a new scene's spatial layout and the layout of a previously experienced scene in memory (but which fails to be recalled) may contribute to the "déjà vu" experience. When the previously experienced scene fails to come to mind in response to viewing the new scene, that previously experienced scene in memory can still exert an effect—that effect may be a feeling of familiarity with the new scene that is subjectively experienced as a feeling that an event or experience currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past, or of having been there before despite knowing otherwise.
Cryptomnesia: Reconstruction of a memory
Another possible explanation for the phenomenon of "déjà vu" is the occurrence of "cryptomnesia", which is where information learned is forgotten but nevertheless stored in the brain, and similar occurrences invoke the contained knowledge, leading to a feeling of familiarity because the event or experience being experienced has already been experienced in the past, known as ""déjà vu"". Some experts suggest that memory is a process of reconstruction, rather than a recall of fixed, established events. This reconstruction comes from stored components, involving elaborations, distortions, and omissions. Each successive recall of an event is merely a recall of the last reconstruction. The proposed sense of recognition ("déjà vu") involves achieving a good "match" between the present experience and our stored data. This reconstruction, however, may now differ so much from the original event that we "know" we have never experienced it before, even though it seems similar.
Dual neurological processing
In 1964, Robert Efron of Boston's Veterans Hospital proposed that "déjà vu" is caused by dual neurological processing caused by delayed signals. Efron found that the brain's sorting of incoming signals is done in the temporal lobe of the brain's left hemisphere. However, signals enter the temporal lobe "twice" before processing, once from each hemisphere of the brain, normally with a slight delay of milliseconds between them. Efron proposed that if the two signals were occasionally not synchronized properly, then they would be processed as two separate experiences, with the second seeming to be a re-living of the first.
Dreams can also be used to explain the experience of déjà vu, and they are related in three different aspects. Firstly, some déjà vu experiences duplicate the situation in dreams instead of waking conditions, according to the survey done by Brown (2004). 20% of the respondents reported their déjà vu experiences were from dreams and 40% of the respondents reported that from both reality and dreams. Secondly, people may experience déjà vu because some elements in their remembered dreams were shown. Research done by Zuger (1966) supported this idea by investigating the relationship between remembered dreams and déjà vu experiences, and suggested that there is a strong correlation. Thirdly, people may experience déjà vu during a dream state, which links déjà vu with dream frequency.
"Jamais vu" (from French, meaning "never seen") is any familiar situation which is not recognized by the observer.
Often described as the opposite of "déjà vu", "jamais vu" involves a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before. "Jamais vu" is more commonly explained as when a person momentarily does not recognize a word, person, or place that they already know. "Jamais vu" is sometimes associated with certain types of aphasia, amnesia, and epilepsy.
Theoretically, a "jamais vu" feeling in a sufferer of a delirious disorder or intoxication could result in a delirious explanation of it, such as in the Capgras delusion, in which the patient takes a known person for a false double or impostor. If the impostor is himself, the clinical setting would be the same as the one described as depersonalization, hence "jamais vus" of oneself or of the very "reality of reality", are termed depersonalization (or surreality) feelings.
The feeling has been evoked through semantic satiation. Chris Moulin of the University of Leeds asked 95 volunteers to write the word "door" 30 times in 60 seconds. 68 percent of the subjects reported symptoms of "jamais vu", with some beginning to doubt that "door" was a real word.
The experience has also been named ""vuja de"" and ""véjà du"".
Déjà vécu is a feeling of “already living through”; however, it has been considered as a pathological form of déjà vu recently. Déjà vécu has behavioral consequences, unlike from déjà vu. Patients of déjà vécu would withdraw from their current events or activities since they believed that they have participated in them before because of the familiarity. Patients justify their feelings of familiarity with beliefs bordering on delusion.
Presque vu (, from French, meaning "almost seen") is the intense feeling of being on the very brink of a powerful epiphany, insight, or revelation, without actually achieving the revelation. The feeling is often therefore associated with a frustrating, tantalizing sense of incompleteness or near-completeness.
Déjà rêvé (from French, meaning "already dreamed") is the feeling of having already dreamed something that you are now experiencing.
Déjà entendu (literally "already heard") is the experience of feeling sure about having already heard something, even though the exact details are uncertain or were perhaps imagined.
Deja vous is a pun on the English pronunciation of déjà vu. The French pronunciation of the vowel U in vu, , does not exist in English. Therefore déjà vu is pronounced with a in English. When pronounced this way, , it means "already you" in French, rather than "already seen" and is written "déjà vous". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8888 |
Dionysius Thrax
Dionysius Thrax (, 170–90 BCE) was a Hellenistic grammarian and a pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace. He was long considered to be the author of the earliest grammatical text on the Greek language, one that was used as a standard manual for perhaps some 1,500 years, and which was until recently regarded as the groundwork of the entire Western grammatical tradition.
His place of origin was not Thrace as the epithet "Thrax" denotes, but probably Alexandria. His Thracian background was inferred from the name, considered to be Thracian, of his father Tērēs (Τήρης). One of his co-students during his studies in Alexandria under Aristarchus was Apollodorus of Athens, who also became a distinguished grammarian. Rudolf Pfeiffer dates his shift to the isle of Rhodes to around 144/3 BCE, when political upheavals associated with the policies of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II are thought to have led to his exile. According to a report in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae (11,489a, b), his Rhodian pupils, grateful for his learning, gathered enough silver to enable him to fashion a cup whose shape aspired to recreate that of Nestor mentioned in the Iliad (Book 11, lines 632–637).
Dionysius was primarily an Homeric scholar, which was integral to his training under Aristarchus in Alexandria. His work shows some influence of earlier Stoic grammatical theory, particular on word classes. He is also reported by Varro to have been an erudite analyst of Greek lyric poetry, perhaps referring to his linguistic and prosodic use of that material. He wrote prolifically in three genres: philological questions (γραμματικά); running commentaries (ὑπομνήματα) and treatises (συνταγματικά). Of the last genre, he wrote a polemical monograph criticizing the Homeric interpretations of Krates. Another work he is said to have written was the Περὶ ποσοτήτων (On quantities). From the scholia preserved from the critical works of Aristonicus and Didymus who excerpted Dionysius' work it is clear that he was decidedly independent in his textual judgements on the Homeric corpus, since he frequently contradicts his master's known readings. His teaching may have exercised a formative impact on the rise of Roman grammatical studies, if as an entry in the Suda suggests, the elder Tyrannion was one of his pupils. The founder of classical scholarship in Rome, L. Aelius Stilo may have profited from Dionysius' instruction, since he accompanied to Rhodes Q. Metellus Numidicus when the latter went into voluntary exile, and while Dionysius was still teaching there.
Dionysius Thrax was credited traditionally as the author of the first extant grammar of Greek, "Art of Grammar" (, "Tékhnē grammatikē"). The Greek text, in August Immanuel Bekker's edition, runs to fifty pages. Its importance in Byzantine scholarship is attested by the fact that commentaries on it by Byzantine scholiasts run to some 600 pages. The text itself was thought to be the unique extant example of a work by Hellenistic scholars. This general consensus began to break down when examinations of grammatical texts datable to a later period emerged among the finds of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri which, until relatively late, showed no awareness of key elements in the text attributed to Dionysius Thrax. It concerns itself primarily with a morphological description of Greek, lacking any treatment of syntax. The work was translated into Armenian sometime around the 5th to 6th centuries CE, and into Syriac around that same period.
Thrax defines grammar at the beginning of the "Tékhnē" as "the empirical knowledge of what is for the most part being said by poets and prose writers." He states that "grammatikē", what we might nowadays call "literary criticism", comprises six parts:
"Grammatikḗ"
Paragraph 6 outlines the στοιχεῖα ("stoikheia") or letters of the alphabet, together with the divisions into vowels, diphthongs and consonants.
Paragraphs 7-10 deal with syllables, long (μακραὶ συλλαβαί), short (βραχεῖαι συλλαβαί) and anceps (κοιναὶ συλλαβαί).
Paragraph 11 treats the eight word classes, though strong doubts exist as to whether or not this division goes back to Dionysius Thrax, since ancient testimonies assert that he conflated proper nouns and appellatives, and classified the article together with pronouns. In the text attributed to Dionysius, the eight classes. which Di Benedetto and others argue was probably developed by Tryphon several decades after Dionysius, are as follows:
Paragraphs 12-20 then elaborates successively on the parts of speech.
Modern scepticism over the attribution is associated with the pioneering work of Vincenzo Di Benedetto in particular, though as early as 1822 Karl Wilhelm Göttling, by analyzing the scholia on the text that had recently been collected and publisher by A. I. Bekker, concluded that the text as we have it was to be dated, not to the Hellinistic period but rather to Byzantine period. Göttling's thesis convinced neither nor Gustav Uhlig, and disappeared from view. In 1958/1959, Di Benedetto revived doubts by comparing the received text with ancient grammatical papyri that had since come to light. He argued that before the 3rd to 4th centuries CE, no papyri on Greek grammar reveal material structured in a way similar to the exposition we have in Dionysius's treatise, that the surviving witnesses for the period before that late date, namely authors such as Sextus Empiricus, Aelius Herodianus, Apollonius Dyscolus and Quintilian, fail to cite him, and that Dionysius's work only begins to receive explicit mention in the works written from the 5th century onwards by such scholars as Timotheus of Gaza, Ammonius Hermiae and Priscian. Di Benedetto concluded that only the first five paragraphs of the treatise came from Dionysius' hand.
Though initially rebuffed by scholars of the caliber of Pfeiffer and Hartmut Erbse, De Benedetto's argument today has found general acceptance among specialists. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8892 |
Discrimination
Discrimination is the act of making distinctions between human beings based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they are perceived to belong. People may discriminate on the basis of age, caste, criminal record, height, weight, physical appearance, disability, family status, gender identity, gender expression, generation, genetic characteristics, marital status, nationality, Profession, color, race and ethnicity, religion, sex and sex characteristics, sexual orientation, political ideology, social class, personality, as well as other categories. Discrimination occurs when individuals or groups are treated "in a way which is worse than the way people are usually treated," on the basis of their actual or perceived membership in certain groups or social categories. It involves the group's initial reaction or interaction going on to influence the individual's actual behavior towards the group's leader or the group, restricting members of one group from opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group, leading to the exclusion of the individual or entities based on illogical or irrational decision making.
Discriminatory traditions, policies, ideas, practices and laws exist in many countries and institutions in all parts of the world, including territories where discrimination is generally looked down upon. In some places, attempts such as quotas have been used to benefit those who are believed to be current or past victims of discrimination. These attempts have often been met with controversy, and have sometimes been called reverse discrimination.
The term "discriminate" appeared in the early 17th century in the English language. It is from the Latin "discriminat-" 'distinguished between', from the verb "discriminare", from "discrimen" 'distinction', from the verb "discernere". Since the American Civil War the term "discrimination" generally evolved in American English usage as an understanding of prejudicial treatment of an individual based solely on their race, later generalized as membership in a certain socially undesirable group or social category. The word "discrimination" derives from Latin, where the verb "discrimire" means "to separate, to distinguish, to make a distinction".
Moral philosophers have defined discrimination as "disadvantageous" treatment or consideration. This is a comparative definition. An individual need not be actually harmed in order to be discriminated against. They just need to be treated "worse" than others for some arbitrary reason. If someone decides to donate to help orphan children, but decides to donate less, say, to black children out of a racist attitude, then they would be acting in a discriminatory way despite the fact that the people they discriminate against actually benefit by receiving a donation. In addition to this discrimination develops into a source of oppression. It is similar to the action of recognizing someone as 'different' so much that they are treated inhumanly and degraded.
Based on realistic-conflict theory and social-identity theory, Rubin and Hewstone have highlighted a distinction among three types of discrimination:
The United Nations stance on discrimination includes the statement: "Discriminatory behaviors take many forms, but they all involve some form of exclusion or rejection." International bodies United Nations Human Rights Council work towards helping ending discrimination around the world.
Ageism or age discrimination is discrimination and stereotyping based on the grounds of someone's age. It is a set of beliefs, norms, and values which used to justify discrimination or subordination based on a person's age. Ageism is most often directed towards old people, or adolescents and children.
Age discrimination in hiring has been shown to exist in the United States. Joanna Lahey, professor at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, found that firms are more than 40% more likely to interview a young adult job applicant than an older job applicant. In Europe, Stijn Baert, Jennifer Norga, Yannick Thuy and Marieke Van Hecke, researchers at Ghent University, measured comparable ratios in Belgium. They found that age discrimination is heterogeneous by the activity older candidates undertook during their additional post-educational years. In Belgium, they are only discriminated if they have more years of inactivity or irrelevant employment.
In a survey for the University of Kent, England, 29% of respondents stated that they had suffered from age discrimination. This is a higher proportion than for gender or racial discrimination. Dominic Abrams, social psychology professor at the university, concluded that ageism is the most pervasive form of prejudice experienced in the UK population.
According to UNICEF and Human Rights Watch, caste discrimination affects an estimated 250 million people worldwide. Discrimination based on caste, as perceived by UNICEF, is mainly prevalent in parts of Asia, (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Nepal, Japan), Africa and others. , there were 200 million Dalits or Scheduled Castes (formerly known as "untouchables") in India.
Discrimination against people with disabilities in favor of people who are not is called ableism or disablism. Disability discrimination, which treats non-disabled individuals as the standard of 'normal living', results in public and private places and services, educational settings, and social services that are built to serve 'standard' people, thereby excluding those with various disabilities. Studies have shown that disabled people not only need employment in order to be provided with the opportunity to earn a living but they also need employment in order to sustain their mental health and well-being. Work fulfils a number of basic needs for an individual such as collective purpose, social contact, status, and activity. A person with a disability is often found to be socially isolated and work is one way to reduce his or her isolation.
In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act mandates the provision of equality of access to both buildings and services and is paralleled by similar acts in other countries, such as the Equality Act 2010 in the UK.
Diversity of language is protected and respected by most nations who value cultural diversity. However, people are sometimes subjected to different treatment because their preferred language is associated with a particular group, class or category. Notable examples are the Anti-French sentiment in the United States as well as the Anti-Quebec sentiment in Canada targeting people who speak the French language. Commonly, the preferred language is just another attribute of separate ethnic groups. Discrimination exists if there is prejudicial treatment against a person or a group of people who either do or do not speak a particular language or languages. An example of this is when thousands of Wayúu Native Colombians were given derisive names and the same birth date, by government officials, during a campaign to provide them with identification cards. The issue was not discovered until many years later.
Another noteworthy example of linguistic discrimination is the backdrop to the Bengali Language Movement in erstwhile Pakistan, a political campaign that played a key role in the creation of Bangladesh. In 1948, Mohammad Ali Jinnah declared Urdu as the national language of Pakistan and branded those supporting the use of Bengali, the most widely spoken language in the state, as enemies of the state.
Language discrimination is suggested to be labeled linguicism or logocism. Anti-discriminatory and inclusive efforts to accommodate persons who speak different languages or cannot have fluency in the country's predominant or "official" language, is bilingualism such as official documents in two languages, and multiculturalism in more than two languages.
Discrimination based on a person's name may also occur, with researchers suggesting that this form of discrimination is present based on a name's meaning, its pronunciation, its uniqueness, its gender affiliation, and its racial affiliation. Research has further shown that real world recruiters spend an average of just six seconds reviewing each résumé before making their initial "fit/no fit" screen-out decision and that a person's name is one of the six things they focus on most. France has made it illegal to view a person's name on a résumé when screening for the initial list of most qualified candidates. Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands have also experimented with name-blind summary processes. Some apparent discrimination may be explained by other factors such as name frequency. The effects of name discrimination based on a name's fluency is subtle, small and subject to significantly changing norms.
Discrimination on the basis of nationality is usually included in employment laws (see above section for employment discrimination specifically). It is sometimes referred to as bound together with racial discrimination although it can be separate. It may vary from laws that stop refusals of hiring based on nationality, asking questions regarding origin, to prohibitions of firing, forced retirement, compensation and pay, etc., based on nationality.
Discrimination on the basis of nationality may show as a "level of acceptance" in a sport or work team regarding new team members and employees who differ from the nationality of the majority of team members.
In the GCC states, in the workplace, preferential treatment is given to full citizens, even though many of them lack experience or motivation to do the job. State benefits are also generally available for citizens only. Westerners might also get paid more than other expatriates.
Racial and ethnic discrimination differentiates individuals on the basis of real and perceived racial and ethnic differences and leads to various forms of the ethnic penalty.. It can also refer to the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity. Modern variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These views can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It has been official government policy in several countries, such as South Africa during the apartheid era. Discriminatory policies towards ethnic minorities include the race-based discrimination against ethnic Indians and Chinese in Malaysia After the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese refugees moved to Australia and the United States, where they face discrimination.
Regional or geographic discrimination is a form of discrimination that is based on the region in which a person lives or the region in which a person was born. It differs from national discrimination because it may not be based on national borders or the country in which the victim lives, instead, it is based on prejudices against a specific region of one or more countries. Examples include discrimination against Chinese people who were born in regions of the countryside that are far away from cities that are located within China, and discrimination against Americans who are from the southern or northern regions of the United States. It is often accompanied by discrimination that is based on accent, dialect, or cultural differences.
Religious discrimination is valuing or treating people or groups differently because of what they do or do not believe in or because of their feelings towards a given religion. For instance, the Jewish population of Germany, and indeed a large portion of Europe, was subjected to discrimination under Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party between 1933 and 1945. They were forced to live in ghettos, wear an identifying star of David on their clothes, and sent to concentration and death camps in rural Germany and Poland, where they were to be tortured and killed, all because of their Jewish religion. Many laws (most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935) separated those of Jewish faith as supposedly inferior to the Christian population.
Restrictions on the types of occupations that Jewish people could hold were imposed by Christian authorities. Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to religious Jews, pushing them into marginal roles that were considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending, occupations that were only tolerated as a "necessary evil". The number of Jews who were permitted to reside in different places was limited; they were concentrated in ghettos and banned from owning land. In Saudi Arabia, non-Muslims are not allowed to publicly practice their religions and they cannot enter Mecca and Medina. Furthermore, private non-Muslim religious gatherings might be raided by the religious police.
In a 1979 consultation on the issue, the United States commission on civil rights defined religious discrimination in relation to the civil rights which are guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Whereas religious civil liberties, such as the right to hold or not to hold a religious belief, are essential for Freedom of Religion (in the United States as secured by the First Amendment), religious discrimination occurs when someone is denied "equal protection under the law, equality of status under the law, equal treatment in the administration of justice, and equality of opportunity and access to employment, education, housing, public services and facilities, and public accommodation because of their exercise of their right to religious freedom".
Sexism is a form of discrimination based on a person's sex or gender. It has been linked to stereotypes and gender roles, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another. Extreme sexism may foster sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual violence. Gender discrimination may encompass sexism, and is discrimination toward people based on their gender identity or their gender or sex differences. Gender discrimination is especially defined in terms of workplace inequality. It may arise from social or cultural customs and norms.
Intersex persons experience discrimination due to innate, atypical sex characteristics. Multiple jurisdictions now protect individuals on grounds of "intersex status" or "sex characteristics". South Africa was the first country to explicitly add intersex to legislation, as part of the attribute of 'sex'. Australia was the first country to add an independent attribute, of 'intersex status'. Malta was the first to adopt a broader framework of 'sex characteristics', through legislation that also ended modifications to the sex characteristics of minors undertaken for social and cultural reasons.
One's sexual orientation is a "predilection for homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality". Like most minority groups, homosexuals and bisexuals are vulnerable to prejudice and discrimination from the majority group. They may experience hatred from others because of their sexuality; a term for such hatred based upon one's sexual orientation is often called homophobia. Many continue to hold negative feelings towards those with non-heterosexual orientations and will discriminate against people who have them or are thought to have them. People of other uncommon sexual orientations also experience discrimination. One study found its sample of heterosexuals to be more prejudiced against asexual people than to homosexual or bisexual people.
Employment discrimination based on sexual orientation varies by country. Revealing a lesbian sexual orientation (by means of mentioning an engagement in a rainbow organisation or by mentioning one's partner name) lowers employment opportunities in Cyprus and Greece but overall, it has no negative effect in Sweden and Belgium. In the latter country, even a positive effect of revealing a lesbian sexual orientation is found for women at their fertile ages.
Besides these academic studies, in 2009, ILGA published a report based on research carried out by Daniel Ottosson at Södertörn University College, Stockholm, Sweden. This research found that of the 80 countries around the world that continue to consider homosexuality illegal, five carry the death penalty for homosexual activity, and two do in some regions of the country. In the report, this is described as "State sponsored homophobia". This happens in Islamic states, or in two cases regions under Islamic authority. On February 5, 2005, the IRIN issued a reported titled "Iraq: Male homosexuality still a taboo". The article stated, among other things that honor killings by Iraqis against a gay family member are common and given some legal protection. In August 2009, Human Rights Watch published an extensive report detailing torture of men accused of being gay in Iraq, including the blocking of men's anuses with glue and then giving the men laxatives. Although gay marriage has been legal in South Africa since 2006, same-sex unions are often condemned as "un-African". Research conducted in 2009 shows 86% of black lesbians from the Western Cape live in fear of sexual assault.
A number of countries, especially those in the Western world, have passed measures to alleviate discrimination against sexual minorities, including laws against anti-gay hate crimes and workplace discrimination. Some have also legalized same-sex marriage or civil unions in order to grant same-sex couples the same protections and benefits as opposite-sex couples. In 2011, the United Nations passed its first resolution recognizing LGBT rights.
Drug use discrimination is the unequal treatment people experience because of the drugs they use. People who use or have used illicit drugs may face discrimination in employment, welfare, housing, child custody, and travel, in addition to imprisonment, asset forfeiture, and in some cases forced labor, torture, and execution. Though often prejudicially stereotyped as deviants and misfits, most drug users are well-adjusted and productive members of society. Drug prohibitions may have been partly motivated by racism and other prejudice against minorities, and racial disparities have been found to exist in the enforcement and prosecution of drug laws. Discrimination due to illicit drug use was the most commonly reported type of discrimination among Blacks and Latinos in a 2003 study of minority drug users in New York City, double to triple that due to race. People who use legal drugs such as tobacco and prescription medications may also face discrimination.
In the US, a government policy which is known as affirmative action was instituted in order to encourage employers and universities to seek out and accept groups such as African Americans and women, who have been subject to discrimination for a long time.
Some attempts at antidiscrimination have been criticized as reverse discrimination. In particular, minority quota systems such as affirmative action) may discriminate against members of a dominant or majority group or members of other minority groups. In its opposition to race preferences, the American Civil Rights Institute's Ward Connerly stated, "There is nothing positive, affirmative, or equal about 'affirmative action' programs that give preference to some groups based on race."
Australia
Canada
Hong Kong
Israel
Netherlands
United Kingdom
United States
Important UN documents addressing discrimination include:
Social theories such as egalitarianism assert that social equality should prevail. In some societies, including most developed countries, each individual's civil rights include the right to be free from government sponsored social discrimination. Due to a belief in the capacity to perceive pain or suffering shared by all animals, "abolitionist" or "vegan" egalitarianism maintains that the interests of every individual (regardless its species), warrant equal consideration with the interests of humans, and that not doing so is "speciesist".
Discrimination, in labeling theory, takes form as mental categorization of minorities and the use of stereotype. This theory describes difference as deviance from the norm, which results in internal devaluation and social stigma that may be seen as discrimination. It is started by describing a "natural" social order. It is distinguished between the fundamental principle of fascism and social democracy. The Nazis in 1930s-era Germany and the pre-1990 Apartheid government of South Africa used racially discriminatory agendas for their political ends. This practice continues with some present day governments.
Economist Yanis Varoufakis (2013) argues that "discrimination based on utterly arbitrary characteristics evolves quickly and systematically in the experimental laboratory", and that neither classical game theory nor neoclassical economics can explain this. Varoufakis and Shaun Hargreaves-Heap (2002) ran an experiment where volunteers played a computer-mediated, multiround hawk-dove game. At the start of each session, each participant was assigned a color at random, either red or blue. At each round, each player learned the color assigned to his or her opponent, but nothing else about the opponent. Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis found that the players' behavior within a session frequently developed a discriminatory convention, giving a Nash equilibrium where players of one color (the "advantaged" color) consistently played the aggressive "hawk" strategy against players of the other, "disadvantaged" color, who played the acquiescent "dove" strategy against the advantaged color. Players of both colors used a mixed strategy when playing against players assigned the same color as their own.
The experimenters then added a cooperation option to the game, and found that disadvantaged players usually cooperated with each other, while advantaged players usually did not. They state that while the equilibria reached in the original hawk-dove game are predicted by evolutionary game theory, game theory does not explain the emergence of cooperation in the disadvantaged group. Citing earlier psychological work of Matthew Rabin, they hypothesize that a norm of differing entitlements emerges across the two groups, and that this norm could define a "fairness" equilibrium within the disadvantaged group.
It is debated as to whether or not markets discourage discrimination brought about by the state. One argument is that since discrimination restricts access to customers and incurs additional expense, market logic will punish discrimination. Opposition by companies to "Jim Crow" segregation laws is an example of this. An alternative argument is that markets don't necessarily undermine discrimination, as it is argued that if discrimination is profitable by catering to the "tastes" of individuals (which is the point of the market), then the market will not punish discrimination. It is argued that micro economic analysis of discrimination uses unusual methods to determine its effects (using explicit treatment of production functions) and that the very existence of discrimination in employment (defined as wages which differ from marginal product of the discriminated employees) in the long run contradicts claims that the market will function well and punish discrimination. Furthermore, economic actors may have imperfect information and statistical discrimination may occur rationally and without prejudice. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8900 |
Double-ended queue
In computer science, a double-ended queue (abbreviated to deque, pronounced "deck") is an abstract data type that generalizes a queue, for which elements can be added to or removed from either the front (head) or back (tail). It is also often called a head-tail linked list, though properly this refers to a specific data structure "implementation" of a deque (see below).
"Deque" is sometimes written "dequeue", but this use is generally deprecated in technical literature or technical writing because "dequeue" is also a verb meaning "to remove from a queue". Nevertheless, several libraries and some writers, such as Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman in their textbook "Data Structures and Algorithms", spell it "dequeue". John Mitchell, author of "Concepts in Programming Languages," also uses this terminology.
This differs from the queue abstract data type or "first in first out" list (FIFO), where elements can only be added to one end and removed from the other. This general data class has some possible sub-types:
Both the basic and most common list types in computing, queues and stacks can be considered specializations of deques, and can be implemented using deques.
The basic operations on a deque are "enqueue" and "dequeue" on either end. Also generally implemented are "peek" operations, which return the value at that end without dequeuing it.
Names vary between languages; major implementations include:
There are at least two common ways to efficiently implement a deque: with a modified dynamic array or with a doubly linked list.
The dynamic array approach uses a variant of a dynamic array that can grow from both ends, sometimes called array deques. These array deques have all the properties of a dynamic array, such as constant-time random access, good locality of reference, and inefficient insertion/removal in the middle, with the addition of amortized constant-time insertion/removal at both ends, instead of just one end. Three common implementations include:
Double-ended queues can also be implemented as a purely functional data structure. Two versions of the implementation exist. The first one, called "'real-time deque", is presented below. It allows the queue to be persistent with operations in formula_1 worst-case time, but requires lazy lists with memoization. The second one, with no lazy lists nor memoization is presented at the end of the sections. Its amortized time is formula_1 if the persistency is not used; but the worst-time complexity of an operation is formula_3 where formula_4 is the number of elements in the double-ended queue.
Let us recall that, for a list codice_1, codice_2 denotes its length, that codice_3 represents an empty list and codice_4 represents the list whose head is codice_5 and whose tail is codice_6. The functions codice_7 and codice_8 return the list codice_1 without its first codice_10 elements, and the first codice_10 elements of codice_1, respectively. Or, if codice_13, they return the empty list and codice_1 respectively.
A double-ended queue is represented as a sextuple codice_15 where codice_16 is a linked list which contains the front of the queue of length codice_17. Similarly, codice_18 is a linked list which represents the reverse of the rear of the queue, of length codice_19. Furthermore, it is assured that codice_20 and codice_21 - intuitively, it means that neither the front nor the rear contains more than a third of the list plus one element. Finally, codice_22 and codice_23 are tails of codice_16 and of codice_18, they allow to schedule the moment where some lazy operations are forced. Note that, when a double-ended queue contains codice_26 elements in the front list and codice_26 elements in the rear list, then the inequality invariant remains satisfied after codice_10 insertions and codice_29 deletions when codice_30. That is, at most codice_31 operations can happen between each rebalancing.
Intuitively, inserting an element codice_32 in front of the double-ended queue codice_33 leads almost to the double-ended queue codice_34, the head and the tail of the double-ended queue codice_35 are codice_32 and almost codice_37 respectively, and the head and the tail of codice_38 are codice_32 and codice_40 respectively. The function to insert an element in the rear, or to drop the last element of the double-ended queue, are similar to the above function which deal with the front of the double-ended queue. It is said "almost" because, after insertion and after an application of "tail", the invariant codice_21 may not be satisfied anymore. In this case it is required to rebalance the double-ended queue.
In order to avoid an operation with an codice_42 costs, the algorithm uses laziness with memoization, and force the rebalancing to be partly done during the following codice_43 operations, that is, before the following rebalancing. In order to create the scheduling, some auxiliary lazy functions are required. The function codice_44 returns the list codice_16, followed by the list codice_18, and followed by the list codice_47. It is required in this function that codice_48 is 2 or 3. This function is defined by induction as codice_49 where ++ is the concatenation operation, and by codice_50. codice_51 returns the list codice_16 followed by the list codice_18 reversed. The function codice_54 which returns codice_16 followed by (codice_18 without codice_57's first element) reversed is also required, for codice_58. It is defined by codice_59, codice_60 and codice_61.
The balancing function can now be defined with
fun balance(q as (lenf, f, sf, lenr, r, sr))=
Note that, without the lazy part of the implementation, this would be a non-persistent implementation of queue in codice_62 amortized time. In this case, the lists codice_22 and codice_23 can be removed from the representation of the double-ended queue.
Ada's containers provides the generic packages Ada.Containers.Vectors and Ada.Containers.Doubly_Linked_Lists, for the dynamic array and linked list implementations, respectively.
C++'s Standard Template Library provides the class templates std::deque and std::list, for the multiple array and linked list implementations, respectively.
As of Java 6, Java's Collections Framework provides a new interface that provides the functionality of insertion and removal at both ends. It is implemented by classes such as (also new in Java 6) and , providing the dynamic array and linked list implementations, respectively. However, the ArrayDeque, contrary to its name, does not support random access.
Javascript's Array prototype & Perl's arrays have native support for both removing (shift and pop) and adding (unshift and push) elements on both ends.
Python 2.4 introduced the codice_65 module with support for deque objects. It is implemented using a doubly linked list of fixed-length subarrays.
As of PHP 5.3, PHP's SPL extension contains the 'SplDoublyLinkedList' class that can be used to implement Deque datastructures. Previously to make a Deque structure the array functions array_shift/unshift/pop/push had to be used instead.
GHC's Data.Sequence module implements an efficient, functional deque structure in Haskell. The implementation uses 2–3 finger trees annotated with sizes. There are other (fast) possibilities to implement purely functional (thus also persistent) double queues (most using heavily lazy evaluation). Kaplan and Tarjan were the first to implement optimal confluently persistent catenable deques. Their implementation was strictly purely functional in the sense that it did not use lazy evaluation. Okasaki simplified the data structure by using lazy evaluation with a bootstrapped data structure and degrading the performance bounds from worst-case to amortized. Kaplan, Okasaki, and Tarjan produced a simpler, non-bootstrapped, amortized version that can be implemented either using lazy evaluation or more efficiently using mutation in a broader but still restricted fashion. Mihaesau and Tarjan created a simpler (but still highly complex) strictly purely functional implementation of catenable deques, and also a much simpler implementation of strictly purely functional non-catenable deques, both of which have optimal worst-case bounds.
Rust's codice_66 includes VecDeque which implements a double-ended queue using a growable ring buffer.
One example where a deque can be used is the "A-Steal" job scheduling algorithm. This algorithm implements task scheduling for several processors. A separate deque with threads to be executed is maintained for each processor. To execute the next thread, the processor gets the first element from the deque (using the "remove first element" deque operation). If the current thread forks, it is put back to the front of the deque ("insert element at front") and a new thread is executed. When one of the processors finishes execution of its own threads (i.e. its deque is empty), it can "steal" a thread from another processor: it gets the last element from the deque of another processor ("remove last element") and executes it. The steal-job scheduling algorithm is used by Intel's Threading Building Blocks (TBB) library for parallel programming. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8904 |
Diene
In organic chemistry a diene ( ) (diolefin ( ) or alkadiene) is a covalent compound that contains two double bonds, usually among carbon atoms. They thus contain two alk"ene" units, with the standard prefix "di" of systematic nomenclature. As a subunit of more complex molecules, dienes occur in naturally occurring and synthetic chemicals and are used in organic synthesis. Conjugated dienes are widely used as monomers in the polymer industry. Polyunsaturated fats are of interest to nutrition.
Dienes can be divided into three classes, depending on the relative location of the double bonds:
According to the "Gold Book" definition, a "diene" could include one or more heteroatoms which replace unsaturated carbon atoms, giving structures that could more specifically be called "heterodienes".
Compounds that contain more than two double bonds are called polyenes. Polyenes and dienes share many properties.
On an industrial scale, butadiene is prepared by thermal cracking of butanes. In a similarly non-selective process, dicyclopentadiene is obtained from coal tars.
In the laboratory, more directed and more delicate processes are employed such as dehydrohalogenations and condensations. Myriad methods have been developed, such as the Whiting reaction. Families of nonconjugated dienes are derived from the oligomerization and dimerization of conjugated dienes. For example, 1,5-cyclooctadiene and vinylcyclohexene are produced by dimerization of 1,3-butadiene.
Diene-containing fatty acids are biosynthesized from acetyl CoA.
α,ω-Dienes have the formula (CH2)n(CH=CH2)2. They are prepared industrially by ethenolysis of cyclic dienes. For example, 1,5-hexadiene and 1,9-decadiene, useful crosslinking agents and synthetic intermediates, are produced from 1,5-cyclooctadiene and cyclooctene, respectively. The catalyst is derived from Re2O7 on alumina.
The most heavily practiced reaction of alkenes, dienes included, is polymerization. 1,3-Butadiene is a precursor to rubber used in tires, and isoprene is the precursor to natural rubber. Chloroprene is related but it is a synthetic monomer.
An important reaction for conjugated dienes is the Diels–Alder reaction. Many specialized dienes have been developed to exploit this reactivity for the synthesis of natural products (e.g., Danishefsky's diene).
Conjugated dienes add reagents such as bromine and hydrogen by both 1,2-addition and 1,4-addition pathways. Addition of polar reagents can generate complex architectures:
Nonconjugated dienes are substrates for ring-closing metathesis reactions. These reactions require a metal catalyst:
The position adjacent to a double bond is acidic because the resulting allyl anion is stabilized by resonance. This effect becomes more pronounced as more alkenes are involved to create greater stability. For example, deprotonation at position 3 of a 1,4-diene or position 5 of a 1,3-diene give a pentadienyl anion. An even greater effect is seen if the anion is aromatic, for example, deprotonation of cyclopentadiene to give the cyclopentadienyl anion.
Dienes are widely used chelating ligands in organometallic chemistry. In some cases they serve as placeholder ligands, being removed during a catalytic cycle. For example, the cyclooctadiene ("cod") ligands in bis(cyclooctadiene)nickel(0) are labile. In some cases, dienes are spectator ligands, remaining coordinated throughout a catalytic cycle and influencing the product distributions. Chiral dienes have also been described. Other diene complexes include (butadiene)iron tricarbonyl and cyclooctadiene rhodium chloride dimer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8905 |
Diatessaron
The Diatessaron (; c. 160–175) is the most prominent early gospel harmony, and was created by Tatian, an Assyrian early Christian apologist and ascetic. Tatian sought to combine all the textual material he found in the four gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—into a single coherent narrative of Jesus's life and death. However, and in contradistinction to most later gospel harmonists, Tatian appears not to have been motivated by any aspiration to validate the four separate canonical gospel accounts; or to demonstrate that, as they stood, they could each be shown as being without inconsistency or error.
Although widely used by early Syriac Christians, the original text has not survived, but was reconstructed in 1881 by Theodor Zahn from translations and commentaries.
Tatian's harmony follows the gospels closely in terms of text but, in order to fit all the canonical material in, he created his own narrative sequence, which is different from both the synoptic sequence and John's sequence; and occasionally creates intervening time periods that are found in none of the source accounts. This sequence is coherent and consistent within itself, but not necessarily consistent with that in all or any of the separate canonical gospels; and Tatian apparently applies the same principle in respect of the narrative itself. Where the gospels differ from one another in respect of the details of an event or teaching, the Diatessaron resolves such apparent contradictions by selecting one or another alternative wording and adding consistent details from the other gospels; while omitting apparent duplicate matter, especially across the synoptics. Hence, in respect of the healing of the blind at Jericho the Diatessaron reports only one blind man, Bartimeaus, healed by Jesus when leaving the city according to the account in Mark 10:46ff (expanded with phrases from Luke 18:36–37); consequently omitting any separate mention of two unnamed blind men healed by Jesus leaving Jericho (Matthew 20:29ff), and also the healing by Jesus entering Jericho the previous day of a single unnamed blind man (Luke 18:35ff).
Otherwise, Tatian originally omitted altogether both of the different genealogies in Matthew and Luke, as well as Luke's introduction (Luke 1:1–4); and also did not originally include Jesus' encounter with the adulteress (John 7:53–8:11). This latter passage is, however, generally considered to be a late addition to the Gospel of John, with the Diatessaron itself often cited as an early textual witness in support of its omission. Most scholars agree that Tatian did, from the beginning, include the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16: 9–20), and correspondingly is amongst the earliest witnesses to this inclusion. Tatian added no significant wording to the textual material he took from the separate gospels. Only 56 verses in the canonical Gospels do not have a counterpart in the Diatessaron, mostly the genealogies and the "Pericope Adulterae". The final work is about 72 per cent the length of the four gospels put together; around a quarter of the text of the separate gospels being adjudged by Tatian to be duplicated. (McFall, 1994).
In the early Church, the gospels at first circulated independently, with Matthew the most popular. The Diatessaron is notable evidence for the authority already enjoyed by the gospels by the mid- to late-2nd century. Within twenty years after Tatian's harmony was written, Irenaeus was expressly arguing for the authoritative character of the Four Gospels. It is unclear whether Tatian intended the Diatessaron to supplement or replace the four separate gospels; but both outcomes came to pass in different churches. The Diatessaron became adopted as the standard lectionary text of the gospels in some Syriac-speaking churches from the late 2nd to the 5th century, until it gave way to the four separate Gospels such as the Syriac Sinaitic gospels, or later in the Peshitta version. At the same time, in the churches of the Latin west, the Diatessaron circulated as a supplement to the four gospels, especially in the Latin translation.
A number of recensions of the "Diatessaron" are extant. The earliest, part of the eastern family of recensions, is preserved in 4th century theologian Ephrem the Syrian's "Commentary" on Tatian's work, which itself is preserved in two versions: an Armenian translation preserved in two copies, and a copy of Ephrem's original Syriac text dated to the late 5th or early 6th century, which has been edited by Louis Leloir (Paris, 1966).
Many other translations have been made, sometimes including substantial revisions to the text. There are translations into Arabic, Latin, Old Georgian, Old High German, Middle High German, Middle English, Middle Dutch and Old Italian. There is a Persian harmony that seems to have borrowed some readings from the "Diatessaron". There are also Parthian texts with borrowings from the "Diatessaron". The Arabic translation was made by Ibn al-Tayyib in the early 11th century from the original Syriac.
Tatian was an Assyrian who was a pupil of Justin Martyr in Rome, where, Justin says, the "apomnemoneumata" (recollections or memoirs) of the Apostles, the gospels, were read every Sunday. When Justin quotes the synoptic Gospels, he tends to do so in a harmonised form, and Helmut Koester and others conclude that Justin must have possessed a Greek harmony text of Matthew, Luke and Mark.
If so, it is unclear how much Tatian may have borrowed from this previous author in determining his own narrative sequence of Gospel elements. It is equally unclear whether Tatian took the Syriac Gospel texts composited into his Diatessaron from a previous translation, or whether the translation was his own. Where the Diatessaron records Gospel quotations from the Jewish Scriptures, the text appears to agree with that found in the Syriac Peshitta Old Testament rather than that found in the Greek Septuagint—as used by the original Gospel authors. The majority consensus is that the Peshitta Old Testament preceded the Diatessaron, and represents an independent translation from the Hebrew Bible. Resolution of these scholarly questions remained very difficult so long as no complete version of the "Diatessaron" in Syriac or Greek had been recovered; while the medieval translations that had survived—in Arabic and Latin—both relied on texts that had been heavily corrected to conform better with later canonical versions of the separate Gospel texts.
There is scholarly uncertainty about what language Tatian used for its original composition, whether Syriac or Greek.
The "Diatessaron" was used as the standard Gospel text in the liturgy of at least some sections of the Syrian Church for possibly up to two centuries and was quoted or alluded to by Syrian writers. Ephrem the Syrian wrote a commentary on it, the Syriac original of which was rediscovered only in 1957, when a manuscript acquired by Sir Chester Beatty in 1957 (now Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709, Dublin) turned out to contain the text of Ephrem's commentary. The manuscript constituted approximately half of the leaves of a volume of Syriac writings that had been catalogued in 1952 in the library of the Coptic monastery of Deir es-Suriani in Wadi Natrun, Egypt. Subsequently, the Chester Beatty library was able to track down and buy a further 42 leaves, so that now approximately eighty per cent of the Syriac commentary is available (McCarthy 1994). Ephrem did not comment on all passages in the Diatessaron, and nor does he always quote commentated passages in full; but for those phrases that he does quote, the commentary provides for the first time a dependable witness to Tatian's original; and also confirms its content and their sequence. .
Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus on the Euphrates in upper Syria in 423, suspecting Tatian of having been a heretic, sought out and found more than two hundred copies of the "Diatessaron", which he "collected and put away, and introduced instead of them the Gospels of the four evangelists".
No Christian tradition, other than some Syriac ones, has ever adopted a harmonized Gospel text for use in its liturgy. However, in many traditions, it was not unusual for subsequent Christian generations to seek to provide paraphrased Gospel versions in language closer to the vernacular of their own day. Frequently such versions have been constructed as Gospel harmonies, sometimes taking Tatian's Diatessaron as an exemplar; other times proceeding independently. Hence from the Syriac Diatessaron text was derived an 11th-century Arabic harmony (the source for the published versions of the Diatessaron in English); and a 13th-century Persian harmony. The Arabic harmony preserves Tatian's sequence exactly, but uses a source text corrected in most places to that of the standard Syriac Peshitta Gospels; the Persian harmony differs greatly in sequence, but translates a Syriac text that is rather closer to that in Ephrem's commentary.
A Vetus Latina version of Tatian's Syriac text appears to have circulated in the West from the late 2nd century; with a sequence adjusted to conform more closely to that of the canonical Gospel of Luke; and also including additional canonical text (such as the "Pericope Adulterae"), and possibly non-canonical matter from the Gospel of the Hebrews. With the gradual adoption of the Vulgate as the liturgical Gospel text of the Latin Church, the Latin Diatessaron was increasingly modified to conform to Vulgate readings. In 546 Victor of Capua discovered such a mixed manuscript; and, further corrected by Victor so as to provide a very pure Vulgate text within a modified Diatessaron sequence and to restore the two genealogies of Jesus side-by-side, this harmony, the Codex Fuldensis, survives in the monastic library at Fulda, where it served as the source text for vernacular harmonies in Old High German, Eastern Frankish and Old Saxon (the alliterative poem 'Heliand'). The older mixed Vulgate/Diatessaron text type also appears to have continued as a distinct tradition, as such texts appear to underlie surviving 13th–14th century Gospel harmonies in Middle Dutch, Middle High German, Middle French, Middle English, Tuscan and Venetian; although no example of this hypothetical Latin sub-text has ever been identified. The Liège Diatessaron is a particularly poetic example. This Latin Diatessaron textual tradition has also been suggested as underlying the enigmatic 16th century Islam-influenced Gospel of Barnabas (Joosten, 2002).
The title "Diatessaron" comes from the Latin "diatessarōn" ("made of four [ingredients]"), derived in turn from Greek, διὰ τεσσάρων ("dia tessarōn") ("out of four"; i.e., "διά, dia", "at intervals of" and "tessarōn" [genitive of τέσσαρες, "tessares"], "four").
The Syriac name for this gospel harmony is " (Ewangeliyôn Damhalltê) meaning 'Gospel of the Mixed'.
Robert F. Shedinger writes that in quotations citations to the Old Testament where the great uncial codices have "κυριος", and the Hebrew manuscripts "יהוה", Tatian wrote the term "God". P. D. Vasileiadis reports that "Shedinger proposed that the Syriac Diatessaron, composed some time after the middle of the second century C.E., may provide additional confirmation of Howard’s hypothesis (Tatian and the Jewish Scriptures, 136–140). Additionally, within the Syriac Peshitta is discernible the distinction between κύριος rendered as ܐܳܪܝܳܡ (marya, which means "lord" and refers to the God as signified by the Tetragrammaton; see Lu 1:32) and ܢܰܪܳܡ (maran, a more generic term for "lord"; see Joh 21:7)." R. F. Shedinger holds that after "יהוה", "θεος" could be a term before κυριος became the standard term in the New Testament Greek copies.
Shedinger's work has been strongly criticized. Since Tatian's Diatessaron is known only indirectly from references to it in other works, Shedinger's dissertation is based on his collection of 69 "possible" readings, only two of which, in the judgment of William L. Petersen. reach the level of probability. Peterson complains of Shedinger's "inconsistent methodology" and says that the surviving readings do not support his conclusions. Petersen thinks the dissertation should never have been accepted for a doctoral degree, in view of "the illogical arguments, inconsistent standards, philological errors, and methodological blunders that mar this book. [...] the errors are so frequent and so fundamental that this volume can contribute nothing to scholarship. What it says that is true has already been said elsewhere, with greater clarity and perspective. What it says that is new is almost always wrong, plagued [...] with philological, logical, and methodological errors, and a gross insensitivity to things historical (both within the discipline, as well as the transmission-history of texts). Reading this book fills one with dismay and despair. It is shocking that a work which does not rise to the level of a master's thesis should be approved as a doctoral dissertation; how it found its way into print is unfathomable. One shudders to think of the damage it will do when, in the future, it is cited by the ignorant and the unsuspecting as "demonstrating" what it has not." Jan Joosten's review of Shedinger's work is also condemnatory. In his judgment "Shedinger's study remains unconvincing, not only in the final conclusions but also in the details of the argument." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8906 |
Dean Koontz
Dean Ray Koontz (born July 9, 1945) is an American author. His novels are billed as suspense thrillers, but frequently incorporate elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and satire. Many of his books have appeared on "The New York Times" Best Seller list, with 14 hardcovers and 16 paperbacks reaching the number-one position. Koontz wrote under a number of pen names earlier in his career, including "David Axton", "Deanna Dwyer" , "K.R. Dwyer" , "Leigh Nichols", and "Brian Coffey".
He has published over 105 novels, a number of novellas and collections of short stories, and has sold over 450 million copies of his work.
Koontz was born on July 9, 1945, in Everett, Pennsylvania, the son of Florence (née Logue) and Raymond Koontz. He has said that he was regularly beaten and abused by his alcoholic father, which influenced his later writing, as also did the courage of his physically diminutive mother in standing up to her husband. In his senior year at Shippensburg State College, he won a fiction competition sponsored by "Atlantic Monthly" magazine. After graduation in 1967, he went to work as an English teacher at Mechanicsburg High School in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. In the 1960s, Koontz worked for the Appalachian Poverty Program, a federally funded initiative designed to help poor children. In a 1996 interview with "Reason" magazine, he said that while the program sounded "very noble and wonderful, ... [i]n reality, it was a dumping ground for violent children ... and most of the funding ended up 'disappearing somewhere.'" This experience greatly shaped Koontz's political outlook. In his book, "The Dean Koontz Companion", he recalled that he
"... realized that most of these programs are not meant to help anyone, merely to control people and make them dependent. I was forced to reconsider everything I'd once believed. I developed a profound distrust of government regardless of the philosophy of the people in power. I remained a liberal on civil-rights issues, became a conservative on defense, and a semi-libertarian on all other matters."
In his spare time, he wrote his first novel, "Star Quest", which was published in 1968. Koontz went on to write over a dozen science fiction novels. Seeing the Catholic faith as a contrast to the chaos in his family, Koontz converted in college because it gave him answers for his life, admiring its "intellectual rigor" and saying it permits a view of life that sees mystery and wonder in all things. He says he sees Catholicism as English writer and Catholic convert G. K. Chesterton did: that it encourages a "joy about the gift of life". Koontz says that spirituality has always been part of his books, as are grace and our struggle as fallen souls, but he "never get[s] on a soapbox".
In the 1970s, Koontz began writing suspense and horror fiction, both under his own name and several pseudonyms, sometimes publishing up to eight books a year. Koontz has stated that he began using pen names after several editors convinced him that authors who switched back and forth between different genres invariably fell victim to "negative crossover" (alienating established fans and simultaneously failing to pick up any new ones). Known pseudonyms used by Koontz during his career include Deanna Dwyer, K. R. Dwyer, Aaron Wolfe, David Axton, Brian Coffey, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Owen West, Richard Paige, and Anthony North. As Brian Coffey, he wrote the "Mike Tucker" trilogy ("Blood Risk", "Surrounded", "Wall of Masks") in acknowledged tribute to the Parker novels of Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake). Many of Koontz's pseudonymous novels are now available under his real name. Many others remain suppressed by Koontz, who bought back the rights to ensure they could not be republished; he has, on occasion, said that he might revise some for republication, but only three have appeared — "Demon Seed" and "Invasion" were both heavily rewritten before they were republished, and "Prison of Ice" had certain sections bowdlerised.
After writing full-time for more than 10 years, Koontz's acknowledged breakthrough novel was "Whispers", published in 1980. The two books before that, "The Key to Midnight" and "The Funhouse", also sold over a million copies, but were written under pen names. His first bestseller was "Demon Seed", the sales of which picked up after the release of the film of the same name in 1977, and sold over two million copies in one year. His first hardcover bestseller, which finally promised some financial stability and lifted him out of the midlist hit-and-miss range, was his book "Strangers".
Since then, 12 hardcovers and 14 paperbacks written by Koontz have reached number one on "The New York Times" Best Seller list.
Bestselling science fiction writer Brian Herbert has stated, "I even went through a phase where I read everything that Dean Koontz wrote, and in the process I learned a lot about characterization and building suspense."
In 1997, psychologist Katherine Ramsland published an extensive biography of Koontz based on interviews with his family and him. This "psychobiography" (as Ramsland called it) often showed the conception of Koontz's characters and plots from events in his own life.
Early author photos on the back of many of his novels show a balding Koontz with a mustache. After Koontz underwent hair transplantation surgery in the late 1990s, his subsequent books have featured a new, clean-shaven appearance with a fuller head of hair. Koontz explained the change by claiming that he was tired of looking like G. Gordon Liddy.
Many of his novels are set in and around Orange County, California. As of 2006, he lives there with his wife, Gerda (Cerra), in Newport Coast, California, behind the gates of Pelican Hills. In 2008, he was the world's sixth-most highly paid author, tied with John Grisham, at $25 million annually.
In 2019, Koontz began publishing with Amazon Publishing. At the time of the announcement, Koontz was one of the company's most notable signings.
One of Dean Koontz's pen names was inspired by his dog, Trixie Koontz, a Golden Retriever, shown in many of his book-jacket photos. Trixie originally was a service dog with Canine Companions for Independence (CCI), a charitable organization that provides service dogs for people with disabilities. Trixie was a gift from CCI in gratitude of Koontz's substantial donations, totaling $2.5 million between 1991 and 2004. Koontz was taken with the charity while he was researching his novel "Midnight", a book which included a CCI-trained dog, a black Labrador Retriever, named Moose.
In 2004, Koontz wrote and edited "Life Is Good: Lessons in Joyful Living" in her name, and in 2005, Koontz wrote a second book credited to Trixie, "Christmas Is Good". Both books are written from a supposed canine perspective on the joys of life. The royalty payments of the books were donated to CCI. In 2007, Trixie contracted terminal cancer that created a tumor in her heart. The Koontzes had her put to sleep outside their family home on June 30. After Trixie's death, Koontz has continued writing on his website under the name "TOTOS", standing for "Trixie on the Other Side". Trixie is widely thought to have been his inspiration for his November 2007 book, "The Darkest Evening of the Year", about a woman who runs a Golden Retriever rescue home, and who rescues a "special" dog, named Nickie, which eventually saves her life. In August 2009, Koontz published "A Big Little Life", a memoir of his life with Trixie.
In October 2008, Koontz revealed that he had adopted a new dog, Anna. Eventually, he learned that Anna was the grandniece of Trixie. Anna died on May 22, 2016. Koontz then adopted a new dog, Elsa, on July 11, 2016.
A number of letters, articles, and novels were ostensibly written by Koontz during the 1960s and 1970s, but he has stated he did not write them. These include 30 erotic novels, allegedly written together by Koontz and his wife Gerda, including books such as "Thirteen and Ready!", "Swappers Convention", and "Hung", the last one published under the name "Leonard Chris". They also include contributions to the fanzines "Energumen" and "BeABohema" in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including articles that mention the erotic novels, such as a movie column called "Way Station" in "BeABohema".
Koontz wrote in "How to Write Best Selling Fiction", a much revised and updated version of 'Writing Popular Fiction' (1972), "During my first six years as a full-time novelist {...} I wrote a lot of ephemeral stuff; anything that would pay some bills {...} I did Gothic romance novels under a pen-name {...} Like many writers, I did some pornography too, and a variety of other things, none of which required me to commit my heart or my soul to the task. (This is not to say I didn't bother to do a good job; on the contrary, I never wrote down to any market, and I always tried to give my editors and readers their money's worth.)" The Gothic novels are identifiable, but none of Koontz's acknowledged work fits into the latter category.
Koontz has stated on his Web site that he used only the ten known pen names and "there are no secret pen names used by Dean"; he adds that his own identity was stolen by "a person he had previously worked with professionally", who submitted letters and some articles to fanzines under Koontz's name between 1969 and at least the early 1970s. Koontz has stated that he was only made aware of these bogus letters and articles in 1991 in a written admission from the identity thief. He has stated that he will reveal this person's name in his memoirs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8910 |
Drake equation
The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.
The equation was written in 1961 by Frank Drake, not for purposes of quantifying the number of civilizations, but as a way to stimulate scientific dialogue at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The equation summarizes the main concepts which scientists must contemplate when considering the question of other radio-communicative life. It is more properly thought of as an approximation rather than as a serious attempt to determine a precise number.
Criticism related to the Drake equation focuses not on the equation itself, but on the fact that the estimated values for several of its factors are highly conjectural, the combined effect being that the uncertainty associated with any derived value is so large that the equation cannot be used to draw firm conclusions.
The Drake equation is:
where:
and
In September 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article in the journal "Nature" with the provocative title "Searching for Interstellar Communications". Cocconi and Morrison argued that radio telescopes had become sensitive enough to pick up transmissions that might be broadcast into space by civilizations orbiting other stars. Such messages, they suggested, might be transmitted at a wavelength of 21 cm (1,420.4 MHz). This is the wavelength of radio emission by neutral hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, and they reasoned that other intelligences might see this as a logical landmark in the radio spectrum.
Two months later, Harvard University astronomy professor Harlow Shapley speculated on the number of inhabited planets in the universe, saying "The universe has 10 million, million, million suns (10 followed by 18 zeros) similar to our own. One in a million has planets around it. Only one in a million million has the right combination of chemicals, temperature, water, days and nights to support planetary life as we know it. This calculation arrives at the estimated figure of 100 million worlds where life has been forged by evolution."
Seven months after Cocconi and Morrison published their article, Drake made the first systematic search for signals from communicative extraterrestrial civilizations. Using the 25 m dish of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank in Green Bank, West Virginia, Drake monitored two nearby Sun-like stars: Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. In this project, which he called Project Ozma, he slowly scanned frequencies close to the 21 cm wavelength for six hours per day from April to July 1960. The project was well designed, inexpensive, and simple by today's standards. It detected no signals.
Soon thereafter, Drake hosted a "search for extraterrestrial intelligence" meeting on detecting their radio signals. The meeting was held at the Green Bank facility in 1961. The equation that bears Drake's name arose out of his preparations for the meeting.
The ten attendees were conference organizer J. Peter Pearman, Frank Drake, Philip Morrison, businessman and radio amateur Dana Atchley, chemist Melvin Calvin, astronomer Su-Shu Huang, neuroscientist John C. Lilly, inventor Barney Oliver, astronomer Carl Sagan and radio-astronomer Otto Struve. These participants dubbed themselves "The Order of the Dolphin" (because of Lilly's work on dolphin communication), and commemorated their first meeting with a plaque at the observatory hall.
The Drake equation amounts to a summary of the factors affecting the likelihood that we might detect radio-communication from intelligent extraterrestrial life. The last four parameters, , , , and , are not known and are very difficult to estimate, with values ranging over many orders of magnitude (see criticism). Therefore, the usefulness of the Drake equation is not in the solving, but rather in the contemplation of all the various concepts which scientists must incorporate when considering the question of life elsewhere, and gives the question of life elsewhere a basis for scientific analysis. The Drake equation is a statement that stimulates intellectual curiosity about the universe around us, for helping us to understand that life as we know it is the end product of a natural, cosmic evolution, and for helping us realize how much we are a part of that universe. What the equation and the search for life has done is focus science on some of the other questions about life in the universe, specifically abiogenesis, the development of multi-cellular life and the development of intelligence itself.
Within the limits of our existing technology, any practical search for distant intelligent life must necessarily be a search for some manifestation of a distant technology. After about 50 years, the Drake equation is still of seminal importance because it is a 'road map' of what we need to learn in order to solve this fundamental existential question. It also formed the backbone of astrobiology as a science; although speculation is entertained to give context, astrobiology concerns itself primarily with hypotheses that fit firmly into existing scientific theories. Some 50 years of SETI have failed to find anything, even though radio telescopes, receiver techniques, and computational abilities have improved enormously since the early 1960s, but it has been discovered, at least, that our galaxy is not teeming with very powerful alien transmitters continuously broadcasting near the 21 cm hydrogen frequency. No one could say this in 1961.
There is considerable disagreement on the values of these parameters, but the 'educated guesses' used by Drake and his colleagues in 1961 were: , , [Drake, above], and years
Use of these parameters gives:
Monte Carlo simulations of estimates of the Drake equation factors based on a stellar and planetary model of the Milky Way have resulted in the number of civilizations varying by a factor of 100.
The Drake equation can be modified to determine just how unlikely intelligent life must be, to give the result that Earth has the only intelligent life that has ever arisen, either in our galaxy or the universe as a whole. This simplifies the calculation by removing the lifetime and communication constraints. Since star and planets counts are known, this leaves the only unknown as the odds that a habitable planet "ever" develops intelligent life. For Earth to have the only civilization that has ever occurred in the universe, then the odds of any habitable planet ever developing such a civilization must be less than . Similarly, for Earth to host the only civilization in our galaxy for all time, the odds of a habitable zone planet ever hosting intelligent life must be less than (about 1 in 60 billion). The figure for the universe implies that it is highly unlikely that Earth hosts the only intelligent life that has ever occurred. The figure for our galaxy suggests that other civilizations may have occurred or will likely occur in our galaxy.
As many observers have pointed out, the Drake equation is a very simple model that does not include potentially relevant parameters, and many changes and modifications to the equation have been proposed. One line of modification, for example, attempts to account for the uncertainty inherent in many of the terms.
Others note that the Drake equation ignores many concepts that might be relevant to the odds of contacting other civilizations. For example, David Brin states: "The Drake equation merely speaks of the number of sites at which ETIs spontaneously arise. The equation says nothing directly about the contact cross-section between an ETIS and contemporary human society". Because it is the contact cross-section that is of interest to the SETI community, many additional factors and modifications of the Drake equation have been proposed.
He defined the factor as "the fraction of communicative civilizations with clear and non-paranoid planetary consciousness", or alternatively expressed, the fraction of communicative civilizations that actually engage in deliberate interstellar transmission.
Seager stresses, “We’re not throwing out the Drake Equation, which is really a different topic,” explaining, “Since Drake came up with the equation, we have discovered thousands of exoplanets. We as a community have had our views revolutionized as to what could possibly be out there. And now we have a real question on our hands, one that’s not related to intelligent life: Can we detect any signs of life in any way in the very near future?”
Criticism of the Drake equation follows mostly from the observation that several terms in the equation are largely or entirely based on conjecture. Star formation rates are well-known, and the incidence of planets has a sound theoretical and observational basis, but the other terms in the equation become very speculative. The uncertainties revolve around our understanding of the evolution of life, intelligence, and civilization, not physics. No statistical estimates are possible for some of the parameters, where only one example is known. The net result is that the equation cannot be used to draw firm conclusions of any kind, and the resulting margin of error is huge, far beyond what some consider acceptable or meaningful.
One reply to such criticisms is that even though the Drake equation currently involves speculation about unmeasured parameters, it was intended as a way to stimulate dialogue on these topics. Then the focus becomes how to proceed experimentally. Indeed, Drake originally formulated the equation merely as an agenda for discussion at the Green Bank conference. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8912 |
Damascus
Damascus (; , Syrian Arabic: , ) is the capital of Syria; it is also the country's largest city, following the decline in population of Aleppo due to the battle for the city. It is colloquially known in Syria as () and titled the "City of Jasmine" ( ). Damascus is a major cultural center of the Levant and the Arab world. The city has an estimated population of 1,711,000 .
Located in south-western Syria, Damascus is the center of a large metropolitan area of 2.7 million people (2004). Geographically embedded on the eastern foothills of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range inland from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean on a plateau above sea level, Damascus experiences a semi-arid climate because of the rain shadow effect. The Barada River flows through Damascus.
First settled in the second millennium BC, it was chosen as the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate from 661 to 750. After the victory of the Abbasid dynasty, the seat of Islamic power was moved to Baghdad. Damascus saw a political decline throughout the Abbasid era, only to regain significant importance in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. Today, it is the seat of the central government and all of the government ministries. , 8 years since the start of the Syrian Civil War, Damascus has been named the world's least livable city by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The name of Damascus first appeared in the geographical list of Thutmose III as 𓍘𓄟𓊃𓈎𓅱/𓍘𓄟𓈎𓅱𓈉 "T-m-ś-q" in the 15th century BC.
The etymology of the ancient name "T-m-ś-q" is uncertain. It is attested as 𒀲𒋙 ' in Akkadian, 𓍘𓄠𓈎𓅱 ' in Egyptian, "" () in Old Aramaic and "Dammeśeq" () in Biblical Hebrew. A number of Akkadian spellings are found in the Amarna letters, from the 14th century BC: 𒁲𒈦𒋡 "Dimasqa", 𒁲𒈦𒀸𒄀 "Dimàsqì", and 𒁲𒈦𒀸𒋡 "Dimàsqa".
Later Aramaic spellings of the name often include an intrusive "resh" (letter "r"), perhaps influenced by the root "dr", meaning "dwelling". Thus, the English and Latin name of the city is "Damascus" which was imported from (Greek: ) originated from "the Qumranic "Darmeśeq" (), and "Darmsûq" () in Syriac", meaning "a well-watered land".
In Arabic, the city is called ' (), although this is often shortened to either "Dimašq" or "aš-Šām" by the citizens of Damascus, of Syria and other Arab neighbors and Turkey (as "Şam"). ' is an Arabic term for "Levant" and for "Syria"; the latter, and particularly the historical region of Syria, is called ' ( / "land of the Levant"). The latter term etymologically means "land of the left-hand side" or "the north", as someone in the Hijaz facing east, oriented to the sunrise, will find the north to the left. This is contrasted with the name of Yemen ( ), correspondingly meaning "the right-hand side" or "the south". The variation ('), of the more typical (")", is also attested in Old South Arabian, (), with the same semantic development.
Damascus was built in a strategic site on a plateau above sea level and about inland from the Mediterranean, sheltered by the Anti-Lebanon mountains, supplied with water by the Barada River, and at a crossroads between trade routes: the north–south route connecting Egypt with Asia Minor, and the east–west cross-desert route connecting Lebanon with the Euphrates river valley. The Anti-Lebanon mountains mark the border between Syria and Lebanon. The range has peaks of over 10,000 ft. and blocks precipitation from the Mediterranean sea, so that the region of Damascus is sometimes subject to droughts. However, in ancient times this was mitigated by the Barada River, which originates from mountain streams fed by melting snow. Damascus is surrounded by the Ghouta, irrigated farmland where many vegetables, cereals and fruits have been farmed since ancient times. Maps of Roman Syria indicate that the Barada river emptied into a lake of some size east of Damascus. Today it is called Bahira Atayba, the hesitant lake, because in years of severe drought it does not even exist.
The modern city has an area of , out of which is urban, while Jabal Qasioun occupies the rest.
The old city of Damascus, enclosed by the city walls, lies on the south bank of the river Barada which is almost dry ( left). To the south-east, north and north-east it is surrounded by suburban areas whose history stretches back to the Middle Ages: Midan in the south-west, Sarouja and Imara in the north and north-west. These neighborhoods originally arose on roads leading out of the city, near the tombs of religious figures. In the 19th century outlying villages developed on the slopes of Jabal Qasioun, overlooking the city, already the site of the al-Salihiyah neighborhood centered on the important shrine of medieval Andalusian Sheikh and philosopher Ibn Arabi. These new neighborhoods were initially settled by Kurdish soldiery and Muslim refugees from the European regions of the Ottoman Empire which had fallen under Christian rule. Thus they were known as "al-Akrad" "(the Kurds)" and "al-Muhajirin" "(the migrants)". They lay north of the old city.
From the late 19th century on, a modern administrative and commercial center began to spring up to the west of the old city, around the Barada, centered on the area known as "al-Marjeh" or "the meadow". "Al-Marjeh" soon became the name of what was initially the central square of modern Damascus, with the city hall in it. The courts of justice, post office and railway station stood on higher ground slightly to the south. A Europeanized residential quarter soon began to be built on the road leading between al-Marjeh and al-Salihiyah. The commercial and administrative center of the new city gradually shifted northwards slightly towards this area.
In the 20th century, newer suburbs developed north of the Barada, and to some extent to the south, invading the Ghouta oasis. In 1956–1957 the new neighborhood of Yarmouk became a second home to thousands of Palestinian refugees. City planners preferred to preserve the Ghouta as far as possible, and in the later 20th century some of the main areas of development were to the north, in the western Mezzeh neighborhood and most recently along the Barada valley in Dummar in the north west and on the slopes of the mountains at Berze in the north-east. Poorer areas, often built without official approval, have mostly developed south of the main city.
Damascus used to be surrounded by an oasis, the Ghouta region (الغوطة "al-ġūṭä"), watered by the Barada river. The Fijeh spring, west along the Barada valley, used to provide the city with drinking water and various sources to the west are tapped by water contractors. The flow of the Barada has reduced with the rapid expansion of housing and industry in the city and it is almost dry. The lower aquifers are polluted by city's runoff from heavily used roads, industry and sewage.
Damascus has a cold desert climate ("BWk") in the Köppen-Geiger system, due to the rain shadow effect of the Anti-Lebanon mountains and the prevailing ocean currents. Summers are dry and hot with less humidity. Winters are cool and somewhat rainy; snowfall is infrequent. Annual rainfall is around , occurring from October to May.
Carbon-14 dating at Tell Ramad, on the outskirts of Damascus, suggests that the site may have been occupied since the second half of the seventh millennium BC, possibly around 6300 BC. However, evidence of settlement in the wider Barada basin dating back to 9000 BC exists, although no large-scale settlement was present within Damascus walls until the second millennium BC.
Some of the earliest Egyptian records are from the 1350 BC Amarna letters, when Damascus (called "Dimasqu") was ruled by king Biryawaza. The Damascus region, as well as the rest of Syria, became a battleground circa 1260 BC, between the Hittites from the north and the Egyptians from the south, ending with a signed treaty between Hattusili and Ramesses II where the former handed over control of the Damascus area to Ramesses II in 1259 BC. The arrival of the Sea Peoples, around 1200 BC, marked the end of the Bronze Age in the region and brought about new development of warfare. Damascus was only a peripheral part of this picture, which mostly affected the larger population centers of ancient Syria. However, these events contributed to the development of Damascus as a new influential center that emerged with the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.
Damascus is mentioned in Genesis 14:15 as existing at the time of the War of the Kings. According to the 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his twenty-one volume "Antiquities of the Jews", Damascus (along with Trachonitis), was founded by Uz, the son of Aram. In Antiquities i. 7, Josephus reports:
Nicolaus of Damascus, in the fourth book of his History, says thus: "Abraham reigned at Damascus, being a foreigner, who came with an army out of the land above Babylon, called the land of the Chaldeans: but, after a long time, he got him up, and removed from that country also, with his people, and went into the land then called the land of Canaan, but now the land of Judea, and this when his posterity were become a multitude; as to which posterity of his, we relate their history in another work. Now the name of Abraham is even still famous in the country of Damascus; and there is shown a village named from him, The Habitation of Abraham.
Damascus is first documented as an important city during the arrival of the Aramaeans, a Semitic people, in the 11th century BC. By the start of the first millennium BC, several Aramaic kingdoms were formed, as Aramaeans abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and formed federated tribal states. One of these kingdoms was Aram-Damascus, centered on its capital Damascus. The Aramaeans who entered the city without battle, adopted the name "Dimashqu" for their new home. Noticing the agricultural potential of the still-undeveloped and sparsely populated area, they established the water distribution system of Damascus by constructing canals and tunnels which maximized the efficiency of the river Barada. The same network was later improved by the Romans and the Umayyads, and still forms the basis of the water system of the old part of the city today. The Aramaeans initially turned Damascus into an outpost of a loose federation of Aramaean tribes, known as Aram-Zobah, based in the Beqaa Valley.
The city would gain pre-eminence in southern Syria when Ezron, the claimant to Aram-Zobah's throne who was denied kingship of the federation, fled Beqaa and captured Damascus by force in 965 BC. Ezron overthrew the city's tribal governor and founded the independent entity of Aram-Damascus. As this new state expanded south, it prevented the Kingdom of Israel from spreading north and the two kingdoms soon clashed as they both sought to dominate trading hegemony in the east. Under Ezron's grandson, Ben-Hadad I (880–841 BC), and his successor Hazael, Damascus annexed Bashan (modern-day Hauran region), and went on the offensive with Israel. This conflict continued until the early 8th century BC when Ben-Hadad II was captured by Israel after unsuccessfully besieging Samaria. As a result, he granted Israel trading rights in Damascus.
Another possible reason for the treaty between Aram-Damascus and Israel was the common threat of the Neo-Assyrian Empire which was attempting to expand into the Mediterranean coast. In 853 BC, King Hadadezer of Damascus led a Levantine coalition, that included forces from the northern Aram-Hamath kingdom and troops supplied by King Ahab of Israel, in the Battle of Qarqar against the Neo-Assyrian army. Aram-Damascus came out victorious, temporarily preventing the Assyrians from encroaching into Syria. However, after Hadadzezer was killed by his successor, Hazael, the Levantine alliance collapsed. Aram-Damascus attempted to invade Israel, but was interrupted by the renewed Assyrian invasion. Hazael ordered a retreat to the walled part of Damascus while the Assyrians plundered the remainder of the kingdom. Unable to enter the city, they declared their supremacy in the Hauran and Beqa'a valleys.
By the 8th century BC, Damascus was practically engulfed by the Assyrians and entered a Dark Age. Nonetheless, it remained the economic and cultural center of the Near East as well as the Arameaen resistance. In 727, a revolt took place in the city, but was put down by Assyrian forces. After Assyria led by Tiglath-Pileser III went on a wide-scale campaign of quelling revolts throughout Syria, Damascus became totally subjugated by their rule. A positive effect of this was stability for the city and benefits from the spice and incense trade with Arabia. However, Assyrian authority was dwindling by 609–605 BC, and Syria-Palestine was falling into the orbit of Pharaoh Necho II's Egypt. In 572 BC, all of Syria had been conquered by the Neo-Babylonians, but the status of Damascus under Babylon is relatively unknown.
Damascus was conquered by Alexander the Great. After the death of Alexander in 323 BC, Damascus became the site of a struggle between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. The control of the city passed frequently from one empire to the other. Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander's generals, made Antioch the capital of his vast empire, which led to the decline of Damascus' importance compared with new Seleucid cities such as Latakia in the north. Later, Demetrius III Philopator rebuilt the city according to the Greek hippodamian system and renamed it "Demetrias".
In 64 BC, the Roman general Pompey annexed the western part of Syria. The Romans occupied Damascus and subsequently incorporated it into the league of ten cities known as the Decapolis which themselves were incorporated into the province of Syria and granted autonomy.
The city of Damascus was entirely redesigned by the Romans after Pompey conquered the region. Still today the Old Town of Damascus retains the rectangular shape of the Roman city, with its two main axes: the Decumanus Maximus (east-west; known today as the "Via Recta") and the Cardo (north-south), the Decumanus being about twice as long. The Romans built a monumental gate which still survives at the eastern end of Decumanus Maximus. The gate originally had three arches: the central arch was for chariots while the side arches were for pedestrians.
In 23 BC Herod the Great was gifted lands controlled by Zenodorus by Caesar Augustus and some scholars believe that Herod was also granted control of Damascus as well. The control of Damascus reverted to Syria either upon the death of Herod the Great or was part of the lands given to Herod Philip which were given to Syria with his death in 33/34 AD.
It is speculated that control of Damascus was gained by Aretas IV Philopatris of Nabatea between the death of Herod Philip in 33/34 AD and the death of Aretas in 40 AD but there is substantial evidence against Aretas controlling the city before 37 AD and many reasons why it could not have been a gift from Caligula between 37 and 40 AD. In fact, all these theories stem not from any actual evidence outside the New Testament but rather "a certain understanding of " and in reality "neither from archaeological evidence, secular-historical sources, nor New Testament texts can Nabatean sovereignty over Damascus in the first century AD be proven."
Damascus became a metropolis by the beginning of the 2nd century and in 222 it was upgraded to a "colonia" by the Emperor Septimius Severus. During the "Pax Romana", Damascus and the Roman province of Syria in general began to prosper. Damascus's importance as a caravan city was evident with the trade routes from southern Arabia, Palmyra, Petra, and the silk routes from China all converging on it. The city satisfied the Roman demands for eastern luxuries. Circa 125 AD the Roman emperor Hadrian promoted the city of Damascus to "Metropolis of Coele-Syria".
Little remains of the architecture of the Romans, but the town planning of the old city did have a lasting effect. The Roman architects brought together the Greek and Aramaean foundations of the city and fused them into a new layout measuring approximately , surrounded by a city wall. The city wall contained seven gates, but only the eastern gate, Bab Sharqi, remains from the Roman period. Roman Damascus lies mostly at depths of up to five meters (16.4 ft) below the modern city.
The old borough of Bab Tuma was developed at the end of the Roman/Byzantine era by the local Eastern Orthodox community. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul and Saint Thomas both lived in that neighborhood. Roman Catholic historians also consider Bab Tuma to be the birthplace of several Popes such as John V and Gregory III. Accordingly, there was a community of Jewish Christians who converted to Christianity with the advent of Saint Paul's proselytisation.
Muhammad's first indirect interaction with the people of Damascus was when he sent Shiya bin Wahab to Haris bin Ghasanni, the king of Damascus. In his letter, Muhammad stated: "Peace be upon him who follows true guidance. Be informed that my religion shall prevail everywhere. You should accept Islam, and whatever under your command shall remain yours."
After most of the Syrian countryside was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate during the reign of Caliph Umar, Damascus itself was conquered by the Muslim-Arab general Khalid ibn al-Walid in August - September 634 AD. His army had previously attempted to capture the city in April 634, but without success. With Damascus now in Muslim-Arab hands, the Byzantines, alarmed at the loss of their most prestigious city in the Near East, had decided to wrest back control of it. Under Emperor Heraclius, the Byzantines fielded an army superior to that of the Rashidun in manpower. They advanced into southern Syria during the spring of 636 and consequently Khalid ibn al-Walid's forces withdrew from Damascus to prepare for renewed confrontation. In August, the two sides met along the Yarmouk River where they a fought a major battle which ended in a decisive Muslim victory, solidifying Muslim rule in Syria and Palestine.
While the Muslims administered the city, the population of Damascus remained mostly Christian—Eastern Orthodox and Monophysite—with a growing community of Muslims from Mecca, Medina, and the Syrian Desert. The governor assigned to the city which had been chosen as the capital of Islamic Syria was Mu'awiya I. After the death of Caliph Ali in 661, Mu'awiya was chosen as the caliph of the expanding Islamic empire. Because of the vast amounts of assets his clan, the Umayyads, owned in the city and because of its traditional economic and social links with the Hijaz as well as the Christian Arab tribes of the region, Mu'awiya established Damascus as the capital of the entire Caliphate. With the ascension of Caliph Abd al-Malik in 685, an Islamic coinage system was introduced and all of the surplus revenue of the Caliphate's provinces were forwarded to the treasury of Damascus. Arabic was also established as the official language, giving the Muslim minority of the city an advantage over the Aramaic-speaking Christians in administrative affairs. It is critical to note that, at the time Damascus was conquered by the Muslims, the majority of Arabs were either pagans or Christians. Damascus itself was predominantly Aramaic with Arab speaking people.
Abd al-Malik's successor, al-Walid initiated construction of the Grand Mosque of Damascus (known as the Umayyad Mosque) in 706. The site originally had been the Christian Cathedral of St. John and the Muslims maintained the building's dedication to John the Baptist. By 715, the mosque was complete. Al-Walid died that same year and he was succeeded at first by Suleiman ibn Abd al-Malik and then by Umar II, who each ruled for brief periods before the reign of Hisham in 724. With these successions, the status of Damascus was gradually weakening as Suleiman had chosen Ramla as his residence and later Hisham chose Resafa. Following the murder of the latter in 743, the Caliphate of the Umayyads—which by then stretched from Spain to India— was crumbling as a result of widespread revolts. During the reign of Marwan II in 744, the capital of the empire was relocated to Harran in the northern Jazira region.
On 25 August 750, the Abbasids, having already beaten the Umayyads in the Battle of the Zab in Iraq, conquered Damascus after facing little resistance. With the heralding of the Abbasid Caliphate, Damascus became eclipsed and subordinated by Baghdad, the new Islamic capital. Within the first six months of Abbasid rule, revolts began erupting in the city, albeit too isolated and unfocused to present a viable threat. Nonetheless, the last of the prominent Umayyads were executed, the traditional officials of Damascus ostracised, and army generals from the city were dismissed. Afterwards, the Umayyad family cemetery was desecrated and the city walls were torn down, reducing Damascus into a provincial town of little importance. It roughly disappeared from written records for the next century and the only significant improvement of the city was the Abbasid-built treasury dome in the Umayyad Mosque in 789. In 811, distant remnants of the Umayyad dynasty staged a strong uprising in Damascus that was eventually put down.
Ahmad ibn Tulun, a dissenting Turkish governor appointed by the Abbasids, conquered Syria, including Damascus, from his overlords in 878–79. In an act of respect for the previous Umayyad rulers, he erected a shrine on the site of Mu'awiya's grave in the city. Tulunid rule of Damascus was brief, lasting only until 906 before being replaced by the Qarmatians who were adherents of Shia Islam. Due to their inability to control the vast amount of land they occupied, the Qarmatians withdrew from Damascus and a new dynasty, the Ikhshidids, took control of the city. They maintained the independence of Damascus from the Arab Hamdanid dynasty of Aleppo and the Baghdad-based Abbasids until 967. A period of instability in the city followed, with a Qarmatian raid in 968, a Byzantine raid in 970, and increasing pressures from the Fatimids in the south and the Hamdanids in the north.
The Shia Fatimids gained control in 970, inflaming hostilities between them and the Sunni Arabs of the city who frequently revolted. A Turk, Alptakin drove out the Fatimids five years later, and through diplomacy, prevented the Byzantines from attempting to annex the city. However, by 977, the Fatimids under Caliph al-Aziz, wrested back control of the city and tamed Sunni dissidents. The Arab geographer, al-Muqaddasi, visited Damascus in 985, remarking that the architecture and infrastructure of the city was "magnificent", but living conditions were awful. Under al-Aziz, the city saw a brief period of stability that ended with the reign of al-Hakim (996–1021). In 998, hundreds of Damascus' citizens were rounded up and executed by him for incitement. Three years after al-Hakim's mysterious disappearance, the Arab tribes of southern Syria formed an alliance to stage a massive rebellion against the Fatimids, but they were crushed by the Fatimid Turkish governor of Syria and Palestine, Anushtakin al-Duzbari, in 1029. This victory gave the latter mastery over Syria, displeasing his Fatimid overlords, but gaining the admiration of Damascus' citizens. He was exiled by Fatimid authorities to Aleppo where he died in 1041. From that date to 1063, there are no known records of the city's history. By then, Damascus lacked a city administration, had an enfeebled economy, and a greatly reduced population.
With the arrival of the Seljuq Turks in the late 11th century, Damascus again became the capital of independent states. It was ruled by Abu Sa'id Taj ad-Dawla Tutush I starting in 1079 and he was succeeded by his son Abu Nasr Duqaq in 1095. The Seljuqs established a court in Damascus and a systematic reversal of Shia inroads in the city. The city also saw an expansion of religious life through private endowments financing religious institutions ("madrasas") and hospitals ("maristans"). Damascus soon became one of the most important centers of propagating Islamic thought in the Muslim world. After Duqaq's death in 1104, his mentor ("atabeg"), Toghtekin, took control of Damascus and the Burid line of the Seljuq dynasty. Under Duqaq and Toghtekin, Damascus experienced stability, elevated status and a revived role in commerce. In addition, the city's Sunni majority enjoyed being a part of the larger Sunni framework effectively governed by various Turkic dynasties who in turn were under the moral authority of the Baghdad-based Abbasids.
While the rulers of Damascus were preoccupied in conflict with their fellow Seljuqs in Aleppo and Diyarbakir, the Crusaders, who arrived in the Levant in 1097, conquered Jerusalem, Mount Lebanon and Palestine. Duqaq seemed to have been content with Crusader rule as a buffer between his dominion and the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt. Toghtekin, however, saw the Western invaders as a viable threat to Damascus which, at the time, nominally included Homs, the Beqaa Valley, Hauran, and the Golan Heights as part of its territories. With military support from Sharaf al-Din Mawdud of Mosul, Toghtekin managed to halt Crusader raids in the Golan and Hauran. Mawdud was assassinated in the Umayyad Mosque in 1109, depriving Damascus of northern Muslim backing and forcing Toghtekin to agree to a truce with the Crusaders in 1110.
Following Tughtakin's death in 1128, his son, Taj al-Din Buri, became the nominal ruler of Damascus. Coincidentally, the Seljuq prince of Mosul, Imad al-Din Zengi, took power in Aleppo and gained a mandate from the Abbasids to extend his authority to Damascus. In 1129, around 6,000 Isma'ili Muslims were killed in the city along with their leaders. The Sunnis were provoked by rumors alleging there was a plot by the Isma'ilis, who controlled the strategic fort at Banias, to aid the Crusaders in capturing Damascus in return for control of Tyre. Soon after the massacre, the Crusaders aimed to take advantage of the unstable situation and launch an assault against Damascus with nearly 60,000 troops. However, Buri allied with Zengi and managed to prevent their army from reaching the city. Buri was assassinated by Isma'ili agents in 1132; he was succeeded by his son, Shams al-Mulk Isma'il who ruled tyrannically until he himself was murdered in 1135 on secret orders from his mother, Safwat al-Mulk Zumurrud; Isma'il's brother, Shihab al-Din Mahmud, replaced him. Meanwhile, Zengi, intent on putting Damascus under his control, married Safwat al-Mulk in 1138. Mahmud's reign then ended in 1139 after he was killed for relatively unknown reasons by members of his family. Mu'in al-Din Unur, his "mamluk" ("slave soldier") took effective power of the city, prompting Zengi—with Safwat al-Mulk's backing—to lay siege against Damascus the same year. In response, Damascus allied with the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem to resist Zengi's forces. Consequently, Zengi withdrew his army and focused on campaigns against northern Syria.
In 1144, Zengi conquered Edessa, a crusader stronghold, which led to a new crusade from Europe in 1148. In the meantime Zengi was assassinated and his territory was divided among his sons, one of whom, Nur ad-Din, emir of Aleppo, made an alliance with Damascus. When the European crusaders arrived, they and the nobles of Jerusalem agreed to attack Damascus. Their siege, however, was a complete failure. When the city seemed to be on the verge of collapse, the crusader army suddenly moved against another section of the walls, and were driven back. By 1154, Damascus was firmly under Nur ad-Din's control.
In 1164, King Amalric of Jerusalem invaded Fatimid Egypt, which requested help from Nur ad-Din. The Nur ad-Din sent his general Shirkuh, and in 1166 Amalric was defeated at the Battle of al-Babein. When Shirkuh died in 1169, he was succeeded by his nephew Yusuf, better known as Saladin, who defeated a joint crusader-Byzantine siege of Damietta. Saladin eventually overthrew the Fatimid caliphs and established himself as Sultan of Egypt. He also began to assert his independence from Nur ad-Din, and with the death of both Amalric and Nur ad-Din in 1174, he was well-placed to begin exerting control over Damascus and Nur ad-Din's other Syrian possessions. In 1177 Saladin was defeated by the crusaders at the Battle of Montgisard, despite his numerical superiority. Saladin also besieged Kerak in 1183, but was forced to withdraw. He finally launched a full invasion of Jerusalem in 1187, and annihilated the crusader army at the Battle of Hattin in July. Acre fell to Saladin soon after, and Jerusalem itself was captured in October. These events shocked Europe, resulting in the Third Crusade in 1189, led by Richard I of England, Philip II of France and Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, though the last drowned en route.
The surviving crusaders, joined by new arrivals from Europe, put Acre to a lengthy siege which lasted until 1191. After re-capturing Acre, Richard defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf in 1191 and the Battle of Jaffa in 1192, recovering most of the coast for the Christians, but could not recover Jerusalem or any of the inland territory of the kingdom. The crusade came to an end peacefully, with the Treaty of Jaffa in 1192. Saladin allowed pilgrimages to be made to Jerusalem, allowing the crusaders to fulfil their vows, after which they all returned home. Local crusader barons set about rebuilding their kingdom from Acre and the other coastal cities.
Saladin died in 1193, and there were frequent conflicts between different Ayyubid sultans ruling in Damascus and Cairo. Damascus was the capital of independent Ayyubid rulers between 1193 and 1201, from 1218 to 1238, from 1239 to 1245, and from 1250 to 1260. At other times it was ruled by the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt. During the internecine wars fought by the Ayyubid rulers, Damascus was besieged repeatedly.
The patterned Byzantine and Chinese silks available through Damascus, one of the Western termini of the Silk Road, gave the English language "damask".
Ayyubid rule (and independence) came to an end with the Mongol invasion of Syria in 1260, and following the Mongol defeat at Ain Jalut in the same year, Damascus became a provincial capital of the Mamluk Empire, ruled from Egypt, following the Mongol withdrawal. The Black Death of 1348–1349 killed as much as half of the city's population.
In 1400, Timur, the Turco-Mongol conqueror, besieged Damascus. The Mamluk sultan dispatched a deputation from Cairo, including Ibn Khaldun, who negotiated with him, but after their withdrawal Timur sacked the city. The Umayyad Mosque was burnt and men and women taken into slavery. A huge number of the city's artisans were taken to Timur's capital at Samarkand. These were the luckier citizens: many were slaughtered and their heads piled up in a field outside the north-east corner of the walls, where a city square still bears the name "burj al-ru'us", originally "the tower of heads".
Rebuilt, Damascus continued to serve as a Mamluk provincial capital until 1516.
In early 1516, the Ottoman Turks, wary of the danger of an alliance between the Mamluks and the Persian Safavids, started a campaign of conquest against the Mamluk sultanate. On 21 September, the Mamluk governor of Damascus fled the city, and on 2 October the khutba in the Umayyad mosque was pronounced in the name of Selim I. The day after, the victorious sultan entered the city, staying for three months. On 15 December, he left Damascus by Bab al-Jabiya, intent on the conquest of Egypt. Little appeared to have changed in the city: one army had simply replaced another. However, on his return in October 1517, the sultan ordered the construction of a mosque, tekkiye and mausoleum at the shrine of Shaikh Muhi al-Din ibn Arabi in al-Salihiyah. This was to be the first of Damascus' great Ottoman monuments.
During this time, according to an Ottoman census, Damascus had 10,423 households.
The Ottomans remained for the next 400 years, except for a brief occupation by Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt from 1832 to 1840. Because of its importance as the point of departure for one of the two great Hajj caravans to Mecca, Damascus was treated with more attention by the Porte than its size might have warranted—for most of this period, Aleppo was more populous and commercially more important. In 1560 the Tekkiye al-Sulaimaniyah, a mosque and khan for pilgrims on the road to Mecca, was completed to a design by the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, and soon afterwards a madrasa was built adjoining it.
Under Ottoman rule, Christians and Jews were considered dhimmis and were allowed to practice their religious precepts. During the Damascus affair of 1840 the false accusation of ritual murder was brought against members of the Jewish community of Damascus. The massacre of Christians in 1860 was also one of the most notorious incidents of these centuries, when fighting between Druze and Maronites in Mount Lebanon spilled over into the city. Several thousand Christians were killed in June 1860, with many more being saved through the intervention of the Algerian exile Abd al-Qadir and his soldiers (three days after the massacre started), who brought them to safety in Abd al-Qadir's residence and the citadel. The Christian quarter of the old city (mostly inhabited by Catholics), including a number of churches, was burnt down. The Christian inhabitants of the notoriously poor and refractory Midan district outside the walls (mostly Orthodox) were, however, protected by their Muslim neighbors.
American Missionary E.C. Miller records that in 1867 the population of the city was 'about' 140,000, of whom 30,000 were Christians, 10,000 Jews and 100,000 'Mohammedans' with fewer than 100 Protestant Christians.
In the early years of the 20th century, nationalist sentiment in Damascus, initially cultural in its interest, began to take a political coloring, largely in reaction to the turkicisation program of the Committee of Union and Progress government established in Istanbul in 1908. The hanging of a number of patriotic intellectuals by Jamal Pasha, governor of Damascus, in Beirut and Damascus in 1915 and 1916 further stoked nationalist feeling, and in 1918, as the forces of the Arab Revolt and the British Imperial forces approached, residents fired on the retreating Turkish troops.
On 1 October 1918, T. E. Lawrence entered Damascus, the third arrival of the day, the first being the Australian 3rd Light Horse Brigade, led by Major A.C.N. 'Harry' Olden. Two days later, 3 October 1918, the forces of the Arab revolt led by Prince Faysal also entered Damascus. A military government under Shukri Pasha was named and Faisal ibn Hussein was proclaimed king of Syria. Political tension rose in November 1917, when the new Bolshevik government in Russia revealed the Sykes-Picot Agreement whereby Britain and France had arranged to partition the Arab east between them. A new Franco-British proclamation on 17 November promised the "complete and definitive freeing of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks." The Syrian National Congress in March adopted a democratic constitution. However, the Versailles Conference had granted France a mandate over Syria, and in 1920 a French army commanded by the General Mariano Goybet crossed the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, defeated a small Syrian defensive expedition at the Battle of Maysalun and entered Damascus. The French made Damascus capital of their League of Nations Mandate for Syria.
When in 1925 the Great Syrian Revolt in the Hauran spread to Damascus, the French suppressed with heavy weaponry, bombing and shelling the city on 9 May 1926. As a result, the area of the old city between Al-Hamidiyah Souq and Medhat Pasha Souq was burned to the ground, with many deaths, and has since then been known as "al-Hariqa" ("the fire"). The old city was surrounded with barbed wire to prevent rebels infiltrating from the Ghouta, and a new road was built outside the northern ramparts to facilitate the movement of armored cars.
On 21 June 1941, 3 weeks into the Allied Syria-Lebanon campaign, Damascus was captured from the Vichy French forces by a mixed British Indian and Free French force. The French agreed to withdraw in 1946, thus leading to the full independence of Syria. Damascus remained the capital.
By January 2012, clashes between the regular army and rebels reached the outskirts of Damascus, reportedly preventing people from leaving or reaching their houses, especially when security operations there intensified from the end of January into February.
By June 2012, bullets and shrapnel shells smashed into homes in Damascus overnight as troops battled the Free Syrian Army in the streets. At least three tank shells slammed into residential areas in the central Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun, according to activists. Intense exchanges of assault-rifle fire marked the clash, according to residents and amateur video posted online.
The Damascus suburb of Ghouta suffered heavy bombing in December 2017 and a further wave of bombing started in February 2018, also known as Rif Dimashq Offensive.
On 20 May 2018, Damascus and the entire Rif Dimashq Governorate came fully under government control for the first time in 7 years after the evacuation of IS from Yarmouk Camp.
The historical role that Damascus played as an important trade center has changed in recent years due to political development in the region as well as the development of modern trade. Most goods produced in Damascus, as well as in Syria, are distributed to countries of the Arabian peninsula. Damascus has also held an annual international trade exposition every fall, since 1954.
The tourism industry in Damascus has a lot of potential, however the current civil war has hampered these prospects. The abundance of cultural wealth in Damascus has been modestly employed since the late 1980s with the development of many accommodation and transportation establishments and other related investments. Since the early 2000s, numerous boutique hotels and bustling cafes opened in the old city which attract plenty of European tourists and Damascenes alike.
In 2009 new office space was built and became available on the real estate market. The real-estate sector is stopped due to the terrorism and exodus of the population.
Damascus is home to a wide range of industrial activity, such as textile, food processing, cement and various chemical industries. The majority of factories are run by the state, however limited privatization in addition to economic activities led by the private sector, were permitted starting in the early 2000s with the liberalization of trade that took place.
Traditional handcrafts and artisan copper engravings are still produced in the old city.
The Damascus stock exchange formally opened for trade in March 2009, and the exchange is the only stock exchange in Syria. It is currently located in the Barzeh district, within Syria's financial markets and securities commission. Its final home is to be the upmarket business district of Yaafur.
The estimated population of Damascus in 2011 was 1,711,000. Damascus is the center of an over-crowded metropolitan area with an estimated population of 5 million. The metropolitan area of Damascus includes the cities of Douma, Harasta, Darayya, Al-Tall and Jaramana.
The city's growth rate is higher than Syria as a whole, primarily due to rural-urban migration and the influx of young Syrian migrants drawn by employment and educational opportunities. The migration of Syrian youths to Damascus has resulted in an average age within the city that is below the national average. Nonetheless, the population of Damascus is thought to have decreased in recent years as a result of the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
The vast majority of Damascenes are Syrian Arabs. The Kurds are the largest ethnic minority, with a population of approximately 300,000. They reside primarily in the neighborhoods of Wadi al-Mashari ("Zorava" or "Zore Afa" in Kurdish) and Rukn al-Din. Other minorities include Syrian Turkmen, Armenians, Assyrians, Circassians and a small Greek community.
Among the city's minorities is a small Palestinian community.
Islam is the dominant religion. The majority of Muslims are Sunni while Alawites and Twelver Shi'a comprise sizeable minorities. Alawites live primarily in the Mezzeh districts of Mezzeh 86 and Sumariyah. Twelvers primarily live near the Shia holy sites of Sayyidah Ruqayya and Sayyidah Zaynab. It is believed that there are more than 200 mosques in Damascus, the most well-known being the Umayyad Mosque. Christians represent about 15%–20% of the population. Several Eastern Christian rites
have their headquarters in Damascus, including the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, and the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch. The Christian districts in the city are Bab Tuma, Qassaa and Ghassani. Each have many churches, most notably the ancient Chapel of Saint Paul and St Georges Cathedral in Bab Tuma. At the suburb of Soufanieh a series of apparitions of the Virgin Mary have reportedly been observed between 1982 and 2004. A smaller Druze minority inhabits the city, notably in the mixed Christian-Druze suburbs of Tadamon, Jaramana, and Sahnaya. The Patriarchal See of the Syriac Orthodox is based in Damascus, Bab Toma. This church is independent of the Middle Eastern-based Syriac Orthodox Church in Damascus and has its own leadership and structure in India, although both practice the same or similar denomination of Christianity. There are 700,000 members of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch in Syria, who are the bulk of the Christian population alongside 400,000 Assyrians/Syriacs and 30-100,000 Armenians and 350,000 Catholics.
There was a small Jewish community namely in what is called "Haret al-Yahud" the Jewish quarter. They are the remnants of an ancient and much larger Jewish presence in Syria, dating back at least to Roman times, if not before to the time of King David.
Sufism throughout the second half of the 20th century has been an influential current in the Sunni religious practises, particularly in Damascus. The largest women-only and girls-only Muslim movement in the world happens to be Sufi-oriented and is based in Damascus, led by Munira al-Qubaysi. Syrian Sufism has its stronghold in urban regions such as Damascus, where it also established political movements such as Zayd, with the help of a series of mosques, and clergy such as Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, Sa'id Hawwa, Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri and Muhammad al-Yaqoubi.
Damascus has a wealth of historical sites dating back to many different periods of the city's history. Since the city has been built up with every passing occupation, it has become almost impossible to excavate all the ruins of Damascus that lie up to below the modern level. The Citadel of Damascus is in the northwest corner of the Old City. The "Damascus Straight Street" (referred to in the account of the conversion of St. Paul in Acts 9:11), also known as the "Via Recta", was the decumanus (east–west main street) of Roman Damascus, and extended for over . Today, it consists of the street of Bab Sharqi and the Souk Medhat Pasha, a covered market. The Bab Sharqi street is filled with small shops and leads to the old Christian quarter of Bab Tuma (St. Thomas's Gate). Medhat Pasha Souq is also a main market in Damascus and was named after Midhat Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Syria who renovated the Souk. At the end of the Bab Sharqi street, one reaches the House of Ananias, an underground chapel that was the cellar of Ananias's house. The Umayyad Mosque, also known as the Grand Mosque of Damascus, is one of the largest mosques in the world and also one of the oldest sites of continuous prayer since the rise of Islam. A shrine in the mosque is said to contain the body of St. John the Baptist. The mausoleum where Saladin was buried is located in the gardens just outside the mosque. Sayyidah Ruqayya Mosque, the shrine of the youngest daughter of Husayn ibn Ali, can also be found near the Umayyad Mosque. The ancient district of Amara is also within a walking distance from these sites. Another heavily visited site is Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque, where the tomb of Zaynab bint Ali is located.
Shias, Fatemids and Dawoodi Bohras believe that after the battle of Karbala (680 AD), in Iraq, the Umayyad Caliph Yezid brought Imam Husain's head to Damascus, where it was first kept in the courtyard of Yezid Mahal, now part of Umayyad Mosque complex. All other remaining members of Imam Husain's family (left alive after Karbala) along with heads of all other companions, who were killed at Karbala, were also brought to Damascus. These members were kept as prisoners on the outskirts of the city (near Bab al-Saghir), where the other heads were kept at the same location, now called Ru’ûs ash-Shuhadâ-e-Karbala or ganj-e-sarha-e-shuhada-e-Karbala. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8914 |
Diplomatic immunity
Diplomatic immunity is a form of legal immunity that ensures diplomats are given safe passage and are considered not susceptible to lawsuit or prosecution under the host country's laws, although they may still be expelled. Modern diplomatic immunity was codified as international law in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) which has been ratified by all but a handful of nations. The concept and custom of diplomatic immunity dates back thousands of years. Many principles of diplomatic immunity are now considered to be customary law. Diplomatic immunity was developed to allow for the maintenance of government relations, including during periods of difficulties and armed conflict. When receiving diplomats, who formally represent the sovereign, the receiving head of state grants certain privileges and immunities to ensure they may effectively carry out their duties, on the understanding that these are provided on a reciprocal basis.
Originally, these privileges and immunities were granted on a bilateral, ad hoc basis, which led to misunderstandings and conflict, pressure on weaker states, and an inability for other states to judge which party was at fault. An international agreement known as the Vienna Convention codified the rules and agreements, providing standards and privileges to all states.
It is possible for the official's home country to waive immunity; this tends to happen only when the individual has committed a serious crime, unconnected with their diplomatic role (as opposed to, for example, allegations of spying), or has witnessed such a crime. However, many countries refuse to waive immunity as a matter of course; individuals have no authority to waive their own immunity (except perhaps in cases of defection). Alternatively, the home country may prosecute the individual. For instance, in 2002, a Colombian diplomat in London was prosecuted for manslaughter, once diplomatic immunity was waived by the Colombian government.
The concept of diplomatic immunity can be found in ancient Indian epics like "Ramayana" (between 3000 and 2000 BC) (traditional Hindu dating: over 100,000 years ago) and "Mahabharata" (around 4th century BC; traditional Hindu dating: 3000 BC), where messengers and diplomats were given immunity from capital punishment. In Ramayana, when the demon king Ravana ordered the killing of Hanuman, Ravana's younger brother Vibhishana pointed out that messengers or diplomats should not be killed, as per ancient practices.
During the evolution of international justice, many wars were considered rebellions or unlawful by one or more combatant sides. In such cases, the servants of the "criminal" sovereign were often considered accomplices and their persons violated. In other circumstances, harbingers of inconsiderable demands were killed as a declaration of war. Herodotus records that when heralds of the Persian king Xerxes demanded "earth and water" (i.e., symbols of submission) of Greek cities, the Athenians threw them into a pit and the Spartans threw them down a well for the purpose of suggesting they would find both earth and water at the bottom, these often being mentioned by the messenger as a threat of siege. However, even for Herodotus, this maltreatment of envoys is a crime. He recounts a story of divine vengeance befalling Sparta for this deed.
A Roman envoy was urinated on as he was leaving the city of Tarentum. The oath of the envoy, "This stain will be washed away with blood!", was fulfilled during the Second Punic War. The arrest and ill-treatment of the envoy of Raja Raja Chola by the king of Kulasekhara dynasty (Second Cheras), which is now part of modern India, led to the naval Kandalur War in AD 994.
The Islamic prophet Muhammad sent and received envoys and strictly forbade harming them. This practice was continued by the Rashidun caliphs who exchanged diplomats with the Ethiopians and the Byzantines. This diplomatic exchange continued during the Arab–Byzantine wars.
Classical Sharia called for hospitality to be shown towards anyone who has been granted "amān" (or right of safe passage). "Amān" was readily granted to any emissary bearing a letter or another sealed document. The duration of the "amān" was typically a year. Envoys with this right of passage were given immunity of person and property. They were exempt from taxation, as long as they didn't engage in trade.
As diplomats by definition enter the country under safe conduct, violating them is normally viewed as a great breach of honor, although there have been numerous cases in which diplomats have been killed. Genghis Khan and the Mongols were well known for strongly insisting on the rights of diplomats, and they would often take terrifying vengeance against any state that violated these rights. The Mongols would often raze entire cities in retaliation for the execution of their ambassadors, and invaded and destroyed the Khwarezmid Empire after their ambassadors had been mistreated.
The British Parliament first guaranteed diplomatic immunity to foreign ambassadors in 1709, after Count Andrey Matveyev, a Russian resident in London, had been subjected to verbal and physical abuse by British bailiffs.
Modern diplomatic immunity evolved parallel to the development of modern diplomacy. In the 17th century, European diplomats realized that protection from prosecution was essential to doing their jobs, and a set of rules evolved guaranteeing the rights of diplomats. These were still confined to Western Europe and were closely tied to the prerogatives of nobility. Thus, an emissary to the Ottoman Empire could expect to be arrested and imprisoned upon the outbreak of hostilities between his state and the empire. The French Revolution also disrupted this system, as the revolutionary state and Napoleon imprisoned numerous diplomats who were accused of working against France. More recently, the Iran hostage crisis is universally considered a violation of diplomatic immunity. Although the hostage takers did not officially represent the state, host countries are obligated to protect diplomatic property and personnel. On the other hand, during World War II, diplomatic immunity was upheld and the embassies of the belligerents were evacuated through neutral countries.
For the upper class of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, diplomatic immunity was an easy concept to understand. The first embassies were not permanent establishments but actual visits by high-ranking representatives, often close relatives, of the sovereign or the sovereign in person. As permanent representations evolved, usually on a treaty basis between two powers, they were frequently staffed by relatives of the sovereign or high-ranking nobles.
Warfare was a status of hostilities not between individuals but between their sovereigns, and the officers and officials of European governments and armies often changed employers. Truces and ceasefires were commonplace, along with fraternization between officers of enemy armies during them. When prisoners, the officers usually gave their parole and were only restricted to a city away from the theatre of war. Almost always, they were given leave to carry their personal sidearms. Even during the French revolutionary wars, British scientists visited the French Academy. In such an atmosphere, it was easy to accept that some persons were immune to the laws. After all, they were still bound by strict requirements of honour and customs.
In the 19th century, the Congress of Vienna reasserted the rights of diplomats; and they have been largely respected since then, as the European model has spread throughout the world. Currently, diplomatic relations, including diplomatic immunity, are governed internationally by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which has been ratified by almost every country in the world.
In modern times, diplomatic immunity continues to provide a means, albeit imperfect, to safeguard diplomatic personnel from any animosity that might arise between nations. As one article put it: "So why do we agree to a system in which we're dependent on a foreign country's whim before we can prosecute a criminal inside our own borders? The practical answer is: because we depend on other countries to honor our own diplomats' immunity just as scrupulously as we honor theirs."
During 18 April 1961 Vienna Convention, the Holy See was granted diplomatic immunity to its foreign ambassadors as well.
In the United States, the Diplomatic Relations Act of 1978 ( et seq.) follows the principles introduced by the Vienna Conventions. The United States tends to be generous when granting diplomatic immunity to visiting diplomats, because a large number of U.S. diplomats work in host countries less protective of individual rights. If the United States were to punish a visiting diplomat without sufficient grounds, U.S. representatives in other countries could receive harsher treatment. If a person with immunity is alleged to have committed a crime or faces a civil lawsuit, the State Department asks the home country to waive immunity of the alleged offender so that the complaint can be moved to the courts. If immunity is not waived, prosecution cannot be undertaken. However, the State Department still has the right to expel the diplomat. In many such cases, the diplomat's visas are canceled, and they and their family may be barred from returning to the United States. Crimes committed by members of a diplomat's family can also result in dismissal.
Some countries have made reservations to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, but they are minor. A number of countries limit the diplomatic immunity of persons who are citizens of the receiving country. As nations keep faith to their treaties with differing zeal, other rules may also apply, though in most cases this summary is a reasonably accurate approximation. The Convention does not cover the personnel of international organizations, whose privileges are decided upon on a case-by-case basis, usually in the treaties founding such organizations. The United Nations system (including its agencies, which comprise the most recognizable international bodies such as the World Bank and many others) has a relatively standardized form of limited immunities for staff traveling on U.N. laissez-passer; diplomatic immunity is often granted to the highest-ranking officials of these agencies. Consular officials (that do not have concurrent diplomatic accreditation) formally have a more limited form of immunity, generally limited to their official duties. Diplomatic technical and administrative staff also have more limited immunity under the Vienna Convention; for this reason, some countries may accredit a member of technical or administrative staff as an attaché.
Other categories of government officials that may travel frequently to other countries may not have diplomatic passports or diplomatic immunity, such as members of the military, high-ranking government officials, ministers, and others. Many countries provide non-diplomatic official passports to such personnel, and there may be different classes of such travel documents such as official passports, service passports, and others. De facto recognition of some form of immunity may be conveyed by states accepting officials traveling on such documents, or there may exist bilateral agreements to govern such cases (as in, for example, the case of military personnel conducting or observing exercises on the territory of the receiving country).
Formally, diplomatic immunity may be limited to officials accredited to a host country, or traveling to or from their host country. In practice, many countries may effectively recognize diplomatic immunity for those traveling on diplomatic passports, with admittance to the country constituting acceptance of the diplomatic status. However, this is not universal, and diplomats have been prosecuted and jailed for crimes committed outside the country they are accredited to.
In reality, most diplomats are representatives of nations with a tradition of professional civil service, and are expected to obey regulations governing their behaviour and they suffer severe disciplinary action if they flout local laws. In many nations, a professional diplomat's career may be compromised if they (or members of their family) disobey the local authorities or cause serious embarrassment, and such cases are, at any rate, a violation of the spirit of the Vienna Conventions.
The Vienna Convention is explicit that "without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of all persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving State." Nevertheless, on some occasions, diplomatic immunity leads to some unfortunate results; protected diplomats have violated laws (including those that would be violations at home as well) of the host country and that country has been essentially limited to informing the diplomat's nation that the diplomat is no longer welcome ("persona non-grata"). Diplomatic agents are not, however, exempt from the jurisdiction of their home state, and hence prosecution may be undertaken by the sending state. For minor violations of the law, the sending state may impose administrative procedures specific to the foreign service or diplomatic mission.
Violation of the law by diplomats has included espionage, smuggling, child custody law violations, money laundering, tax evasion, making terrorist threats, slavery, preying on children over the Internet for sex, and murder.
On-duty police officer Yvonne Fletcher was murdered in London in 1984, by a person shooting from inside the Libyan embassy during a protest. The incident caused a breakdown in diplomatic relations until Libya admitted "general responsibility" in 1999. The incident became a major factor in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's decision to allow President of the United States Ronald Reagan to launch the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986 from American bases in the United Kingdom.
In 1987 in New York City, the Human Resources Administration placed 9-year-old Terrence Karamba in a foster home after his elementary school teachers noticed suspicious scars and injuries. He and his 7-year-old sister, who was also placed in City custody, told officials the wounds had been inflicted by their father, Floyd Karamba, an administrative attaché at the Zimbabwean Mission to the U.N. No charges were filed, as Karamba had diplomatic immunity.
On February 1999 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Kazuko Shimokoji, wife of the Japanese Consul-General, showed up at the emergency department of a city hospital with two black eyes and a bruised neck. She told doctors that her husband had beaten her. When local police questioned her husband, Mr. Shimokoji said, "Yes, I punched her out and she deserved it", and described the incident as "a cultural thing and not a big deal". Although an arrest warrant was issued, Mr. Shimokoji could not be arrested due to his diplomatic immunity. However, his statement to the police was widely reported in both the local and Japanese press. The subsequent public uproar prompted the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to waive Mr. Shimokoji's immunity. Though he pleaded guilty in Canadian court, he was given an absolute discharge. Nonetheless, he was recalled to Japan where he was reassigned to office duty and had his pay cut.
In November 2006 in New York City, Fred Matwanga, Kenyan diplomat to the U.N., was taken into police custody by officers responding to reports that he had assaulted his son; he was released after asserting diplomat immunity.
In April 2012 in the Philippines, Erick Shcks Bairnals, a technical officer of the Panama Maritime Authority's regional office in Manila, was accused of raping a 19-year-old Filipino woman. Being an attached agency to the Panamanian Embassy in Manila, the AMP office was classified as a diplomatic entity, its officers enjoying the same privileges conferred to the embassy's diplomats. Shcks was later released from detention because Shcks "enjoys protection under the 1961 Vienna Convention."
In March 2013, the Supreme Court of India restricted Italian ambassador Daniele Mancini from leaving India for breaching an undertaking given to the apex court. Despite Italian and European Union protests regarding the restrictions as contrary to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the Supreme Court of India said it would be unacceptable to argue diplomatic immunity after voluntarily submitting to the court's jurisdiction. The Italian envoy had invoked Article 32 of the Constitution of India when filing an affidavit to the Supreme Court taking responsibility for the return of the two Italian marines to India after casting their votes in the March 2012 general elections in Italy. The Indian Supreme Court opined that the Italian ambassador had waived his diplomatic immunity and could be charged for contempt. The two marines were being tried in India for the murder of two Indian fishermen off the coast of Kerala (see the Enrica Lexie case).
In October 2013, Russian diplomat Dmitri Borodin was arrested in The Hague, The Netherlands, after neighbours called the police. Borodin was alleged to have been drunk and violent towards his children, aged two and four. Police were in the area because Borodin's wife had lost control over her car while also intoxicated, and had rammed four parked cars near the diplomats' house. Russia immediately demanded an apology from the Dutch government for violating Borodin's diplomatic immunity. The row came at a time of tension between Russia and the Netherlands, after the Russian security services captured a Greenpeace vessel sailing under the Dutch flag, "Arctic Sunrise", that was protesting against oil drilling in the Prirazlomnoye field.
In June 2014, the New Zealand government confirmed that Mohammed Rizalman Bin Ismail from Malaysia, aged in his 30s and employed at Malaysia's High Commission in Wellington, had invoked diplomatic immunity when faced with charges of burglary and assault with intent to rape after allegedly following a 21-year-old woman to her home. He returned to Malaysia in May 2014 with his family while the case was still in hearing. The New Zealand foreign ministry was criticized for allowing the defendant to leave the country, which was blamed on miscommunication between the foreign ministries of the two countries, as Prime Minister John Key expressed his view that "the man should have faced the charges in New Zealand". Malaysia eventually agreed to send the diplomat back to assist in investigations and he was eventually tried and sentenced to nine months' home detention in New Zealand.
In July 2017, in Jordan, two Jordanian carpenters were invited to repair furniture at an Israeli diplomatic security agent's residence near the Israeli Embassy. It is believed that the Jordanians and Israeli security agent quarreled over the ongoing tensions regarding the installations of metal detectors at entry points to al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. One carpenter, a teenager of Palestinian origin reportedly tried to stab the Israeli security agent with his screwdriver, and the Israeli security agent shot and killed the Jordanian carpenter, and also shot the property landlord as well, a doctor, who happened to be there at the time. Israel refused to allow Jordanian authorities to question the agent, claiming diplomatic immunity under the Vienna convention.
In August 2017, Zimbabwe first lady, Grace Mugabe, invoked diplomatic immunity on 15 August after assault charges were laid against her by a South African model.
Diplomats and officials involved in drug smuggling have benefited from diplomatic immunity. For example, a Venezuelan general wanted in the United States on drugs charges was arrested in Aruba only to be released after the Venezuelan government protested his diplomatic immunity and threatened sanctions if Aruba did not release him.
In December 2014, Gambian diplomats were found guilty by Southwark Crown Court of London for selling tax-free tobacco from the Gambian embassy in the United Kingdom. The Crown Prosecution Service told the court that much of this was sold from the embassy without paying value-added tax and excise duty.
Diplomatic immunity from local employment and labor law has precipitated incidents in which diplomatic staff have been accused of abusing local workers, who are often hired for positions requiring local knowledge (such as an administrative assistant, press/PR officer) or for general labor. In such situations, the employees are in a legal limbo where the laws of neither the host country nor the diplomat's country are enforceable. Diplomats have ignored local laws concerning minimum wages, maximum working hours, vacation and holidays, and in some cases have imprisoned employees in their homes, deprived them of their earned wages, passports, food, and communication with the outside world, abused them physically and emotionally, and invaded their privacy. Reported incidents include the following:
A particular problem is the difficulty in enforcing ordinary laws, such as prohibitions on double parking. For example, the Autobahn 555 in Cologne, Germany was nicknamed the "Diplomatenrennbahn" (Diplomat's Raceway), when Bonn was the capital of West Germany, because of the numerous diplomats that used to speed through the highway under diplomatic immunity. Certain cities, for example The Hague, have taken to impounding such cars rather than fining their owners. Diplomats' status does not guarantee the release of impounded cars. Diplomats' cars may not be searched or entered in the U.S.
Diplomatic missions have their own regulations, but many require their staff to pay any fines due for parking violations. A 2006 economic study found that there was a significant correlation between home-country corruption (as measured by Transparency International) and unpaid parking fines: six countries had in excess of 100 violations per diplomat: Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria and Mozambique. In particular, New York City, the home of the United Nations Headquarters, regularly protests to the United States Department of State about non-payment of parking tickets because of diplomatic status. As of 2001, the city had more than 200,000 outstanding parking tickets from diplomats, totaling more than $21.3 million, of which only $160,682 had been collected. In 1997, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani proposed to the Clinton administration that the U.S. State Department revoke the special DPL plates for diplomats who ignore parking summonses; the State Department denied Giuliani's request.
In cities that impose a congestion charge, the decision of some diplomatic missions not to furnish payment has proved controversial. In London, embassies have amassed approximately £58 million in unpaid charges as of 2012, with the American embassy comprising approximately £6 million and the Russian, German and Japanese missions around £2 million each.
In January 1997, Gueorgui Makharadze, a high-ranking Georgian diplomat, caused a five-car pileup in Washington, D.C., in the United States, which killed a 16-year-old girl. Makharadze's claim of diplomatic immunity created a national outrage in the United States, particularly given Makharadze's previous record of driving offenses: In April 1996, Makharadze had been charged with speeding in Virginia, and four months later, he was detained by District of Columbia police on suspicion of drunk driving. In both prior cases, charges were dismissed based on his immunity. On the basis of the media coverage, Georgia revoked Makharadze's immunity, and he was ultimately sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of involuntary manslaughter and four counts of aggravated assault.
On 27 October 1998, in Vladivostok, Russia, Douglas Kent, the American Consul General to Russia, was involved in a car accident that left a young man, Alexander Kashin, disabled. Kent was not prosecuted in a U.S. court. Under the Vienna Convention, diplomatic immunity does not apply to civil actions relating to vehicular accidents, but in 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that, since he was using his vehicle for consular purposes, Kent could not be sued civilly.
In 2001, a Russian diplomat, Andrei Knyazev, hit and killed a woman while driving drunk in Ottawa. Knyazev refused to take a breathalyzer at the scene of the crash, citing diplomatic immunity. Russia refused Canadian requests to waive his immunity, and Knyazev was expelled from Canada. Though the Russian Foreign Ministry fired him and charged him with involuntary manslaughter, and Russian and Canadian authorities cooperated in the investigation, the case caused a political storm in Canada. Many accused the Foreign Ministry of incompetence after it emerged that Knyazev had twice been previously investigated for drunk driving. The Canadian Foreign Minister had fought unsuccessfully to have Knyazev tried in Ottawa. In 2002, Knyazev was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in Russia.
On 3 December 2004, in Bucharest, Romania, Christopher Van Goethem, an American Marine serving his embassy, ran a red traffic signal, collided with a taxi, and killed popular Romanian musician Teo Peter. The Romanian government requested the American government to lift his immunity, which it refused to do. In a court-martial, he was acquitted of manslaughter and adultery (which is still a court martial offence) but was convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements.
On 9 December 2009, in Tanzania, Canadian Junior Envoy Jean Touchette was arrested after it was reported that he spat at a traffic police officer on duty in the middle of a traffic jam in the Banana district on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. Canada's High Commissioner, Robert Orr, was summoned by the Tanzanian Foreign Ministry over the incident, and the junior envoy was later recalled.
On 15 December 2009, in Singapore, the Romanian chargé d'affaires, Silviu Ionescu, was allegedly behind a drunk-driving hit-and-run accident that killed a 30-year-old man and seriously injured two others. He left Singapore for Romania three days after the accident. The Romanian foreign ministry suspended Ionescu from his post. A coroner's inquiry in Singapore, which included testimony by the Romanian embassy driver, concluded that Ionescu was solely responsible for the accident. An Interpol Red Notice was subsequently issued for his arrest and possible extradition notwithstanding the fact that Romania had not waived his diplomatic immunity and had commenced criminal proceedings against him in Romania. The Singapore government argued that by reason of Article 39(2) of the Vienna Convention, Ionescu was no longer protected by diplomatic immunity. Ionescu was eventually sentenced to six years in jail.
In January 2011 in Lahore, Pakistan, American embassy employee Raymond Allen Davis shot and killed two Pakistani civilians, while a third man was struck and killed by a U.S. consulate car responding to the shooting. According to Davis, they were about to rob him and he acted in self-defense. When detained by police, Davis claimed to be a consultant at the U.S. consulate in Lahore. He was formally arrested and remanded into custody. Further investigations revealed that he was working with the CIA as a contractor in Pakistan. The U.S. State Department declared him a diplomat and repeatedly requested immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, to which Pakistan is a signatory. On 16 March 2011, Davis was released after the families of the two killed men were paid $2.4 million in "diyya" (a form of monetary compensation or blood money). Judges then acquitted him on all charges and Davis immediately departed Pakistan.
On 10 April 2011, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Patrick Kibuta, an electrical engineer in the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan caused a vehicle collision with another vehicle, while under the influence of alcohol. Kibuta, who was driving in the opposing lane, injured a Canadian citizen residing in Islamabad, who suffered multiple fractures and required surgery. The Kohsar police impounded Kibuta's UN vehicle on the scene, and a blood test confirmed that he had an elevated blood alcohol level. Charges for reckless and drunken driving were filed against Kibuta, who enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
On 14 February 2013, a vehicle bearing diplomatic plates registered to the US Embassy got into an accident in Islamabad, Pakistan involving two residents out of which one was killed and the other survived. Murder charges were laid under Section 320 of Pakistan Penal Code against the driver of the vehicle who is a diplomat according to Pakistani officials.
In July 2013, Joshua Walde, an American diplomat in Nairobi, Kenya, crashed into a mini-bus, killing one man and seriously injuring eight others, who were left with no financial assistance to pay for hospital bills. United States embassy officials took the diplomat and his family out of Kenya the following day. The United States government was concerned about the impact the accident could have on bilateral relations with Kenya. Walde gave a statement to police, but was not detained due to his diplomatic immunity. Kenyan police say the case remains under investigation.
In September 2013, Jad Saeed al-Hassan, Lebanese Ambassador to South Korea, was involved in a hit-and-run in Seoul. Right after the accident, he drove directly into the Lebanese embassy compound and refused to cooperate with the local police investigation, claiming his diplomatic immunity. He stayed in his post as ambassador until his death due to another traffic collision in Seoul in 2014.
On 12 September 2015, Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Thani tried to claim diplomatic immunity when his Ferrari LaFerrari and a Porsche 911 GT3 were caught on camera drag racing through a residential neighborhood in Beverly Hills. He owns the cars and a drag racing team, and is a member of Qatar's ruling family. The Beverly Hills Police Department contacted the U.S. State Department to clarify if he had diplomatic immunity. They stated he did not. However, his face was not shown on camera, and no officer witnessed the crime, so the state of California has not yet pressed charges. He has since fled the country. The investigation is ongoing.
In June 2017, in Germany a Saudi driver killed a cyclist by opening the door of his Porsche directly into the cyclist's path without checking to see if the road was clear. Anger arose when the Saudi claimed diplomatic immunity. Police said that under normal circumstances the driver would face investigation and possible prosecution on suspicion of negligent manslaughter, but prosecutors said they had no choice but to close the case because he had diplomatic immunity.
On 27 August 2019, Anne Sacoolas, the wife of an American National Security Agency employee working in the United Kingdom was a suspect in a traffic incident involving 19-year-old Harry Dunn in Croughton, Northamptonshire, England. Dunn was riding his motorcycle when it was reported that a woman emerged from RAF Croughton driving on the wrong side of the road, resulting in a head-on collision. After 999 handlers wrongly categorized the call, there was a 43-minute wait for an ambulance, resulting in a two-hour delay arriving at a trauma center, where Harry Dunn later died. Sacoolas was breathalyzed at the accident site. The following day, police interviewed Sacoolas at her home, learning the US claimed diplomatic immunity.
Sacoolas told police she had no immediate plans to leave the country. However, on 13 October US authorities notified the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office of plans to send Sacoolas home, unless serious objections were raised: on 16 October, the UK's Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, went to present objections, a day after the family was sent back.
Woody Johnson, US Ambassador to the UK, expressed "profound sadness" at the death of Harry Dunn and the US Embassy also offered their sympathies and condolences. US President Donald Trump called it a "terrible accident" and mentioned that the woman was "driving on the wrong side of the road, and that can happen". The US government has not waived the diplomatic immunity afforded to Sacoolas and has stated she would not return to the UK, despite calls by the UK government to do so.
Historically, the problem of large debts run up by diplomats has also caused many problems. Some financial institutions do not extend credit to diplomats because they have no legal means of ensuring the money be repaid. Local citizens and businesses are often at a disadvantage when filing civil claims against a diplomat, especially in cases of unpaid rent, alimony, and child support.
The bulk of diplomatic debt lies in the rental of office space and living quarters. Individual debts can range from a few thousand dollars to $1 million in back rent. A group of diplomats and the office space in which they work are referred to as a diplomatic mission. Creditors cannot sue missions individually to collect money they owe. Landlords and creditors have found that the only thing they can do is contact a city agency to see if they can try to get some money back. They cannot enter the offices or apartments of diplomats to evict them because the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act says that "the property in the United States of a foreign state shall be immune from attachment, arrest and execution" (). This has led creditors who are owed money by diplomats to become more cautious about their renters and to change their rental or payment policies.
In one case, for example, officials from Zaire stopped paying rent to their private landlord and ran up $400,000 in debt. When the landlord sued, the U.S. State Department defended the Zaireans on the basis of diplomatic immunity, and a circuit court agreed. When the landlord finally cut off the utilities, the officials fled without paying their back rent. The landlords reportedly later reached an "amicable agreement" with the Zaire government.
The issue of abusing diplomatic immunity in family relations, especially alimony and child support, has become so widespread that it prompted discussion at the 1995 U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing. Historically, the United Nations has not become involved with family disputes and has refused to garnish the wages of diplomats who owe money for child support, citing sovereign immunity. However, in September 1995, the incumbent head of Legal Affairs for the United Nations acknowledged there was a moral and legal obligation to take at least a partial responsibility in family disputes. Fathers working as diplomats who refused to fulfill their family-related financial duties were increasing in numbers in the United Nations: several men who had left their wives and children were still claiming U.N. dependency, travel, and education allowances for their families, though they are no longer supporting those families.
Diplomats are exempt from most taxes, but not from "charges levied for specific services rendered". In certain cases, whether a payment is or is not considered a tax may be disputed, such as central London's congestion charge. It was reported in 2006 that the UAE embassy had agreed to pay their own accumulated charges of nearly £100,000.
There is an obligation for the receiving state not to "discriminate as between states"; in other words, any such fees should be payable by all accredited diplomats equally. This may allow the diplomatic corps to negotiate as a group with the authorities of the receiving country.
Diplomats are exempt from import duty and tariffs for items for their personal use. In some countries, this has led to charges that diplomatic agents are profiting personally from resale of "tax free" goods. The receiving state may choose to impose restrictions on what may reasonably constitute personal use (for example, only a certain quantity of cigarettes per day). When enacted, such restrictions are generally quite generous so as to avoid tit-for-tat responses.
On 24 April 2008, in New Orleans, Mexican press attaché Rafael Quintero Curiel was seen stealing BlackBerry PDA units from a White House press meeting room. Quintero made it all the way to the airport before members of the United States Secret Service caught up with him. He initially denied taking the devices, but after being confronted with security video, Quintero claimed it was purely accidental, gave the devices back, claimed diplomatic immunity and left New Orleans with the Mexican delegation. He was eventually fired for the incident.
The following chart outlines the immunities afforded to foreign diplomatic personnel residing in the United States. In general, these rules follow the Vienna Convention (or the New York Convention for UN officials) and apply in other countries as well (with the exceptions of immunities for United Nations officials, which can vary widely across countries based on the "Host Country Agreement" signed between the UN and the host country, whereby additional immunities beyond those granted by the New York Convention may be established). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8921 |
DDR SDRAM
Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory, officially abbreviated as DDR SDRAM, is a double data rate (DDR) synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) class of memory integrated circuits used in computers. DDR SDRAM, also retroactively called DDR1 SDRAM, has been superseded by DDR2 SDRAM, DDR3 SDRAM and DDR4 SDRAM. None of its successors are forward or backward compatible with DDR1 SDRAM, meaning DDR2, DDR3, and DDR4 memory modules will not work in DDR1-equipped motherboards, and vice versa.
Compared to single data rate (SDR) SDRAM, the DDR SDRAM interface makes higher transfer rates possible by more strict control of the timing of the electrical data and clock signals. Implementations often have to use schemes such as phase-locked loops and self-calibration to reach the required timing accuracy. The interface uses double pumping (transferring data on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal) to double data bus bandwidth without a corresponding increase in clock frequency. One advantage of keeping the clock frequency down is that it reduces the signal integrity requirements on the circuit board connecting the memory to the controller. The name "double data rate" refers to the fact that a DDR SDRAM with a certain clock frequency achieves nearly twice the bandwidth of a SDR SDRAM running at the same clock frequency, due to this double pumping.
With data being transferred 64 bits at a time, DDR SDRAM gives a transfer rate (in bytes/s) of (memory bus clock rate) × 2 (for dual rate) × 64 (number of bits transferred) / 8 (number of bits/byte). Thus, with a bus frequency of 100 MHz, DDR SDRAM gives a maximum transfer rate of 1600 MB/s.
Samsung demonstrated the first DDR memory prototype in 1997, and released the first commercial DDR SDRAM chip (64Mb) in June 1998, followed soon after by Hyundai Electronics (now SK Hynix) the same year. The development of DDR began in 1996, before its specification was finalized by JEDEC in June 2000 (JESD79). JEDEC has set standards for data rates of DDR SDRAM, divided into two parts. The first specification is for memory chips, and the second is for memory modules. The first retail PC motherboard using DDR SDRAM was released in August 2000.
To increase memory capacity and bandwidth, chips are combined on a module. For instance, the 64-bit data bus for DIMM requires eight 8-bit chips, addressed in parallel. Multiple chips with the common address lines are called a memory rank. The term was introduced to avoid confusion with chip internal rows and banks. A memory module may bear more than one rank. The term sides would also be confusing because it incorrectly suggests the physical placement of chips on the module. All ranks are connected to the same memory bus (address + data). The chip select signal is used to issue commands to specific rank.
Adding modules to the single memory bus creates additional electrical load on its drivers. To mitigate the resulting bus signaling rate drop and overcome the memory bottleneck, new chipsets employ the multi-channel architecture.
Note: All above listed are specified by JEDEC as JESD79F. All RAM data rates in-between or above these listed specifications are not standardized by JEDEC — often they are simply manufacturer optimizations using tighter-tolerance or overvolted chips. The package sizes in which DDR SDRAM is manufactured are also standardized by JEDEC.
There is no architectural difference between DDR SDRAM modules. Modules are instead designed to run at different clock frequencies: for example, a PC-1600 module is designed to run at , and a PC-2100 is designed to run at . A module's clock speed designates the data rate at which it is guaranteed to perform, hence it is guaranteed to run at lower ("underclocking") and can possibly run at higher ("overclocking") clock rates than those for which it was made.
DDR SDRAM modules for desktop computers, dual in-line memory modules (DIMMs), have 184 pins (as opposed to 168 pins on SDRAM, or 240 pins on DDR2 SDRAM), and can be differentiated from SDRAM DIMMs by the number of notches (DDR SDRAM has one, SDRAM has two). DDR SDRAM for notebook computers, SO-DIMMs, have 200 pins, which is the same number of pins as DDR2 SO-DIMMs. These two specifications are notched very similarly and care must be taken during insertion if unsure of a correct match. Most DDR SDRAM operates at a voltage of 2.5 V, compared to 3.3 V for SDRAM. This can significantly reduce power consumption. Chips and modules with DDR-400/PC-3200 standard have a nominal voltage of 2.6 V.
JEDEC Standard No. 21–C defines three possible operating voltages for 184 pin DDR, as identified by the key notch position relative to its centreline. Page 4.5.10-7 defines 2.5V (left), 1.8V (centre), TBD (right), while page 4.20.5–40 nominates 3.3V for the right notch position. The orientation of the module for determining the key notch position is with 52 contact positions to the left and 40 contact positions to the right.
Increasing operating voltage slightly can increase maximum speed, at the cost of higher power dissipation and heating, and at the risk of malfunctioning or damage.
Module and chip characteristics are inherently linked.
Total module capacity is a product of one chip's capacity and the number of chips. ECC modules multiply it by 8/9 because they use 1 bit per byte (8 bits) for error correction. A module of any particular size can therefore be assembled either from 32 small chips (36 for ECC memory), or 16(18) or 8(9) bigger ones.
DDR memory bus width per channel is 64 bits (72 for ECC memory). Total module bit width is a product of bits per chip and number of chips. It also equals number of ranks (rows) multiplied by DDR memory bus width. Consequently, a module with a greater number of chips or using ×8 chips instead of ×4 will have more ranks.
This example compares different real-world server memory modules with a common size of 1 GB. One should definitely be careful buying 1 GB memory modules, because all these variations can be sold under one price position without stating whether they are ×4 or ×8, single- or dual-ranked.
There is a common belief that number of module ranks equals number of sides. As above data shows, this is not true. One can also find 2-side/1-rank modules. One can even think of a 1-side/2-rank memory module having 16(18) chips on single side ×8 each, but it's unlikely such a module was ever produced.
From Ballot JCB-99-70, and modified by numerous other Board Ballots, formulated under the cognizance of Committee JC-42.3 on DRAM Parametrics.
Standard No. 79 Revision Log:
"This comprehensive standard defines all required aspects of 64Mb through 1Gb DDR SDRAMs with X4/X8/X16 data interfaces, including features, functionality, ac and dc parametrics, packages and pin assignments. This scope will subsequently be expanded to formally apply to x32 devices, and higher density devices as well."
PC3200 is DDR SDRAM designed to operate at 200 MHz using DDR-400 chips with a bandwidth of 3,200 MB/s. Because PC3200 memory transfers data on both the rising and falling clock edges, its effective clock rate is 400 MHz.
1 GB PC3200 non-ECC modules are usually made with 16 512 Mbit chips, 8 on each side (512 Mbits × 16 chips) / (8 bits (per byte)) = 1,024 MB. The individual chips making up a 1 GB memory module are usually organized as 226 8-bit words, commonly expressed as 64M×8. Memory manufactured in this way is low-density RAM and is usually compatible with any motherboard specifying PC3200 DDR-400 memory.
In the context of the 1 GB non-ECC PC3200 SDRAM module, there is very little visually to differentiate low-density from high-density RAM. High-density DDR RAM modules will, like their low-density counterparts, usually be double-sided with eight 512 Mbit chips per side. The difference is that each chip, instead of being organized as 64M×8, is organized as 227 4-bit words, or 128M×4.
High-density memory modules are assembled using chips from multiple manufacturers. These chips come in both the familiar 22 × 10 mm (approx.) TSOP2 and smaller squarer 12 × 9 mm (approx.) FBGA package sizes. High-density chips can be identified by the numbers on each chip.
High-density RAM devices were designed to be used in registered memory modules for servers. JEDEC standards do not apply to high-density DDR RAM in desktop implementations. JEDEC's technical documentation, however, supports 128M×4 semiconductors . As such, "high density" is a relative term, which can be used to describe memory that is not supported by a particular motherboard's memory controller.
DDR (DDR1) was superseded by DDR2 SDRAM, which had modifications for higher clock frequency and again doubled throughput, but operates on the same principle as DDR. Competing with DDR2 was Rambus XDR DRAM. DDR2 dominated due to cost and support factors. DDR2 was in turn superseded by DDR3 SDRAM, which offered higher performance for increased bus speeds and new features. DDR3 has been superseded by DDR4 SDRAM, which was first produced in 2011 and whose standards were still in flux (2012) with significant architectural changes.
DDR's prefetch buffer depth is 2 (bits), while DDR2 uses 4. Although the effective clock rates of DDR2 are higher than DDR, the overall performance was not greater in the early implementations, primarily due to the high latencies of the first DDR2 modules. DDR2 started to be effective by the end of 2004, as modules with lower latencies became available.
Memory manufacturers stated that it was impractical to mass-produce DDR1 memory with effective transfer rates in excess of 400 MHz (i.e. 400 MT/s and 200 MHz external clock) due to internal speed limitations. DDR2 picks up where DDR1 leaves off, utilizing internal clock rates similar to DDR1, but is available at effective transfer rates of 400 MHz and higher. DDR3 advances extended the ability to preserve internal clock rates while providing higher effective transfer rates by again doubling the prefetch depth.
The DDR4 SDRAM is a high-speed dynamic random-access memory internally configured as 16 banks, 4 bank groups with 4
banks for each bank group for x4/x8 and 8 banks, 2 bank groups with 4 banks for each bank group for x16 DRAM.
The DDR4 SDRAM uses an 8"n" prefetch architecture to achieve high-speed operation. The 8"n" prefetch architecture is combined with
an interface designed to transfer two data words per clock cycle at the I/O pins. A single read or write operation for the DDR4 SDRAM
consists of a single 8"n"-bit-wide 4-clock data transfer at the internal DRAM core and 8 corresponding "n"-bit-wide half-clock-cycle data transfers at the I/O pins.
RDRAM was a particularly expensive alternative to DDR SDRAM, and most manufacturers dropped its support from their chipsets. DDR1 memory's prices substantially increased since Q2 2008, while DDR2 prices declined. In January 2009, 1 GB DDR1 was 2–3 times more expensive than 1 GB DDR2. High-density DDR RAM suits about 10% of PC motherboards on the market, while low-density DDR RAM suits almost all motherboards on the desktop PC market.
MDDR is an acronym that some enterprises use for Mobile DDR SDRAM, a type of memory used in some portable electronic devices, like mobile phones, handhelds, and digital audio players. Through techniques including reduced voltage supply and advanced refresh options, Mobile DDR can achieve greater power efficiency. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8922 |
Don Rosa
Keno Don Hugo Rosa (), known simply as Don Rosa (born June 29, 1951), is an American comic book writer and illustrator known for his Disney comics stories about Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck, and other characters that Carl Barks created for Disney-licensed comic books, first published in America by Dell Comics. Many of his stories are built on characters and locations created by Carl Barks; among these was his very first Duck story, "The Son of the Sun" (1987), which was nominated for a Harvey Award in the "Best Story of the Year" category.
Rosa created about 90 stories between 1987 and 2006. In 1995, his 12-chapter work "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck" won the Eisner Award for "Best Serialized Story".
Don Rosa's grandfather, Gioachino Rosa, lived in Maniago, a town at the foot of the Alps in Northern Italy, in the province of Pordenone. He emigrated to Kentucky, United States around 1900, established a successful tile and terrazzo company, then returned to Italy to marry and start a family. In 1915 just after the birth of his son Ugo Rosa, Gioachino returned to Kentucky with his wife, two daughters and two sons. Ugo Rosa grew up and was later married in Kentucky. His wife was born to a German American father and a mother with both Scottish and Irish ancestry.
Don Rosa was born Keno Don Hugo Rosa on June 29, 1951 in Louisville, Kentucky. He was named after both his father and grandfather. Gioachino was called "Keno" for short. Don's father was named Ugo Dante Rosa, but used the name "Hugo Don" Rosa in America.
Rosa was exposed to comics at a very early age, as his only sibling, an 11-year-older sister, Deanna, was a comics hoarder and had a large number of comics, which made it possible for Rosa to discover comics literally from birth as a storytelling medium by just "reading the pictures" and later also actually read. Rosa also began drawing comics before being able to write. The characters he would typically draw were a large cast of stick figures which he usually featured in comedy/adventures of a Barksian style, since the Carl Barks' stories were the ones Rosa was most fond of. Rosa stuck to drawing simple stick figures for these stories since these were mere illustrations as a means of getting the story told. The story was the pinnacle to him, not the actual drawings. Rosa kept drawing the stick figure stories until he attended High school at St. Xavier High School (Louisville), Kentucky.
Rosa's favorite comic books while growing up were "Uncle Scrooge" and "Little Lulu" comics from Dell Comics, as well as his sister's collection of MAD magazines. When Rosa became 12 years old he also discovered and started to enjoy the Superman titles of DC Comics especially from the editor Mort Weisinger's period, drawn mostly by his favorite Superman artists Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger. Shortly after Rosa started to collect Superman comics he also began to trade in the comics he had inherited from his older sister for old Superman comics. The reason behind this action was that a comic book shop in his living area offered to trade two used old comics for one new, a sound deal for the young Rosa. By the 1970s Rosa's comic trading had ended up with him only having two Barks duck comics issues left from the collection his sister originally passed on to him. One of them being "Dell Comics' Four Color Comics #386" (also known as Dell Comics' One shot's) issue titled: ""Uncle Scrooge in Only a Poor Old Man"", which was unknown to him to be the first issue of the new Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge Title. The second issue being his other favorite Barks Comic from his youth, Dell's Donald Duck in "The Golden Helmet". Later when Rosa became a serious collector of all comics of the post-war years, he particularly enjoyed and collected the classic E.C. Comics of the horror and science fiction genres published in the early 1950s, Will Eisner's "The Spirit", Walt Kelly's "Pogo", and virtually all other comics from 1945 and onward.
Rosa entered the University of Kentucky in 1969. He graduated in 1973 with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering.
In 1969 while still in college, Rosa won an award as "best political cartoonist in the nation in a college paper". "I'm not really an editorial cartoonist. I'd much rather be doing comedy adventure. But I must have done something right, for at one point "The Journal of Higher Education" named me one of the five or six best college newspaper cartoonists in the nation."
Rosa's first published comic (besides the spot illustrations in his grade school and high school newspapers) was a comic strip featuring his own character, Lancelot Pertwillaby, titled "The Pertwillaby Papers". He created the strip in 1971 for "The Kentucky Kernel", a college newspaper of the University of Kentucky, which wanted the strip to focus on political satire.
Rosa later switched the strip to comedy-adventure, his favorite style of comics, and drew the story "Lost in (an alternative section of) the Andes". (The title is a reference to "Lost in the Andes!", a Donald Duck story by Carl Barks, first published in April, 1949.) The so-called "Pertwillaby Papers" included 127 published episodes by the time Rosa graduated in 1973.
Meanwhile, Rosa participated in contributing art and articles to comic collector fanzines. One contribution was "An Index of Uncle Scrooge Comics". According to his introduction: ""Scrooge being my favorite character in comic history and Barks my favorite pure cartoonist, I'll try not to get carried away too much.""
After attaining his bachelor's degree, Rosa continued to draw comics purely as a hobby, his only income came from working in the "Keno Rosa Tile and Terrazzo Company", a company founded by his paternal grandfather.
Rosa authored and illustrated the monthly "Information Center" column in the fanzine "Rocket's Blast Comicollector" from 1974 to 1979. This was a question-and-answer feature dealing with readers' queries on all forms of pop entertainment of which Rosa was a student, including comics, TV and movies. He also revived the "Pertwillaby Papers" in this "RBCC" fanzine as a comic book style story rather than a newspaper comic strip from 1976 to 1978.
By now having become a locally known comics collector and cartoonist, Rosa accepted an offer from the editor of the local newspaper to create a weekly comic strip. This led to his creation of the comic strip character Captain Kentucky for the Saturday edition of the local newspaper "Louisville Times". Captain Kentucky was the superhero alter ego of Lancelot Pertwillaby. The pay was $25/week and not worth the 12+ hours each week's strip entailed, but Rosa did it as part of his hobby. Publication started on October 6, 1979. The comic strip ended on August 15, 1982 after the publication of 150 episodes. After three years with Captain Kentucky, Don decided that it was not worth the effort. He retired from cartooning and did not draw a single line for the next four years. Years later, as his fame grew, his non-Disney work was published by the Norwegian publisher Gazette Bok in 2001, in the two hard-cover "Don Rosa Archives" volumes, "The Pertwillaby Papers" and "The Adventures of Captain Kentucky".
In 1986, Rosa discovered a Gladstone Comics comic book. This was the first American comic book that contained Disney characters since Western Publishing's discontinuation of their Whitman Comics in the 1970s. Since early childhood Don Rosa had been fascinated by Carl Barks' stories about Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck. He immediately called the editor, Byron Erickson, and told him that he was the only American who was born to write and draw one Scrooge McDuck adventure. Erickson agreed to let him send a story, and Don Rosa started drawing his first Duck story, "The Son of the Sun," the very next day.
"The Son of the Sun" was a success and Rosa's very first professional comic story was nominated for a Harvey Award "Best Story of the Year". The plot of the story was the same as his earlier story, "Lost in (an alternative section of) the Andes". As Don Rosa explained it, he was just "(...) turning that old Pertwillaby Papers adventure back into the story it originally was in my head, starring Scrooge, Donald, the nephews, and Flintheart Glomgold."
Rosa created a few more comics for Gladstone until 1989. He then stopped working for them, because the policies of their licensor, Disney, did not allow for the return of original art for a story to its creators. This was unacceptable to Don Rosa, since a part of his income came from selling the originals, and the original art is the property of the freelance artists, unless otherwise agreed upon. Without that extra money, he could not make a living drawing comic books.
After making some stories for the Dutch publisher Oberon, the publishers of an American Disney children's magazine called "DuckTales" (based on the animated series of the same name) offered Rosa employment. They even offered him a much higher salary than the one he received at Gladstone. Rosa made just one script ("Back in Time for a Dime"). The publishers never asked him to make more, and due to problems with receiving the payment, he did not care.
After working with the DuckTales magazine, Rosa found out that the Denmark-based International publisher Egmont (at that time called Gutenberghus) was publishing reprints of his stories and wanted more. Rosa joined Egmont in 1990. Two years later, at Rosa's suggestion, Byron Erickson, the former editor at Gladstone also went to work for Egmont and has been working there ever since as an editor and later as a freelancer.
In 1991 Rosa started creating "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck", a 12 chapter story about his favorite character. The series was a success, and in 1995 he won an Eisner Award for best continuing series. After the end of the original series, Rosa sometimes produced additional "missing" chapters. Some of the extra chapters were turned down by Egmont, because they were not interested in any more episodes. Fortunately, the French magazine "Picsou" was eager to publish the stories. From 1999, Rosa started working freelance for Picsou magazine as well. All of these chapters were compiled as "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion".
During early summer 2002, Rosa suddenly laid down work. As an artist he could not live under the conditions Egmont was offering him, but he did not want to give up making Scrooge McDuck comics either. So, his only choice was to go on hiatus and try to come to an agreement with Egmont. His main issues were that he had no control over his works. Rosa had discovered too often that his stories were printed with incorrect pages of art, improper colors, poor lettering, or pixelated computer conversions of the illustrations. Another matter was that his name was used in promotion of these flawed books and collections of stories without his agreement. Rosa has never, nor has any other artist working on Disney-licensed characters, received royalties for the use or multi-national reprinting of any of his stories worldwide.
Rosa came to an agreement with Egmont in December of the same year, which gave him more control over the stories and the manner in which they were publicized.
Rosa's eyesight had been very poor since his childhood. In 2006 and 2007 he began having new difficulties, which made drawing a very slow and tedious process for him, even more so than normally. In March 2008, Rosa suffered a severe retinal detachment and underwent emergency eye surgery that proved to be only partially successful. Further surgery in both eyes made drawing even more difficult. On June 2, 2008, during an interview at the Danish Komiks.dk fair, Rosa stated that he would not do any more comics, citing eye troubles, low pay, and the constant use of his stories in special hardback or album editions by international Disney licensees without any payment of royalties or requests for permission for the use of his name.
In 2012, Rosa wrote an essay about his retirement for Egmont's 9-volume "Don Rosa Collection", which was to be published in Finland, Norway, Germany and Sweden. Rosa says that Egmont agreed to publish the essay, but Disney refused to allow them to print it under their license. Rosa arranged with Egmont to post the essay on his own website, and publish a link to the essay in the collection. The essay, posted at "career-end.donrosa.de", cites the above reasons, with special emphasis on the "Disney comics system" for paying writers and artists a flat per-page rate, and then allowing publishers around the world to print the stories without payment to the creators.
Rosa is more popular with readers in Europe than in his native United States. According to him, even his next-door neighbors do not know his profession.
In 1980, Rosa married Ann Payne. Payne is a retired social studies middle school teacher.
Don Rosa describes himself as an introvert due to being socially isolated as a child. Also, he thinks of himself as a workaholic.
Rosa suffered from depression during years before he quit. He believes that it was caused by working hard while taking little time for leisure, a result of his self-imposed work regimen due to his enthusiasm for Barks' characters.
Rosa is an avid collector of many things, including comic books, "TV Guide", "National Geographic", and movie magazines, fanzines, books, White Castle memorabilia, pinball machines and movies and more.
Rosa also grows exotic chili plants and tends nearly 30 acres of a private nature preserve with wildflower fields and numerous forest trails. That and taking semi-annual European signing tours to visit his fellow BarksDucks fans, takes up all of his time. He is also working to complete his collections of All American comic books published between 1945 and 1970.
In Europe, Rosa is recognized as one of the best Disney comics creators. Carl Barks and Rosa are among the few artists who have their name written on the covers of Disney magazines when their stories are published. Rosa enjoys including subtle references to his movies and comic as well as his own previous work. He normally uses about 12 panels per page, instead of the more common eight. He needs to use the extra panels, because his plot ideas usually are too long to be published if he does not condense them.
Rosa has an especially large following in Finland, and in 1999, he created a special 32-page adventure featuring Scrooge McDuck for his Finnish fans called; "Sammon Salaisuus" (translates to "The secret of the Sampo", but it is officially named "The Quest for Kalevala" in English), based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. The publication of this story created a national sensation in Finland where Donald Duck and the Kalevala are important aspects of culture. It was published in many other countries as well. The cover for the comic book was a spoof of a famous painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
The latest work that Rosa has worked on is a cover for the album "Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge" by Tuomas Holopainen from Nightwish who is a fan of Rosa's comics.
With a bachelor of arts degree in civil engineering as his only real drawing education, Rosa has some unusual drawing methods, as he writes: "I suspect "nothing" I do is done the way anyone else does it."
Because of being self-taught in making comics, Rosa relies mostly on the skills he learned in engineering school, which means using technical pens and templates extensively. He applies templates and other engineering tools to draw what other artists draw freehand. He usually drew just under a page per day, but that depended on the amount of detail he puts in the picture.
Rosa's drawing style is considered much more detailed and "dirtier" than that of most Disney artists, living or dead, and often likened to that of underground artists, and he is frequently compared to Robert Crumb. When Rosa was first told of this similarity, he said that he "drew that bad" long before he discovered underground comics during college. He went on to explain these similarities to underground artists with a similar background of making comics as a hobby:
"I want to take everything Barks wrote and forge it into a workable timeline. My original dream was to become the new Carl Barks. I wanted to write, draw, and letter all my own stories. People tell me that my pencils look just like Barks, but my inks are pure Rosa, and I can't letter properly! So I'll have to settle for being Don Rosa." – Don Rosa in 1987
"Don Rosa has often been called the heir of Carl Barks, especially for the way in which he has carried on the Ducks' Family Saga. But I don't think so: in my opinion Don Rosa [...] is an author who has used Barks' characters to make stories that are completely new, 'Donrosian' rather than 'Barksian', just like Barks can't be considered the heir of Al Taliaferro only because he has worked on the Ducks after him." – Carlo Chendi, Italian Disney comics writer
Rosa's idol when it comes to comics is Carl Barks. Rosa builds almost all his stories on characters and locations that Barks invented. Many of Rosa's stories contain references to some fact pointed out in a Barks story. At the request of publishers in response to reader demands, Rosa has even created sequels of old Barks stories. For example, his "Return to Plain Awful" is a sequel to "Lost in the Andes!", where the Ducks return to the same hidden country. To add more to his admiration and consistency to Barks and Barks' stories, Rosa makes all his ducks' stories set in the 1950s. This is because Barks writes most of the stories about Scrooge, Donald and all people of Duckburg in the 1950s (it also conveniently resolves potential continuity problems, such as Scrooge's age). As explained in text pages in the "Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck" and its companion volume, Rosa does intense research of time periods to ensure not only that he gets the physical details right, but also to ensure that all characters could have been present.
Barks either created most of the characters used by Rosa or is credited for greatly developing their personalities. Rosa thus feels obliged to make his stories factually consistent. He has spent a lot of time in making lists of facts and anecdotes pointed out in different stories by his mentor. Especially "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck" was based mostly on the earlier works of Barks. Rosa admitted however that a scene of the first chapter was inspired by a story by Tony Strobl.
As most of the characters Rosa uses were created by Barks, and because Rosa considers Scrooge rather than Donald to be the main character of the Duck universe, he does not regard himself as a pure Disney artist, nor the characters really as Disney's. "Rosa prefers to say that the characters he uses are Barks's, Barks having reshaped Donald Duck's personality and creating everything else we know of Duckburg while working as a freelancer in 1942–1967 for an independent licensed publisher (Dell/Western Comics). Barks even claimed to have also created Huey, Dewey and Louie while working as a writer on Donald Duck animated cartoons in 1937." Because of his idolization of Barks, he repeatedly discourages his fans to use an absolutist way of saying his clearly different drawing style would be better than Barks's, and he found that notion confirmed when Barks himself spoke about Rosa's style in a critical tone though it is uncertain whether those comments were Barks's or those of his temporary "business managers" who filtered his communications.
"I usually don't like my stories. I mean I try really hard, but I know I don't draw that well. I know people like it because it's got lots of extra details, but art directors know good artwork, and they know mine is not good artwork. Now, people always say, 'You're being too modest, you're being too modest', and I say, 'What?' They just have to ask me the right question. I know it's not good artwork and I don't know if it's well-drawn, but I know it's entertaining." – Don Rosa, Torino Comics Festival, April 2011
"Don Rosa has a style that is a little bit different from the Disney style. I know that there is a great deal of people that like that style, which is extremely detailed. So there is room in the business for artists like Don Rosa and for others like Van Horn. They have a different style. But if they have a good story and tell it properly, then people are going to like it." – Carl Barks, interview given at Disneyland Paris, July 7, 1994
Beside Rosa's constant effort to remain faithful to the universe Barks created, there is also a number of notable differences between the two artists. The most obvious of these is Rosa's much more detailed drawing style, often with many background gags, which has been credited as being a result of Rosa's love of the Will Elder stories of "MAD" comics and magazines. While Barks himself discouraged the use of extreme grimacing and gesturing in any other panel for comical or dramatic effect, Rosa's stories are rich with colorful and bizarre facial renditions and physical slapstick. Barks had over 600 Duck stories to his name while Rosa only created 85 until his eye trouble set in, but whereas Barks made many short one and two-pagers centered around a subtle, compact gag, Rosa's oeuvre consists almost exclusively of long adventure stories.
Andrea "Bramo" Bramini identifies the following four differences between Barks's and Rosa's way of storytelling:
Most of Rosa's stories have the letters D.U.C.K. hidden within either the first panel or, if Rosa has created the cover art, within the cover art itself. D.U.C.K. is an acronym for "Dedicated to Uncle Carl from Keno" (Carl being Carl Barks and Keno being Rosa's given first name). Due to Disney's refusal to allow artists to sign their work, early Rosa dedications to Barks were deleted as they seemed to be a form of a signature. Later Rosa began hiding the dedication acronym from his editors in various and unlikely places within his drawings.
Rosa has drawn covers for reprints of Carl Barks stories and has included his D.U.C.K. dedication within them as well.
Another curiosity is his Hidden Mickeys. Rosa is only interested in creating stories featuring the Duck family, but he often hides small Mickey Mouse heads or figures in the pictures, sometimes in a humiliating or unwanted situation. An example of this is in the story "The Terror of the Transvaal" where a flat Mickey can be seen under an elephant's foot. This is mostly a gag done for the fun of it. Rosa has admitted to neither liking nor disliking Mickey Mouse, but being indifferent to him.
In the story "Attack of the Hideous Space-Varmints", the asteroid with Uncle Scrooge's money bin on it crashes into the Moon along with two missiles, creating a large Mickey Mouse head on the surface. When Huey, Dewey and Louie tell Donald that the missiles hit the "dark" (far) side of the Moon, Donald is thankful no one is going to see it — "For a minute there, I thought we were going to have some legal problems."
In the second Rosa story featuring The Three Caballeros, Donald Duck is shocked by the sight of a capybara standing on its hind legs, with shrubs, leaves and fruit in front of its body, coincidentally making it look like Mickey Mouse. José Carioca and Panchito Pistoles, never having seen Mickey Mouse, ask Donald what is wrong, but Donald replies he is just tired. Later in the same story, the Caballeros free several animals from a poacher. One panel shows the animals fleeing; Mickey can be seen among them.
In "The Quest for Kalevala" this running gag can be seen on the original, Akseli Gallen-Kallela-inspired cover art. In the original work, Louhi is depicted as bare-chested, but the Disneyfied version has been drawn a top, of fabric patterned with Mickey Mouse heads.
His work has won Rosa a good deal of recognition in the industry, including nominations for the Comics' Buyer's Guide Award for Favorite Writer in 1997, 1998, and 1999. Heidi MacDonald of Comics Buyer's Guide also mentioned Rosa's 1994 story "Guardians of the Lost Library" as ""possibly the greatest comic book story of all time"".
In 1995 Rosa was awarded the Eisner Award for "Best Serialized Story" for "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck". In 1997 he won an Eisner for "Best Artist/Writer – Humor Category".
Rosa's story "The Black Knight GLORPS Again!" was nominated for the 2007 Eisner Award in the category Best Short Story. While "The Prisoner of White Agony Creek", Rosa's latest Duck story to-date, was published in 2006, he was also nominated for the 2007 Harvey Awards in five categories (more than any other creator was that year) for his Uncle Scrooge comics: "Best Writer", "Best Artist", "Best Cartoonist", "Best Cover Artist", and "Special Award for Humor in Comics." In 2013 Rosa received the Bill Finger Award which recognises excellence in comic book writing for writers who have not received their rightful reward and/or recognition.
International "Best Cartoonist of the Year" awards include:
In 1997 the Italian publishing house Editrice ComicArt published a lavish volume about Rosa's biography and work related to the Disney characters. It was titled "Don Rosa e il Rinascimento Disneyano" ("Don Rosa and the Disneyean Renaissance") and written by famous Disney and Rosa scholars, Alberto Becattini, Leonardo Gori and Francesco Stajano. This work not only discusses all of Rosa's creative life up to 1997, but it also gives a comprehensive biography, lists up to that date his Disney work and presents an extensive interview with Rosa.
In 2009, Danish director Sebastian S. Cordes shot a 75-minute documentary called "The Life and Times of Don Rosa", consisting of exclusive interviews with Rosa himself on his farm near Louisville, Kentucky. According to the project's Facebook group, the English-language DVD was released in Denmark on April 16, 2011.
In 2011, Italian Disney fan forum "papersera.net" published "Don Rosa: A Little Something Special" (edited by Italian Rosa fan Paolo Castagno), a large folio format, bilingual (Italian and English) book about Rosa's life and work, containing interviews with Rosa and articles by many Italian and European Disney artists, Disney scholars, and established art critics commenting on Rosa's work and career, also including many exclusive, rare Rosa drawings and illustrations. The book was originally made as a gift by "papersera.net" for Rosa himself upon the occasion of Rosa's April 2011 visit to Turin, Italy.
In 2017 the book, "I Still Get Chills!", featuring text by German journalist Alex Jakubowski and photographs by Lois Lammerhuber, was published by Edition Lammerhuber in honor of Rosa's 66th birthday and the 70th anniversary of the first appearance of Scrooge McDuck.
A feature documentary about Don Rosa and Scrooge McDuck by French director Morgann Gicquel titled "The Scrooge Mystery" was released in December 2017 and was released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2018.
Apart from the "Don Rosa Collection" in Germany and "Don Rosas Samlade/Samlede Verk" and "Don Rosan kootut" in the Nordic nations, the following collections only contain Rosa's work for Disney. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8927 |
Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov (, born David Abelevich Kaufman, , and also known as Denis Kaufman; – 12 February 1954) was a Ukrainian Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
In the 2012 "Sight & Sound" poll, critics voted Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929) the 8th best film ever made.
Vertov's younger brothers Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman were also noted filmmakers, as was his wife, Yelizaveta Svilova.
Vertov was born David Abelevich Kaufman () into a family of Jewish lineage in Białystok, Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire. He Russified his Jewish name David and patronymic Abelevich to Denis Arkadievich at some point after 1918. Vertov studied music at Białystok Conservatory until his family fled from the invading German Army to Moscow in 1915. The Kaufmans soon settled in Petrograd, where Vertov began writing poetry, science fiction, and satire. In 1916–1917 Vertov was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and experimenting with "sound collages" in his free time. He eventually adopted the name "Dziga Vertov", which translates loosely from Ukrainian as 'spinning top'.
Vertov is known for many early writings, mainly while still in school, that focus on the individual versus the perceptive nature of the camera lens, which he was known to call his "second eye".
Most of Vertov's early work was unpublished, and few manuscripts survived after the Second World War, though some material surfaced in later films and documentaries created by Vertov and his brothers, Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman.
Vertov is known for quotes on perception, and its ineffability, in relation to the nature of qualia (sensory experiences).
After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for "Kino-Nedelya" (, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia), which first came out in June 1918. While working for "Kino-Nedelya" he met his future wife, the film director and editor, Elizaveta Svilova, who at the time was working as an editor at Goskino. She began collaborating with Vertov, beginning as his editor but becoming assistant and co-director in subsequent films, such as "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929), and "Three Songs About Lenin" (1934).
Vertov worked on the "Kino-Nedelya" series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin's agit-train during the ongoing Russian Civil War between Communists and counterrevolutionaries. Some of the cars on the agit-trains were equipped with actors for live performances or printing presses; Vertov's had equipment to shoot, develop, edit, and project film. The trains went to battlefronts on agitation-propaganda missions intended primarily to bolster the morale of the troops; they were also intended to stir up revolutionary fervor of the masses.
In 1919, Vertov compiled newsreel footage for his documentary "Anniversary of the Revolution;" he also supervising the filming of his project "The Battle for Tsaritsyn" (1919). in 1921 he compiled "History of the Civil War." The so-called "Council of Three," a group issuing manifestoes in LEF, a radical Russian newsmagazine, was established in 1922; the group's "three" were Vertov, his (future) wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman. Vertov's interest in machinery led to a curiosity about the mechanical basis of cinema.
His statement "We: Variant of a Manifesto" was published in the first issue of Kino-Fot, published by Aleksei Gan in 1922. It commenced with a distinction between "kinoks" and other approaches to the emergent cinematic industry:
In 1922, the year that "Nanook of the North" was released, Vertov started the "Kino-Pravda" series. The series took its title from the official government newspaper "Pravda". "Kino-Pravda" (literally translated, "film truth") continued Vertov's agit-prop bent. "The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow", Vertov explained. He called it damp and dark. There was an earthen floor and holes one stumbled into at every turn. Dziga said, "This dampness prevented our reels of lovingly edited film from sticking together properly, rusted our scissors and our splicers." "Before dawn- damp, cold, teeth chattering- I wrap comrade Svilova in a third jacket." [quotation source needed]
Vertov's driving vision, expounded in his frequent essays, was to capture "film truth"—that is, fragments of actuality which, when organized together, have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye. In the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first. Usually, the episodes of "Kino-Pravda" did not include reenactments or stagings. (One exception is the segment about the trial of the Social Revolutionaries: the scenes of the selling of the newspapers on the streets and the people reading the papers in the trolley were both staged for the camera.) The cinematography is simple, functional, unelaborate—perhaps a result of Vertov's disinterest in both "beauty" and the "grandeur of fiction". Twenty-three issues of the series were produced over a period of three years; each issue lasted about twenty minutes and usually covered three topics. The stories were typically descriptive, not narrative, and included vignettes and exposés, showing for instance the renovation of a trolley system, the organization of farmers into communes, and the trial of Social Revolutionaries; one story shows starvation in the nascent Communist state. Propagandistic tendencies are also present, but with more subtlety, in the episode featuring the construction of an airport: one shot shows the Tsar's tanks helping prepare a foundation, with an intertitle reading "Tanks on the labor front".
Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series—in the final segment he includes contact information—but by the 14th episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as "insane". Vertov responds to their criticisms with the assertion that the critics were hacks nipping "revolutionary effort" in the bud, and concludes the essay with his promise to "explode art's tower of Babel". In Vertov's view, "art's tower of Babel" was the subservience of cinematic technique to narrative, commonly known as the Institutional Mode of Representation.
By this point in his career, Vertov was clearly and emphatically dissatisfied with narrative tradition, and expresses his hostility towards dramatic fiction of any kind both openly and repeatedly; he regarded drama as another "opiate of the masses". Vertov freely admitted one criticism leveled at his efforts on the "Kino-Pravda" series—that the series, while influential, had a limited release.
By the end of the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov made liberal use of stop motion, freeze frames, and other cinematic "artificialities", giving rise to criticisms not just of his trenchant dogmatism, but also of his cinematic technique. Vertov explains himself in "On 'Kinopravda' ": in editing "chance film clippings" together for the Kino-Nedelia series, he "began to doubt the necessity of a literary connection between individual visual elements spliced together... This work served as the point of departure for 'Kinopravda' ". Towards the end of the same essay, Vertov mentions an upcoming project which seems likely to be "Man with the Movie Camera" (1929), calling it an "experimental film" made without a scenario; just three paragraphs above, Vertov mentions a scene from "Kino Pravda" which should be quite familiar to viewers of "Man with the Movie Camera": the peasant works, and so does the urban woman, and so too, the woman film editor selecting the negative ... "
With Lenin's admission of limited private enterprise through the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, Russia began receiving fiction films from afar, an occurrence that Vertov regarded with undeniable suspicion, calling drama a "corrupting influence" on the proletarian sensibility ("On 'Kinopravda' ", 1924). By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" (1925). "Potemkin" was a heavily fictionalized film telling the story of a mutiny on a battleship which came about as a result of the sailors' mistreatment; the film was an obvious but skillful propaganda piece glorifying the proletariat. Vertov lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, possibly as a result of criticizing a film which effectively preaches the line of the Communist Party. He was fired for making "A Sixth Part of the World: Advertising and the Soviet Universe" for the State Trade Organization into a propaganda film, selling the Soviet as an advanced society under the NEP, instead of showing how they fit into the world economy.
The Ukraine State Studio hired Vertov to create "Man with a Movie Camera". Vertov says in his essay "The Man with a Movie Camera" that he was fighting "for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature". By the later segments of "Kino-Pravda", Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés (and receiving criticism for it); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of "Man with a Movie Camera", which was filmed in Ukraine. Some have criticized the obvious stagings in this film as being at odds with Vertov's credos of "life as it is" and "life caught unawares": the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot that films Mikhail Kaufman riding in a car filming a third car.
However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian comments in the commentary track on the DVD for "Man with the Movie Camera:" for Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera. This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera". All of these shots might conform to Vertov's credo "caught unawares". His slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Mikhail Kaufman stated in an interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. For example, in "Man with a Movie Camera", two trains are shown almost melting into each other. Although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail spoke about Eisenstein's films as being different from his and his brother's in that Eisenstein "came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads". "We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism", Mikhail explained. More than even film truth, "Man with a Movie Camera" was supposed to be a way to make those in the Soviet Union more efficient in their actions. He slowed down his movements, such as the decision whether to jump or not. You can see the decision in his face, a psychological dissection for the audience. He wanted a peace between the actions of man and the actions of a machine, for them to be, in a sense, one.
"Cine-Eye" is a montage method developed by Dziga Vertov and first formulated in his work "WE: Variant of a Manifesto" in 1919.
Dziga Vertov believed his concept of "Kino-Glaz", or "Cine Eye" in English, would help contemporary "man" evolve from a flawed creature into a higher, more precise form. He compared man unfavorably to machines: "In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people [...]" As he put it in a 1923 credo, "I am the Cine-Eye. I am the mechanical eye. I the machine show you the world as only I can see it. I emancipate myself henceforth and forever from human immobility. "I am in constant motion..." My path leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I can thus decipher a world that you do not know."
Like other Russian filmmakers, he attempted to connect his ideas and techniques to the advancement of the aims of the Soviet Union. Whereas Sergei Eisenstein viewed his montage of attractions as a creative tool through which the film-viewing masses could be subjected to "emotional and psychological influence" and therefore able to perceive "the ideological aspect" of the films they were watching, Vertov believed the Cine-Eye would influence the actual evolution of man, "from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man".
Vertov surrounded himself with others who were also firm believers in his ideas. These were the Kinoks, other Russian filmmakers who would assist him in his hopes of making "cine-eye" a success.
Vertov believed film was too "romantic" and "theatricalised" due to the influence of literature, theater, and music, and that these psychological film-dramas "prevent man from being as precise as a stopwatch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine". He desired to move away from "the pre-Revolutionary 'fictional' models" of filmmaking to one based on the rhythm of machines, seeking to "bring creative joy to all mechanical labour" and to "bring men closer to machines".
In May 1927 Vertov moved to Ukraine, and the Cine-Eye movement broke up.
Vertov's successful career continued into the 1930s. "Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass" (1931), an examination into Soviet miners, has been called a 'sound film', with sound recorded on location, and these mechanical sounds woven together, producing a symphony-like effect.
Three years later, "Three Songs about Lenin" (1934) looked at the revolution through the eyes of the Russian peasantry. For his film, however, Vertov had been hired by Mezhrabpomfilm, a Soviet studio that produced mainly propaganda efforts. The film, finished in January 1934 for Lenin's obit, was only publicly released in the Soviet Union in November of that year. From July 1934 it was shown at private screenings to various high-ranking Soviet officials and also to prominent foreigners including H. G. Wells, William Bullitt, and others, and it was screened at the Venice Film Festival in August 1934. A new version of the film was released in 1938, including a longer sequence to reflect Stalin's "achievements" at the end of the film and leaving out footage of "enemies" of that time. Today there exists a 1970 reconstruction by Elizaveta Svilova. With the rise and official sanction of socialist realism in 1934, Vertov was forced to cut his personal artistic output significantly, eventually becoming little more than an editor for Soviet newsreels. "Lullaby", perhaps the last film in which Vertov was able to maintain his artistic vision, was released in 1937.
Dziga Vertov died of cancer in Moscow in 1954.
Vertov's brother Boris Kaufman was a cinematographer who worked with Jean Vigo on "L'Atalante" (1934) and much later for directors such as Elia Kazan in the United States who won an Oscar for his work on "On the Waterfront". His other brother, Mikhail Kaufman, worked with Vertov on his films until he became a documentarian in his own right. Mikhail Kaufman's directorial debut was the film "In Spring" (1929).
In 1923, Vertov married his long-time collaborator Elizaveta Svilova.
Vertov's legacy still lives on today. His ideas are echoed in cinéma vérité, the movement of the 1960s named after Vertov's "Kino-Pravda". The 1960s and 1970s saw an international revival of interest in Vertov.
The independent, exploratory style of Vertov influenced and inspired many filmmakers and directors like the Situationist Guy Debord and independent companies such as Vertov Industries in Hawaii. The Dziga Vertov Group borrowed his name. In 1960, Jean Rouch used Vertov's filming theory when making "Chronicle of a Summer". His partner Edgar Morin coined the term "cinéma vérité" when describing the style, using direct translation of Vertov's "KinoPravda".
The Free Cinema movement in the United Kingdom during the 1950s, the Direct Cinema in North America in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the "Candid Eye" series in Canada in the 1950s all essentially owed a debt to Vertov.
This revival of Vertov's legacy included rehabilitation of his reputation in the Soviet Union, with retrospectives of his films, biographical works, and writings. In 1962, the first Soviet monograph on Vertov was published, followed by another collection, "Dziga Vertov: Articles, Diaries, Projects". In 1984, to recall the 30th anniversary of Vertov's death, three New York cultural organizations put on the first American retrospective of Vertov's work.
New Media theorist Lev Manovich suggested Vertov as one of the early pioneers of database cinema genre in his essay "Database as a symbolic form". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8930 |
Delaware General Corporation Law
The Delaware General Corporation Law (Title 8, Chapter 1 of the Delaware Code) is the statute governing corporate law in the U.S. state of Delaware. Originally adopted in 1899, it has been the most important jurisdiction in United States corporate law since the early 20th century. Over 50% of publicly traded corporations in the United States and 60% of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in the state.
Delaware acquired its status as a corporate haven in the early 20th century. Following the example of New Jersey, which enacted corporate-friendly laws at the end of the 19th century to attract businesses from New York, Delaware adopted on March 10, 1899, a general incorporation act aimed at attracting more businesses. The group that pushed for this legislation intended to establish a corporation that would sell services to other businesses incorporating in Delaware. Before the rise of general incorporation acts, forming a corporation required a special act of the state legislature. General incorporation allowed anyone to form a corporation by simply raising money and filing articles of incorporation with the state's Secretary of State.
Because of the extensive experience of the Delaware courts, Delaware has a more well-developed body of case law than other states, which serves to give corporations and their counsel greater guidance on matters of corporate governance and transaction liability issues. Disputes over the internal affairs of Delaware corporations are usually filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery, which is a separate court of equity, as opposed to a court of law. Because it is a court of equity, there are no juries; its cases are heard by judges, called chancellors. Since 1989, the court has consisted of one chancellor and four vice-chancellors. The court is a trial court, with one chancellor hearing each case. Litigants may appeal final decisions of the Court of Chancery to the Delaware Supreme Court.
Delaware has also attracted major credit card banks because of its relaxed rules regarding interest. Many U.S. states have usury laws limiting the amount of interest a lender can charge. Federal law allows a national bank to "import" these laws from the state in which its principal office is located. Delaware (amongst others) has relatively relaxed interest laws, so several national banks have decided to locate their principal office in Delaware. National banks are, however, corporations formed under federal law, not Delaware law. A corporation formed under Delaware state law benefits from the relaxed interest rules to the extent it conducts business in Delaware, but is subject to restrictions of other states' laws if it conducts business in other states.
Pursuant to the "internal affairs doctrine", corporations which act in more than one state are subject only to the laws of their state of incorporation with regard to the regulation of the internal affairs of the corporation. As a result, Delaware corporations are subject almost exclusively to Delaware law, even when they do business in other states.
While most states require a for-profit corporation to have at least one director and two officers, Delaware laws do not have this restriction. All offices may be held by a single person who also can be the sole shareholder. The person, who does not need to be a U.S. citizen or resident, may also operate anonymously with only the listing agent through whom the company is registered named.
According to Section 226 of the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL) the Court of Chancery is permitted to appoint a receiver or custodian for a corporation when its stockholders or directors are divided and the deadlock is injurious to the corporation. In August 2015, the head of the Delaware Chancery, Chancellor Andre Bouchard employed 226(a) of the DGCL to order the auction of the shares of a company that was not in financial distress, nor at risk of insolvency, because its co-owners could not get along. The forced sale of TransPerfect is the first time a company that did not meet the criteria for receivership and mandated sale under Delaware law was being forced to dissolve, to award one board member who wanted to exit with a control premium. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has taken an interest in this case because he views it as "contradictory" to the Delaware corporate laws.
Under the law, the Chancery is not obligated or even mandated to make accommodations for any party to sell his or her interest. The only concern for the Delaware court is to make sure that a company is run well and not being harmed. In this regard, the case of TransPerfect can seem at odds with the court's mandate. The Chancellor decided to mandate the sale of the company because the two directors were locked in a dispute that left them unable to negotiate among themselves. At issue, however, is that in doing so, the Chancery and the Chancellor appear to be seeking an inequitable share for one of the partners who wanted to exit and asked for an offer to leave, forcing the partner who would prefer to remain and operate the firm to exit as well. The court cited employee affidavits attesting to one party's commitment over the other's.
On April 27, 2016, rather than sealing his decision, Chancellor Bouchard told the parties to take more time and to come to a resolution outside of the courtroom. One party then made a public offer of $300 million to the other.
Delaware charges no income tax on corporations not operating within the state, so taking advantage of Delaware's other benefits does not result in taxation. At the same time, Delaware has a particularly aggressive tax on banks that locate in the state. However, in general, the state is viewed as a positive location for corporate tax purposes because favorable laws of incorporation allow companies to minimize corporate expenditures (achieved through legal standardization of corporate legal processes), creating a nucleus in Delaware with operating companies often in other states.
In addition, Delaware has used its position as the state of incorporation to generate revenue from its abandoned and unclaimed property laws. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, the state of incorporation gets to keep any abandoned and unclaimed property, such as uncashed checks and unredeemed gift certificates, if the corporation does not have information about the location of the owner of the property.
A state may levy, however, a franchise tax on the corporations incorporated in it. Franchise taxes in Delaware are actually far higher than in most other states which typically charge little or nothing beyond corporate income taxes on the portion of the corporation's business done in that state. Delaware's franchise taxes supply about one-fifth of its state revenue.
In February 2013, "The Economist" published an article on tax-friendly jurisdictions, commenting that Delaware stood for "Dollars and Euros Laundered And Washed At Reasonable Expense". Jeffrey W. Bullock, Delaware's Secretary of State, insists that the state has struck the right balance between curbing criminality and "paying deference to the millions of legitimate businesspeople who benefit" from hassle-free incorporation.
On June 30, 2013, Delaware Governor Jack Markell signed into law amendments to the Delaware General Corporation Law that affect several provisions in the current law and could substantially affect the process through which public companies are merged. The new legislation took effect August 1, 2013, except for ratification of defective corporate acts amendment which took effect in 2014.
In 2020, the Delaware Supreme Court upheld a provision allowing companies to require in their certificates of incorporation all Securities Act of 1933 claims to be filed in federal court.
DGCL 203 is particularly known as a antitakover law. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8933 |
Detroit River
The Detroit River () flows for from Lake St. Clair west and south to Lake Erie as a strait in the Great Lakes system. It forms part of the border between Canada and the United States. The river divides the metropolitan areas of Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario—an area referred to as Detroit–Windsor. The Ambassador Bridge, the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel, and the Michigan Central Railway Tunnel connect the cities.
The river's English name comes from the French (""River of the Strait""). The Detroit River has served an important role in the history of Detroit and Windsor, and is one of the world's busiest waterways. It is an important transportation route connecting Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior to the St. Lawrence Seaway and Erie Canal. When Detroit underwent rapid industrialization at the turn of the 20th century, the Detroit River became notoriously polluted and toxic. Since the late 20th century, however, a vast restoration effort has been undertaken because of the river's ecological importance.
In the early 21st century, the river today has a wide variety of economic and recreational uses. There are numerous islands in the Detroit River, and much of the lower portion of the river part is of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. The portion of the river in the city of Detroit has been organized into the Detroit International Riverfront and the William G. Milliken State Park and Harbor. The Detroit River is designated both an American Heritage River and a Canadian Heritage River—the only river to have this dual designation.
The Detroit River flows for from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie. By definition, this classifies it as both a river and a strait — a strait being a narrow passageway connecting two large bodies of water, which is how the river earned its name from early French settlers. However, today, the Detroit River is rarely referred to as a strait, because bodies of water referred to as straits are typically much wider.
The Detroit River is only wide. It begins with an east-to-west flow from Lake St. Clair, but curves and runs north to south. The deepest portion of the Detroit River is in its northern portion. At its source, the river is at an elevation of above sea level. The river is relatively level, dropping only before entering Lake Erie at . As the river contains no dams and no locks, it is easily navigable by even the smallest of vessels. The watershed basin for the Detroit River is approximately .
Since the river is fairly short, it has few tributaries, the largest being the River Rouge in Michigan; this is four times longer than the Detroit River and contains most of the watershed. The only other major American tributary to the Detroit River is the much smaller Ecorse River. Tributaries on the Canadian side include Little River, Turkey Creek, and the River Canard. The discharge for the Detroit River is relatively high for a river of its size. The river's discharge averaged over the year is , and the river's flow is relatively constant.
The Detroit River forms a major element of the international border between the United States and Canada. The river on the American side is all under the jurisdiction of Wayne County, Michigan, and the Canadian side is under the administration of Essex County, Ontario. The largest city along the Detroit River is Detroit, and most of the population along the river lives in Michigan. The Detroit River has two automobile traffic crossings connecting the United States and Canada: the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel. Both of these are strongly protected by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Canada Border Services Agency.
The upper portion of the river is one of the few places where a Canadian city lies directly south of an American city. In this case, the city of Detroit is directly north of the city of Windsor, Ontario. The only other location where this occurs is Fort Erie, Ontario, which lies south of several cities in Niagara County, New York. The cities and communities southwest of Detroit along the American side of the river are popularly referred to as the Downriver area, because those areas are said to be "down the river" from Detroit. Several of these communities do not border the Detroit River but the term "Downriver" refers broadly to the cluster of 18 suburban communities that lie to the southwest of the city of Detroit and to the west of the Detroit River.
The Detroit River contains numerous islands, whose ownership and control varies. The majority are on the American side of the river; none is divided by the international border. Many are very small and uninhabited, but Grosse Île on the U.S. side and Bois Blanc (Boblo) Island on the Canadian side each have permanent populations. Most islands are in the southern portion of the waterway, close to where the river empties into Lake Erie. Belle Isle, in the northern section of the river, is open to the public via a bridge connection with Detroit. The former city park is now operated as a Michigan State Park. Bald eagles and other birds have returned to the island and river areas.
Europeans first recorded navigating the Detroit River in the 17th century. The Iroquois traded furs with the Dutch colonists at New Amsterdam by traveling through the Detroit River. The French later claimed the area for New France. The famed sailing ship "Le Griffon" reached the mouth of the Detroit River in mid-August 1679 on its maiden voyage through the Great Lakes. Later, when the French began settling in the area, they navigated the river using canoes made of birch or elm bark. Handcrafted vessels were a common mode of travel across the river, and pirogues and bateaux were also used.
As the North American fur trade intensified, European settlers expanded their trade westward into uncharted territories. French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac sailed up the Detroit River on July 23, 1701. The next day, he established Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, which developed as Detroit. The French named the river as "Rivière Détroit". "Détroit" is French for "strait". The river was known literally as the "River of the Strait".
When Great Britain defeated the French in the Seven Years War (known as the French and Indian War on the North American front), it took over control of the Detroit River, as well as other French territory east of the Mississippi River. The newly formed United States claimed this territory during the American Revolution, but the British did not transfer it until 1796.
During the War of 1812, the Detroit River served as a major barrier between the American Michigan Territory and British Upper Canada, especially during the Battle of Fort Detroit in August 1812. Detroit briefly fell to the British. After the completion of the Erie Canal in 1817, which opened up easier travel to Lake Erie from the East Coast of the United States, connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and the port of New York City, the Detroit River became a route for many migrating settlers traveling to northern Michigan. Detroit rapidly attracted a share of new residents. Following the Patriot War, in which British regulars and Michigan militia nearly came to armed conflict on the ice-covered Detroit River, the United States built Fort Wayne at Detroit to counter Britain's riverside Fort Malden at Amherstburg across the river.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Union feared the seceded Confederate States of America (CSA) would plan a northerly attack from Canada, which was controlled by the British Empire and remained neutral in the war. The Union feared the CSA would cross the Detroit River to launch this attack. For that reason, Union forces regularly patrolled the Detroit River and the fortification at Fort Wayne improved, although it was far removed from any major combat. A Confederate plot to capture the U.S. Navy warship, USS "Michigan", and liberate Confederate prisoners from Johnson Island, in western Lake Erie, was narrowly averted only after the Confederates had captured two passenger steamships.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Detroit's industrialization took off on an unprecedented scale. The Detroit River became the world's busiest commercial river and in 1908 was dubbed "the Greatest Commercial Artery on Earth" by "The Detroit News". In 1907, the Detroit River carried 67,292,504 tons (61 billion kg) of shipping commerce through Detroit to markets all over the world. By comparison, London shipped 18,727,230 tons (16 billion kg), and New York shipped 20,390,953 tons (18 billion kg).
From 1920 to 1933, the United States (US) enforced the Prohibition era. The sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption were nationally banned. Detroit, as the largest city bordering Canada, where alcohol remained legal during Prohibition, became the center of a new industry known as rum-running, smuggling liquor into the US.
No bridges connected Ontario, Canada and Michigan, US, until the Ambassador Bridge was finished in 1929 and the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel in 1930. Smugglers used boats of varying sizes to transport alcohol across the river during the summer, and during the winter months, rum-runners traveled back and forth across the frozen Detroit River by car. In some cases, overloaded cars fell through the ice. In the 21st century, car parts from this illegal era are occasionally still found on the bottom of the river. Rum-running in Windsor and production of bootleg liquor became common practices. American mobsters such as the Purple Gang of Detroit used violence to control the route known as the "Detroit-Windsor Funnel," and continue to gain lucrative returns from the trade. The name parodied the newly built tunnel between the cities and nations. The Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair River are estimated to have carried 75% of all liquor smuggled into the United States during Prohibition. Government officials were unable or unwilling to deter the flow.
The rum-running industry died when prohibition was repealed in 1933 by the Twenty-first Amendment.
Because of the booming businesses and long history of Metro Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, the Detroit River has been the site of many artifacts, some lost with sunken ships and others abandoned, such as murder weapons or stolen bronze statues. A DMC DeLorean has also been recovered from the river. The artifacts recovered are well preserved due to the river's fresh water but low visibility makes them difficult to find.
A 1940s-era bronze statue depicting a classical nude woman was originally installed to overlook a reflecting pool in the Grosse Pointe War Memorial. It was nicknamed "The Nude," and was believed to have been successfully stolen for display in some art collector's private cache. During a police diving exercise near a submerged Jeep, the statue was found in 2019, restored, and returned to the memorial.
Anchors from the "SS Greater Detroit," a luxury steamship that toured the Detroit River from 1924-1950, and the famed "SS Edmund Fitzgerald", a lake freighter that sank in a terrible 1975 storm, have notably both been recovered from the river. The 6,000-pound anchor of the "SS Greater Detroit" was raised in November 2016. It was installed at the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority Building. The lost anchor of the "SS Edmund Fitzgerald" was recovered during a July 1992 project, and the anchor was installed in the yard of the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle.
Since the 1980s, divers have recovered a total of six 1700s-era cannons from the river. The last was found in 2011 near the Cobo Center. They are believed to have been part of the pre-War of 1812 inventory kept by the British garrison in this area. Historians believe another three cannon may still be in the river. Inventory documents record a total of 17 cannons and 14 have been accounted for. It is believed that the British dragged the cannons onto the frozen river so they would sink with the spring thaw, and be kept from use by the American enemy. Another seven, larger cannons may have fallen off a barge closer to Amherstburg, Ontario, and may yet be found in the river.
Much of the land that surrounds the Detroit River is urbanized and, in some places, has been used for industrial purposes for more than 100 years. There has been excessive water pollution of the river from the long-term, unregulated dumping of chemicals, industrial waste, garbage, and sewage. Much of the Detroit River and its shoreline were polluted and unsafe for recreational use. Thousands of migrating birds died each year because of the oil slicks and contaminated water around the mouth of the Detroit River at Lake Erie. The river's oxygen levels were depleted to the point where fish could not inhabit its waters. Because this pollution often drained into and affected Lake Erie, the lake was considered "dead" and unable to support aquatic life.
In 1961, a congressional order founded the Wyandotte National Wildlife Refuge. That began the government's placing tighter restrictions on industries; substantial government funding at various levels has been allocated to clean up the river. In this early period, opponents believed that such efforts would adversely affect Detroit's industry and economy. In 1970, toxic levels of mercury in the water resulted in the total closing of the fishing industry in the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, the Detroit River, and Lake Erie. Finally a massive conservation effort was initiated to clean up the Detroit River. For years, the multi-million dollar cost of removing pollutants from the river and the political influence of nearby industries, hindered conservation efforts.
In 2001, the Wyandotte National Wildlife Refuge was absorbed into the larger Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, a cooperative effort between the United States and Canada to preserve the area as an ecological refuge. The millions of dollars spent since that time to dredge pollutants out of the Detroit River has led to a remarkable restoration, although problems remain. Today, many species of native animals that had been driven out by human development are returning to the area. The river is home to a growing number of bird species such as eagles (including reintroduced bald eagles), ospreys, and peregrine falcons. Large numbers of lake whitefish, sturgeon, silver bass, black bass, salmon, perch, and walleye are again thriving in the river.
In 1998 the Detroit River was designated as an American Heritage River by the US Environmental Protection Agency and in 2001 as a Canadian Heritage River. It is the only river in North America to have such dual designations.
The Detroit River is used for shipping and trading. The earliest use of the river for these economic activities was the shipping of furs for trade as early as the 17th century. By the time the fur trade decreased, Michigan had begun to exploit the lumber-rich areas of Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. Detroit turned into a major industrial region, largely because of the Detroit River. The only way a ship could travel out of the upper Great Lakes system was to travel down the Detroit River. From there, ships could travel anywhere in the world out of the St. Lawrence Seaway or the Erie Canal to New York City. At the beginning of the 20th century, the automotive industry boomed, and the many manufacturers imported abundant supplies of iron ore, sand, limestone and wood.
The Detroit River provides substantial revenue for the local economies. A 1991 study showed $20.1 million came from sales related to waterfowl hunting along the Detroit River. The same year, bird watching, photography, and other non-consumptive uses of waterfowl contributed another $192.8 million to Michigan’s economy. Local economies benefit through boating registrations and fishing licenses. It is estimated walleye fishing alone brings in $1 million to the economy of communities along the lower Detroit River each spring. Other fish caught by recreational fisherman include white bass, bluegill, crappie, freshwater drum, smallmouth bass, northern pike and muskie. There are over 800,000 recreation boats in Michigan, and more than half of them are regularly used on or near the Detroit River. Popular river destinations in Detroit include the Detroit International Riverfront and Belle Isle Park — both of which host events throughout the year. Several restaurants on the river have docks for boaters. Tour boats and dinner cruises travel through the sights of Detroit and the undeveloped islands downriver. Cruise ships support tourism on the Great Lakes and dock at the Port Detroit passenger terminal downtown. The iconic Renaissance Center is on the banks of the Detroit River.
According to a 2004 study, 150,000 jobs and $13 billion in annual production depend on the river crossings connecting Detroit to Windsor. In 2004, the American trade with Ontario alone was $407 billion, in which 28% ($113.3 billion) crossed the Detroit River.
The only automobile traffic routes that completely cross the river are the privately owned Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, both of which connect Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario. A railway tunnel and a commercial truck ferry service also travel between Detroit and Windsor. In Michigan, there are two bridges connecting the mainland to Grosse Ile and the MacArthur Bridge, popularly known as the "Belle Isle Bridge," that connects the City of Detroit to Belle Isle Park. All crossings (ports of entry) on the American side are secured by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Office of Field Operations and on the Canadian side by the Canada Border Services Agency; all areas between the American ports of entry and on the American side of the river are secured by the United States Border Patrol.
Proposals have been made to create a third crossing to connect Detroit and Windsor. The exact location for this crossing is the most debated element, as it could negatively affect a large number of environmental features and communities along the river. The Gordie Howe International Bridge is a new bridge project which began construction in 2015; it will directly connect Highway 401 in Canada to Interstate 75 in the U.S. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8935 |
Dsungaripterus
Dsungaripterus is a genus of pterosaur, with an average wingspan of . It lived during the Early Cretaceous, in China, where the first fossil was found in the Junggar Basin.
"Dsungaripterus weii" had a wing span of 3 to 3.5 metres (9.8-11.5 ft). Like most dsungaripteroids it had a rather robust skeleton with thick walls and stouty bodily proportions, suggesting a mostly terrestrial lifestyle. The flight style of these animals is unclear, but it was probably punctuated by abrupt landings and extensive flapping.
Its skull, forty to fifty centimetres long, bore a low bone crest that ran down from the base of the skull to halfway to the beak. "Dsungaripterus"'s head and neck were together almost a meter long. Its most notable feature are its long, narrow, upcurved jaws with a pointed tip. It had no teeth in the front part of its jaws, which were probably used to remove prey from cracks in rocks or/and the sandy, muddy inland environments it inhabited. It had knobbly flat teeth more to the back of the jaw that were well suited for crushing the armor of shellfish or other hard objects.
It had a palate similar to that of azhdarchoid pterosaurs.
"Dsungaripterus" was described in 1964 named by Yang Zhongjian. The genus name combines a reference to the Junggar Basin with a Latinized Greek "pteron", "wing". The type species is "Dsungaripterus weii", the specific name honouring paleontologist C.M. Wei of the Palaeontological Division, Institute of Science, Bureau of Petroleum of Xinjiang. The holotype is IVPP V-2776, a partial skull and skeleton. From 1973 more material has been found including almost complete skulls.
In 1980 Peter Galton renamed "Pterodactylus brancai" (Reck 1931), a form from a late Jurassic African formation, into "Dsungaripterus brancai", but the identification is now commonly rejected. In 1982 Natasha Bakhurina named a new species, "Dsungaripterus parvus", based on a smaller skeleton from Mongolia. Later this was renamed into "Phobetor", a preoccupied name, and in 2009 concluded to be identical to "Noripterus". In 2002 a "Dsungaripterus" wing finger phalanx was reported from Korea.
"Dsungaripterus" was classified by Yang as a member of the Dsungaripteridae. Below is a cladogram showing the phylogenetic placement of "Dsungaripterus" within Neoazhdarchia from Andres and Myers (2013). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8937 |
Derek Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught undergraduate and graduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem "Omeros" (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play "Dream on Monkey Mountain", a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry "White Egrets" and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies, the son of Alix (Maarlin) and Warwick Walcott. He had a twin brother, the playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister, Pamela Walcott. His family is of English, Dutch and African descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island that he explores in his poetry. His mother, a teacher, loved the arts and often recited poetry around the house. His father was a civil servant and a talented painter. He died when Walcott and his brother were one year old, and were left to be raised by their mother. Walcott was brought up in Methodist schools. His mother, who was a teacher at a Methodist elementary school, provided her children with an environment where their talents could be nurtured. Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule.
As a young man Walcott trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons, whose life as a professional artist provided an inspiring example for him. Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them. Walcott's painting was later exhibited at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, along with the art of other writers, in a 2007 exhibition named "The Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing by Writers".
He studied as a writer, becoming "an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English" and strongly influenced by modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Walcott had an early sense of a vocation as a writer. In the poem "Midsummer" (1984), he wrote:
Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that
the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen,
that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse.
At 14, Walcott published his first poem, a Miltonic, religious poem, in the newspaper "The Voice of St Lucia". An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in a response printed in the newspaper. By 19, Walcott had self-published his first two collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: "25 Poems" (1948) and "Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos" (1949). He sold copies to his friends and covered the costs. He later commented:
I went to my mother and said, "I’d like to publish a book of poems, and I think it's going to cost me two hundred dollars." She was just a seamstress and a schoolteacher, and I remember her being very upset because she wanted to do it. Somehow she got it—a lot of money for a woman to have found on her salary. She gave it to me, and I sent off to Trinidad and had the book printed. When the books came back I would sell them to friends. I made the money back.
The influential Bajan poet Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work.
After getting his high school education from St. Mary's College, he received a scholarship to study at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.
After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist. He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remained active with its board of directors.
Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection "In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960" (1962) attracted international attention. His play "Dream on Monkey Mountain" (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. Makak is the protagonist in this play; and "Makak‟s condition represents the condition of the colonized natives under the oppressive forces of the powerful colonizers". In 1971 it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company off-Broadway in New York City; it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play". The following year, Walcott won an OBE from the British government for his work.
He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis. Walcott retired from his position at Boston University in 2007. He became friends with other poets, including the Russian expatriate Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the U.S. after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.
Walcott's epic poem "Omeros" (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from the "Iliad", has been critically praised as his "major achievement." The book received praise from publications such as "The Washington Post" and "The New York Times Book Review", which chose "Omeros" as one of its "Best Books of 1990".
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honour after Saint-John Perse, who was born in Guadeloupe, received the award in 1960. The Nobel committee described Walcott's work as "a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment". He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.
His later poetry collections include "Tiepolo's Hound" (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolors; "The Prodigal" (2004), and "White Egrets" (2010), which received the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
In 2008, Walcott gave the first Cola Debrot Lectures In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex.
As a part of St Lucia's Independence Day celebrations, in February 2016, he became one of the first knights of the Order of Saint Lucia.
In 1982 a Harvard sophomore accused Walcott of sexual harassment in September 1981. She alleged that after she refused a sexual advance from him, she was given the only C in the class. In 1996 a student at Boston University sued Walcott for sexual harassment and "offensive sexual physical contact". The two reached a settlement.
In 2009, Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry. He withdrew his candidacy after reports of the accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996.
When the media learned that pages from an American book on the topic were sent anonymously to a number of Oxford academics, this aroused their interest in the university decisions.
Ruth Padel, also a leading candidate, was elected to the post. Within days, "The Daily Telegraph" reported that she had alerted journalists to the harassment cases. Under severe media and academic pressure, Padel resigned. Padel was the first woman to be elected to the Oxford post, and some journalists attributed the criticism of her to misogyny and a gender war at Oxford. They said that a male poet would not have been so criticized, as she had reported published information, not rumour.
Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Al Alvarez, published a letter of support for Walcott in "The Times Literary Supplement," and criticized the press furore. Other commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest in an internal university affair, because the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination". Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret at Padel's resignation.
Methodism and spirituality have played a significant role from the beginning in Walcott's work. He commented: "I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation." Describing his writing process, he wrote: "the body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is the ecstasy...Ultimately, it's what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature." He also notes, "if one thinks a poem is coming on...you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity."
Walcott said his writing was influenced by the work of the American poets, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who were also friends.
He published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them address, either directly or indirectly, the liminal status of the West Indies in the post-colonial period. Through poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy.
In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and theatre in his native region (from "Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays"), Walcott reflects on the West Indies as colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: "We are all strangers here... Our bodies think in one language and move in another". The epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as "Ti-Jean and his Brothers". Mi-Jean, one of the eponymous brothers, is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesize it or apply it to his life as a colonised person.
Walcott notes of growing up in West Indian culture:
What we were deprived of was also our privilege. There was a great joy in making a world that so far, up to then, had been undefined... My generation of West Indian writers has felt such a powerful elation at having the privilege of writing about places and people for the first time and, simultaneously, having behind them the tradition of knowing how well it can be done—by a Defoe, a Dickens, a Richardson.
Walcott identified as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage. In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play "Pantomime" (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in later work as well. He writes: "If we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify a non-existent past, then time passes us by."
Walcott's epic book-length poem "Omeros" was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem very loosely echoes and references Homer and some of his major characters from "The Iliad". Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the housemaid Helen, the blind man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself.
Although the main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of St. Lucia, where Walcott was born and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts (where Walcott was living and teaching at the time of the poem's composition), and the character Achille imagines a voyage from Africa onto a slave ship that is headed for the Americas; also, in Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel experiences in a variety of cities around the world, including Lisbon, London, Dublin, Rome, and Toronto.
Composed in a variation on "terza rima", the work explores the themes that run throughout Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in a post-colonial world.
Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, two years after publishing the epic poem "Omeros". He was known for writing about "the harsh legacy of colonialism and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds." His poetic voice reflected a blend of his ear for the English language and his sense of his own people.
Stephen Breslow explained that he and the Swedish Academy chose Derek Walcott for the Nobel Laureate in Literature because his work had "a strong regional voice that transcends its topical locality, through the depth and breadth of its poetic resonance and through its global human implication." It was Walcott's ability to be more than just "exotic" that brought his work critical attention. Breslow explains that "Walcott has merged a profound, rhapsodic reverie upon his remote birthplace – its people, its landscape, and its history – with the central, classical tradition of Western civilization." This ability shows the importance of multiculturalism and literary mastery to the Swedish Academy. Walcott's works represent how different cultures can enrich one another to produce even more compelling works.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Walcott describes life on Antilles and what it means to discover identity. He describes all of the "broken fragments" of his "diasporic" identity. People need books, he says, but they are not enough to encompass all that a culture is. Walcott says that "the visible poetry of the Antilles, then. [is] Survival" because "all of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog." He encompasses the diasporic identity found in Caribbean Literature by looking at how insignificant he feels because he cannot, alone, fully bring together a cultural identity.
Walcott's work has received praise from major poets including Robert Graves, who wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries", and Joseph Brodsky, who praised Walcott's work, writing: "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language." Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who all taught in the United States, were a band of poets "outside the American experience".
The poetry critic William Logan critiqued Walcott's work in a "New York Times" book review of Walcott's "Selected Poems". While he praised Walcott's writing in "Sea Grapes" and "The Arkansas Testament", Logan had mostly negative things to say about Walcott's poetry, calling "Omeros" "clumsy" and "Another Life" "pretentious." He concluded with "No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered."
Most reviews of Walcott's work are more positive. For instance, in "The New Yorker" review of "The Poetry of Derek Walcott", Adam Kirsch had high praise for Walcott's oeuvre, describing his style in the following manner:
By combining the grammar of vision with the freedom of metaphor, Walcott produces a beautiful style that is also a philosophical style. People perceive the world on dual channels, Walcott’s verse suggests, through the senses and through the mind, and each is constantly seeping into the other. The result is a state of perpetual magical thinking, a kind of "Alice in Wonderland" world where concepts have bodies and landscapes are always liable to get up and start talking.
Kirsch calls "Another Life" Walcott's "first major peak" and analyzes the painterly qualities of Walcott's imagery from his earliest work through to later books such as "Tiepolo's Hound". Kirsch also explores the post-colonial politics in Walcott's work, calling him "the postcolonial writer par excellence". Kirsch calls the early poem "A Far Cry from Africa" a turning point in Walcott's development as a poet. Like Logan, Kirsch is critical of "Omeros", which he believes Walcott fails to successfully sustain over its entirety. Although "Omeros" is the volume of Walcott's that usually receives the most critical praise, Kirsch believes "Midsummer" to be his best book.
His poetry, as spoken performance, appears briefly in the sampled sounds in the music album of the group Dreadzone. Their track entitled "Captain Dread" from the album "Second Light" incorporates the fourth verse of Walcott's 1990 poem "The Schooner Flight".
In 2013 Dutch filmmaker Ida Does released "Poetry is an Island", a feature documentary film about Walcott's life and the ever-present influence of his birthplace of St Lucia.
In 1954 Walcott married Fay Moston, a secretary, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1959. They had a son, the St Lucian painter Peter Walcott. Walcott married a second time to Margaret Maillard in 1962, who worked as an almoner in a hospital, and together they had two daughters, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and Anna Walcott-Hardy, before divorcing in 1976. In 1976, Walcott married for a third time, to actress Norline Metivier; they divorced in 1993. His companion until his death was Sigrid Nama, a former art gallery owner.
Walcott was also known for his passion for travelling to countries around the world. He split his time between New York, Boston, and St. Lucia, and incorporated the influences of different areas into his pieces of work.
Walcott died at his home in Cap Estate, St. Lucia, on 17 March 2017. He was 87. He was given a state funeral on Saturday, 25 March, with a service at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Castries and burial at Morne Fortune.
In 1993, a public square and park located in central Castries, Saint Lucia, was named Derek Walcott Square.
The Saint Lucia National Trust acquired Walcott's childhood home at 17 Chaussée Road, Castries, in November 2015, renovating it before opening it to the public as Walcott House in January 2016.
In January 2020 the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St. Lucia announced that Walcott's books on Caribbean Literature and poetry have been donated to its Library. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8945 |
Decipherment
In philology, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of texts written in ancient or obscure languages or scripts. Decipherment in cryptography refers to decryption. The term is used sardonically in everyday language to describe attempts to read poor handwriting. In genetics, decipherment is the successful attempt to understand DNA, which is viewed metaphorically as a text containing word-like units. Throughout science the term decipherment is synonymous with the understanding of biological and chemical phenomena.
In a few cases, a multilingual artifact has been necessary to facilitate decipherment, the Rosetta Stone being the classic example. Statistical techniques provide another pathway to decipherment, as does the analysis of modern languages derived from ancient languages in which undeciphered texts are written. Archaeological and historical information is helpful in verifying hypothesized decipherments. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8946 |
Decca Navigator System
The Decca Navigator System was a hyperbolic radio navigation system which allowed ships and aircraft to determine their position by receiving radio signals from fixed navigational beacons. The system used phase comparison of two low frequency signals between 70 and 129 kHz, as opposed to pulse timing systems like Gee and LORAN. This made it much easier to implement the receivers using 1940s electronics, eliminating the need for a cathode ray tube.
The system was invented in the US, but development was carried out by Decca in the UK. It was first deployed by the Royal Navy during World War II when the Allied forces needed a system which could be used to achieve accurate landings and was not known to the Germans and thus free of jamming. After the war, it was extensively developed around the UK and later used in many areas around the world. Decca's primary use was for ship navigation in coastal waters, offering much better accuracy than the competing LORAN system. Fishing vessels were major post-war users, but it was also used on aircraft, including a very early (1949) application of moving map displays. The system was deployed extensively in the North Sea and was used by helicopters operating to oil platforms.
The opening of the more accurate Loran-C system to civilian use in 1974 offered stiff competition, but Decca was well established by this time and continued operations into the 1990s. Decca was eventually replaced, along with Loran and similar systems, by the GPS during the 1990s. The Decca system in Europe was shut down in the spring of 2000, and the last worldwide chain, in Japan, in 2001.
The Decca Navigator System consisted of a number of land-based radio beacons organised into "chains". Each chain consisted of a master station and three (occasionally two) secondary stations, termed Red, Green and Purple. Ideally, the secondaries would be positioned at the vertices of an equilateral triangle with the master at the centre. The baseline length, that is, the master-secondary distance, was typically .
Each station transmitted a continuous wave signal that, by comparing the phase difference of the signals from the master and one of the secondaries, resulted in a set of hyperbolic "lines of position" called a "pattern". As there were three secondaries there were three patterns, termed Red, Green and Purple. The patterns were drawn on nautical charts as a set of hyperbolic lines in the appropriate colour. Receivers identified which hyperbola they were on and a position could be plotted at the intersection of the hyperbola from different patterns, usually by using the pair with the angle of cut closest to orthogonal as possible.
When two stations transmit at the phase-locked frequency, the difference in phase between the two signals is constant along a hyperbolic path. Of course, if two stations transmit on the same frequency, it is practically impossible for the receiver to separate them; so instead of all stations transmitting at the same frequency, each chain was allocated a nominal frequency, 1f, and each station in the chain transmitted at a harmonic of this base frequency, as follows:
The frequencies given are those for Chain 5B, known as the English Chain, but all chains used similar frequencies between 70 kHz and 129 kHz.
Decca receivers multiplied the signals received from the Master and each Slave by different values to arrive at a common frequency (least common multiple, LCM) for each Master/Slave pair, as follows:
It was phase comparison at this common frequency that resulted in the hyperbolic lines of position. The interval between two adjacent hyperbolas on which the signals are in phase was called a "lane". Since the wavelength of the common frequency was small compared with the distance between the Master and Slave stations there were many possible lines of position for a given phase difference, and so a unique position could not be arrived at by this method.
Other receivers, typically for aeronautical applications, divided the transmitted frequencies down to the basic frequency (1f) for phase comparison, rather than multiplying them up to the LCM frequency.
Early Decca receivers were fitted with three rotating "Decometers" that indicated the phase difference for each pattern. Each Decometer drove a second indicator that counted the number of lanes traversed – each 360 degrees of phase difference was one lane traversed. In this way, assuming the point of departure was known, a more or less distinct location could be identified.
The lanes were grouped into "zones", with 18 green, 24 red, or 30 purple lanes in each zone. This meant that on the baseline (the straight line between the Master and its Slave) the zone width was the same for all three patterns of a given chain. Typical lane and zone widths on the baseline are shown in the table below (for chain 5B):
The lanes were numbered 0 to 23 for red, 30 to 47 for green and 50 to 79 for purple. The zones were labelled A to J, repeating after J. A Decca position coordinate could thus be written: Red I 16.30; Green D 35.80. Later receivers incorporated a microprocessor and displayed a position in latitude and longitude.
"Multipulse" provided an automatic method of lane and zone identification by using the same phase comparison techniques described above on lower frequency signals.
The nominally continuous wave transmissions were in fact divided into a 20-second cycle, with each station in turn simultaneously transmitting all four Decca frequencies (5f, 6f, 8f and 9f) in a phase-coherent relationship for a brief period of 0.45 seconds each cycle. This transmission, known as Multipulse, allowed the receiver to extract the 1f frequency and so to identify which lane the receiver was in (to a resolution of a zone).
As well as transmitting the Decca frequencies of 5f, 6f, 8f and 9f, an 8.2f signal, known as Orange, was also transmitted. The beat frequency between the 8.0f (Red) and 8.2f (Orange) signals allowed a 0.2f signal to be derived and so resulted in a hyperbolic pattern in which one cycle (360°) of phase difference equates to 5 zones.
Assuming that one’s position was known to this accuracy, this gave an effectively unique position.
During daylight, ranges of around could be obtained, reducing at night to 200 to , depending on propagation conditions.
The accuracy depended on:
By day these errors could range from a few meters on the baseline up to a nautical mile at the edge of coverage. At night, skywave errors were greater and, on receivers without multipulse capabilities, it was not unusual for the position to jump a lane, sometimes without the navigator knowing.
Although in the days of differential GPS this range and accuracy may appear poor, in its day the Decca system was one of the few, if not the only, position fixing system available to many mariners. Since the need for an accurate position is less when the vessel is further from land, the reduced accuracy at long ranges was not a great problem.
In 1936 William J. O'Brien, an engineer, contracted tuberculosis which put his career on hold for a period of two years. During this period he had the idea of position fixing by means of phase comparison of continuous wave transmissions. This was not the first such system, but O'Brien apparently developed his version without knowledge of the others, and made several advancements in the art that would prove useful. He initially imagined the system being used for aircraft testing, specifically the accurate calculation of ground speed. Some experiments were carried out in California in 1938, selecting frequencies with harmonic "beats" that would allow for station identification in a network of transmitters. Both the US Army and Navy considered the idea too complicated and work ended in 1939.
O’Brien's friend, Harvey F. Schwarz, was chief engineer of the Decca Record company in England. In 1939 O’Brien sent him details of the system so it could be put forward to the British military. Initially Robert Watson-Watt reviewed the system but he did not follow it up, deeming it too easily jammed (and likely due to the existing work on the Gee system, being carried out by Watt's group). However, in October 1941 the British Admiralty Signal Establishment (ASE) became interested in the system, which was then classified as "Admiralty Outfit QM". O’Brien brought the Californian equipment to the UK and conducted the first marine trials between Anglesey and the Isle of Man, at frequencies of 305/610 kHz, on 16 September 1942.
Further trials were conducted in the northern Irish Sea in April 1943 at 70/130 kHz. It was decided that the original frequencies were not ideal, and a new system using a 14 kHz inter-signal spacing was selected. This led to the common 5, 6, 8 and 9"f" frequencies, used throughout the life of the Decca system. 7"f" was reserved for a Loran-C-like extension, but never developed. A follow-up test was carried out in the Irish Sea in January 1944 to test a wide variety of upgrades and production equipment. By this time the competing Gee system was known to the Admiralty and the two systems were tested head-to-head under the code names QM and QH. QM was found to have better sea-level range and accuracy, which led to its adoption.
A three-station trial was held in conjunction with a large-scale assault and landing exercise in the Moray Firth in February/March 1944. The success of the trials and the relative ease of use and accuracy of the system resulted in Decca receiving an order for 27 "Admiralty Outfit QM" receivers. The receiver consisted of an electronics unit with two dials and was known to its operators as the "Blue Gasmeter Job". A Decca chain was set up, consisting of a master station at Chichester and slaves at Swanage and Beachy Head. A fourth decoy transmitter was located in the Thames Estuary as part of the deception that the invasion would be focussed on the Calais area.
21 minesweepers and other vessels were fitted with "Admiralty Outfit QM" and, on 5 June 1944, 17 of these ships used it to accurately navigate across the English Channel and to sweep the minefields in the planned areas. The swept areas were marked with buoys in preparation for the Normandy Landings.
After the initial ship tests, Decca conducted tests in cars, driving in the Kingston By-Pass area to verify receiver accuracy. In the car installation, it was found possible to navigate within an individual traffic lane. The company entertained high hopes that the system could be used in aircraft, to permit much more precise navigation in the critical airspace around airports and urban centres where traffic density was highest.
After the end of World War II the Decca Navigator Co. Ltd. was formed (1945) and the system expanded rapidly, particularly in areas of British influence; at its peak it was deployed in many of the world's major shipping areas. More than 15,000 receiving sets were in use aboard ships in 1970. There were 4 chains around England, 1 in Ireland and 2 in Scotland, 12 in Scandinavia (5 each in Norway and Sweden and 1 each in Denmark and Finland), a further 4 elsewhere in northern Europe and 2 in Spain.
In the late 1950s an experimental Decca chain was set up in the United States, in the New York area, to be used for navigating the Vertol 107 helicopters of New York Airways. These helicopters were operating from the principal local airports—Idlewild Airport on Long Island, Newark Airport in New Jersey, LaGuardia Airport in the Borough of Queens, nearer to Manhattan, and a site on the top of the (then) PanAm Building on Park Avenue. Use of Decca was essential because its signals could be received down to sea level, were not subject to the line-of-sight limitations of VOR/DME and did not suffer the slant-range errors that create problems with VOR/DME close to the transmitters. The Decca installations in the New York Airways helicopters included the unique Decca 'roller map' displays that enabled the pilot to see his or her position at a glance, a concept infeasible with VOR/DME.
This chain installation was considered highly controversial at the time, for political reasons. This led to the U.S. Coast Guard, under instructions from the Treasury Department to which it reported, banning the use of Decca receivers in ships entering New York harbour for fear that the system might create a de facto standard (as it had become in other areas of the world). It also served to protect the marketing interests of the Hoffman Electronics division of ITT, a principal supplier of VOR/DME systems, that Decca might have been poised to usurp.
This situation was exacerbated by the workload problems of the Air Traffic Controllers Association (ATCA), under its executive director Francis McDermott, whose members were forced to use radar data on aircraft positions, relaying those positions by radio to the aircraft from their control locations. An example of the problem, cited by experts, was the collision of a Douglas DC8 and a Lockheed Constellation over Staten Island, New York, that—according to some experts—could have been avoided if the aircraft had been Decca-equipped and could not only have determined their positions more precisely but would not have suffered from the rho-theta position errors inherent in VOR/DME.
Other chains were established in Japan (6 chains); Namibia and South Africa (5 chains); India and Bangladesh (4 chains); Canada (4 chains around Newfoundland and Nova Scotia); North-West Australia (2 chains); the Persian Gulf (1 chain with stations in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and a second chain in the north of the Gulf with stations in Iran) and the Bahamas (1 chain). Four chains were planned for Nigeria but only two were built and these did not enter into public service. Two chains in Vietnam were used during the Vietnam War for helicopter navigation, with limited success.
During the Cold War period, following WWII, the R.A.F. established a confidential chain in Germany. The Master station was in Bad Iburg near Osnabrück and there were two Slaves. The purpose of this chain was to provide accurate air navigation for the corridor between Western Germany and Berlin in the event that a mass evacuation of allied personnel may be required. In order to maintain secrecy, frequencies were changed at irregular intervals.
The headquarters of Decca Navigator were at New Malden, Surrey, just off the Kingston by-pass. There was a Decca School, at Brixham, Devon, where employees were sent on courses from time to time. Racal, the UK weapons and communications company, acquired Decca in 1980. Merging Decca's radar assets with their own, Racal began selling off the other portions of the company, including avionics and Decca Navigator.
A significant amount of income from the Decca system was due to the receivers being leased to users, not sold outright. This guaranteed predictable annual income. When the patents on the original technology lapsed in the early 1980s, new receivers were quickly built by a number of companies. In particular, Aktieselskabet Dansk Philips ('Danish Philips', "ap") introduced receivers that could be purchased outright, and were much smaller and easier to use than the current Decca counterparts. The "ap" versions directly output the longitude and latitude to two decimals (originally in datum ED50 only) instead of using the "deco meter" displays, offering accuracy better than ±9.3 m, much better than the Decca units. This also eliminated the need for the special charts printed with Decca lanes and zones.
Decca sued ap for infringement and, in the ensuing court battle, Decca lost the monopoly. That signalled the beginning of the end for the company. Income dwindled and eventually, the UK Ministry of Transport stepped in, having the lighthouse authorities take responsibility for operating the system in the early 1990s.
A ruling from the European Union forced the UK government to withdraw funding. The general lighthouse authority ceased Decca transmissions at midnight on 31 March 2000. The Irish chain provided by Bórd Iascaigh Mhara continued transmitting until 19 May 2000. Japan continued operating their Hokkaidō chain until March 2001, the last Decca chain in operation.
In the immediate post-war era, Decca began studying a long-range system like Decca, but using much lower frequencies to enable reception of skywaves at long distances. In February 1946 the company proposed a system with two main stations located at Shannon Airport in Ireland and Gander International Airport in Newfoundland (today part of Canada). Together, these stations would provide navigation over the main great circle route between London and New York. A third station in Bermuda would provide general ranging information to measure progress along the main track.
Work on this concept continued, and in 1951 a modified version was presented that offered navigation over very wide areas. This was known as Delrac, short for "Decca Long Range Area Cover". A further development, including features of the General Post Office's POPI system, was introduced in 1954, proposing 28 stations that provided worldwide coverage. The system was predicted to offer accuracy at range 95% of the time. Further development was ended in favour of the Dectra system.
In the early 1960s the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA), as part of a wider ICAO effort, began the process of introducing a standard long-range radio navigation system for aviation use. Decca proposed a system that could offer both high-accuracy at short ranges and trans-Atlantic navigation with less accuracy, using a single receiver. The system was known as Dectra, short for "Decca Track".
Unlike the Delrac system, Dectra was essentially the normal Decca Navigator system with the modification of several existing transmitter sites. These were located at the East Newfoundland and Scottish chains, which were equipped with larger antennas and high-power transmitters, broadcasting 20 times as much energy as normal chain stations. Given that the length of the chain baselines did not change, and were relatively short, at long distance the signal offered almost no accuracy. Instead, Dectra operated as a track system; aircraft would navigate by keeping themselves within the signal defined by a particular Decca lane.
The main advantage of Dectra compared to other systems being proposed for the RTCA solution was that it could be used for both medium-range navigation over land, as well as long-range navigation over the Atlantic. In comparison, the VOR/DME system that ultimately won the competition offered navigation over perhaps a 200 mile radius, and could not offer a solution to the long-distance problem. Additionally, as the Decca system provided an X and Y location, as opposed to the angle-and-range VOR/DME, Decca proposed offering it with their Decca Flight Log moving map display to further improve ease of navigation. In spite of these advantages, the RTCA ultimately chose VOR/DME for two primary reasons; VOR offered coverage over about the same range as Decca, about 200 miles, but did so with a single transmitter instead of Decca's four, and Decca's frequencies proved susceptible to interference from static due to lightning, while VOR's higher frequencies were not quite as sensitive.
Decca continued to propose that Dectra be used for the long-range role. In 1967 they installed another transmitter in Iceland to provide ranging along the Scotland-Newfoundland track, with a second proposed to be installed on the Azores. They also installed Dectra receivers with Omnitrac computers and a lightweight version of the Flight Log on a number of commercial airliners, notably a BOAC Vickers VC10. The Omnitrac could take inputs from Decca (and Dectra), Loran-C, VOR/DME, an air data computer and doppler radars and combine them all to produce a lat/long output along with bearing, distance-to-go, bearing and an autopilot coupling. Their efforts to standardize this were eventually abandoned as inertial navigation systems began to be installed for these needs.
A more accurate system named Hi-Fix was developed using signalling in the 1.6 MHz range. It was used for specialised applications such as precision measurements involved with oil-drilling and by the Royal Navy for detailed mapping and surveying of coasts and harbours. The Hi-Fix equipment was leased for a period with temporary chains established to provide coverage of the area required, Hi-Fix was commercialised by Racal Survey in the early 1980s. An experimental chain was installed with coverage of central London and receivers placed in London buses and other vehicles to demonstrate an early vehicle location and tracking system. Each vehicle would report its location automatically via a conventional VHF two-way radio link, the data added to a voice channel.
Another application was developed by the Bendix Pacific division of Bendix Corporation, with offices in North Hollywood, California, but not deployed: PFNS—Personal Field Navigation System—that would enable individual soldiers to ascertain their geographic position, long before this capability was made possible by the satellite-based GPS (Global Positioning System).
A further application of the Decca system was implemented by the U.S. Navy in the late 1950s and early 1960s for use in the Tongue of the Ocean/Eleuthera Sound area near The Bahamas, separating the islands of Andros and New Providence. The application was for sonar studies made possible by the unique characteristics of the ocean floor.
An interesting characteristic of the Decca VLF signal discovered on BOAC, later British Airways, test flights to Moscow, was that the carrier switching could not be detected even though the carrier could be received with sufficient strength to provide navigation. Such testing, involving civilian aircraft, is quite common and may well not be in the knowledge of a pilot.
The 'low frequency' signalling of the Decca system also permitted its use on submarines. One 'enhancement' of the Decca system was to offer the potential of keying the signal, using Morse code, to signal the onset of nuclear war. This option was never taken up by the UK government. Messages were clandestinely sent, however, between Decca stations thereby bypassing international telephone calls, especially in non-UK chains. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8949 |
Dana Rohrabacher
Dana Tyrone Rohrabacher (; born June 21, 1947) is a former American politician, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 to 2019. A Republican, he formerly represented for the last three terms of his House tenure.
Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Rohrabacher was on the shortlist for Secretary of State along with Mitt Romney and eventual pick Rex Tillerson. Rohrabacher ran for re-election to Congress in 2018, losing to Democrat Harley Rouda. He was the longest-serving House incumbent to lose reelection in 2018. Rohrabacher has expressed strong pro-Russia and pro-Putin opinions, which have raised questions about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
Rohrabacher, , was born on June 21, 1947, in Coronado, California, the son of Doris M. (née Haring) and Donald Tyler Rohrabacher. He attended elementary school locally, and during his college years, he lived in Sunset Beach. Rohrabacher graduated from Palos Verdes High School in Palos Verdes Estates, California, attended community college at Los Angeles Harbor College, and earned a bachelor's degree in history at California State University, Long Beach in 1969. He received his master's degree in American Studies at the University of Southern California.
While in graduate school and during the early 1970s, Rohrabacher had a side activity as a folk singer. He was also a writer for the "Orange County Register". At this time he was considered a free-market anarchist and libertarian activist, followng his previous membership in Young Americans for Freedom. Libertarian author Samuel Konkin recalled Rohrabacher as "a charismatic campus activist, radicalized by Robert LeFevre who provided him with small funding to travel the country with his instrument and folk songs from campus to campus, converting YAF chapters into Libertarian Alliances and SIL chapters."
Rohrabacher served as assistant press secretary to Ronald Reagan during his 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. Rohrabacher then worked as a speechwriter and special assistant to President Reagan from 1981 to 1988. During his tenure at the White House, Rohrabacher played a leading role in the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine.
Rohrabacher left the Reagan administration in 1988 to pursue Dan Lungren's recently vacated House seat. With his friend Oliver North's fundraising help, Rohrabacher won the Republican primary with a plurality of 35%. He won the general election with 64% of the vote. He twice experienced serious primary competition, in 1992 and 1998. After redistricting, he won a three-candidate primary election in 1992 with a plurality of 48%. In 1998, he won an open primary with 54% of the vote. In general elections, only one time, in 2008, did he receive less than 55% of the vote, until he was defeated.
In 2008, Rohrabacher defeated Democratic nominee Debbie Cook, mayor of Huntington Beach, 53%–43%, the lowest winning percentage of Rohrabacher's career.
In 2010, Rohrabacher defeated Democratic nominee Ken Arnold 62%–38%.
After redistricting, Rohrabacher announced in 2012 that he would run in the newly redrawn 48th Congressional district. He said "The new 48th District is a good fit and something that will enable me to serve my constituents and the country well." He won re-election in this Orange County district, with 61% of the vote.
Rohrabacher won reelection with 64.1% of the vote.
Rohrabacher won reelection with 58.3% of the vote.
On October 12, 2018, the "Los Angeles Times" reported that the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Super PAC closely associated with House Speaker Paul Ryan, had passed over Rohrbacher in its initial round of broadcast television advertising across Southern California. Rohrbacher's campaign denied this, saying that CLF had spent "about $2.4 million and they have an additional $1 million in media buys scheduled" for Rohrabacher.
Democrat Harley Rouda was declared the winner on November 10, 2018.
In 1990, Rohrabacher opposed the National Endowment of the Arts and joined Mel Hancock in demanding its abolition. In a February letter to other members of Congress, Rohrabacher sent a photograph by artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz. In April, liberal constitutional rights group People for the American Way announced its intent to launch a newspaper advert campaign against Rohrabacher. Western vice president of the organization Michael Hudson stated, "Americans overwhelmingly reject censorship of the arts and support the NEA. Rep. Rohrabacher has taken the leading role in the House calling for the abolishment of the NEA. If we are to win this battle, we must energize and mobilize the creative community here in Los Angeles." Rohrabacher welcomed the announcement, stating that his constituents "don't want federal dollars to go to sacrilegious or obscene art" and that it would help voters to understand the issue. Explaining his position, Rohrabacher stated that he did not believe "anyone should be prevented from seeing what they want to see or painting what they want to paint...on their own time and their own dime. But if you get a government subsidy, that's another question." In October, the House passed a bill to reauthorize funds for the NEA with the directive that the organization could not fund obscene art. Rohrabacher introduced an amendment that would include specific guidelines on the kind of art projects that could not be funded, such as works that were sexually explicit or denigrated the American flag or religions, the amendment being rejected by a vote of 249-175. Rohrabacher stated his amendment was supposed to ensure that the federal government was "not subsidizing obscenity, child pornography, attacks on religion, desecration of the American flag or any other of the outrages we have seen in the past." By the time the House passed the bill, Rohrabacher had become known as " the House's most outspoken critic of the NEA".
In October 1991, Rohrabacher wrote a letter to the civil rights division of the Education Department after seven Filipino students complained to the media that they were denied admission to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Rohrabacher requested the department conduct a federal civil rights investigation on what seemed to be "a quota based upon race that illegally discriminates against Filipino-Americans and possibly applicants of other races". UCSD vice chancellor for undergraduate affairs Joseph Watson refused the letter, dismissing Rohrabacher as "wrong when he says that 40% of admissions are reserved for certain races". He stated that the school ranks all applicants using a grade-based formula. Watson charged Rohrabacher with fanning hysteria over discrimination: "The Rohrabacher approach is to play to public fears that something fishy is going on. We don't want anyone to feel we're not giving everyone a fair and equitable review that can stand up to any scrutiny."
In 2011, Rohrabacher voted against the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012.
In June 2015, Rohrabacher released a statement accusing former treasurer of his reelection committee, Jack Wu, of embezzling more than $170,000 from his campaign. Rohrabacher's attorney Charles H. Bell Jr. stated that the congressman had filed criminal charges against Wu with the Orange County district attorney and state attorney general.
During a trip to Iraq in June 2011, he said that Iraq should pay back the US for all the money it had spent since the invasion, when it becomes a wealthy country. Rohrabacher also commented he would be holding a hearing with the Sub-Committee on Oversight and Investigations into whether Iraq committed "crimes against humanity" during an attack on Camp Ashraf in April 2011. The incident left 34 residents killed and over 300 wounded. The delegation was denied access to the camp by Iraqi government, citing their sovereignty. Rohrabacher's delegation was subsequently asked to leave the country.
On November 4, 2005, the "Los Angeles Times" reported that Rohrabacher was paid $23,000 for a 30-year-old screen play he had written. At issue was whether the producer paid him for the screenplay or for introductions to congressional and federal officials. Rohrabacher said that the introductions were made in good faith, were nothing that was not done regularly for legitimate causes, and that the introductions had only become an issue because of Joseph Medawar's alleged misdeeds.
In May 2006, Rohrabacher announced through his press secretary that he would return the $23,000. The decision was made public shortly before Medawar took responsibility in a United States District Court for bilking $3.4 million from about 50 investors.
In February 2017, Rohrabacher faced criticism for refusing to meet with constituents that showed up at his local Huntington Beach office. The constituents were upset with his support of President Donald Trump. Police were called to remove the constituents.
Rohrabacher chaired the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee of the House Science Committee from 1997 until January 2005; he received a two-year waiver to serve beyond the six-year term limit.
As a senior member of the International Relations Committee, Rohrabacher led the effort to deny Most Favored Nation trading status to the People's Republic of China, citing that nation's dismal human rights record and opposition to democracy. His subcommittee assignments were East Asia and Pacific, and Middle East and South Asia.
On September 8, 2008, at a House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, Rohrabacher argued that the Georgians had initiated a recent military confrontation in the ongoing Russia–Georgia war.
In 2012, the FBI warned Rohrabacher that Rohrabacher's support for Russia's interests was allowing Russia to cultivate him for its purposes.
In February 2013, Rohrabacher gave a speech urging the right to self-determination for the Baloch people in Pakistan at a UNPO conference in London.
In April 2014, he tweeted that "If majority of people legally residing in Alaska want to be part of Russia then its OK with me." In February 2017, he responded to the April 2014 tweet by writing "We fought a war against slavery. With out that factor if majority in any state wants out, let them go."
In April 2016, Dana Rohrabacher and Paul Behrends, who is a member of his staff, traveled to Russia and returned with Yuri Chaika's confidential talking points memo about incriminating information on Democratic donors which were later discussed in the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016. The talking points paper used at the Trump Tower meeting in June by Natalia Veselnitskaya was very similar to the document Rohrabacher had obtained from Chaika in April and included some paragraphs verbatim.
It has been reported in multiple sources that Rohrabacher is known for his long-time friendship with Russia's Vladimir Putin and his defense of "the Russian point of view." On June 15, 2016, Republican congressman Kevin McCarthy told a group of Republicans, "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. Swear to God." Paul Ryan ended the conversation, saying "No leaks. This is how we know we're a real family here." The Republicans present were sworn to secrecy. Brendan Buck, counselor to Paul Ryan, initially denied these reports, but was then told "The Washington Post" had a recording. After the recording was leaked by the "Post" in May 2017, McCarthy said the comment was intended as a joke which had not worked.
It was not reported for another year that around that time, Rohrabacher had planned, in his capacity as chair of the Europe subcommittee, to hold a hearing on the Magnitsky Act, which bars certain Russian officials from entering the United States or holding any financial assets in American banks. At the hearing Bill Browder, the American-born investor who had lobbied for the act's passage after what he claims was the illegal appropriation of his hedge fund's assets and the subsequent murder of his Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, was to testify. Rohrabacher planned to subject him to what was described as a "show trial", where in addition to questioning Browder closely and skeptically about his claims, a feature-length documentary film critical of the Magnitsky claims, directed by Andrei Nekrasov, was to be shown in its entirety. Among the other witnesses scheduled to testify were Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, a longtime lobbyist against the Magnitsky Act; at around the same time, she had attended a meeting with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Trump's then-campaign manager Paul Manafort at which the Russians purportedly offered to share negative information about Hillary Clinton, Trump's opponent in that year's election. In July 2017, Browder testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that persons supporting the interests of foreign governments or acting on their behalf, especially Russia, must comply with Foreign Agents Registratin Act (FARA) requirements and that no one behind the screening of the Andrei Nekrasov film had met the disclosure filings under FARA.
When Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce learned of the plans, he canceled the hearing and forbade Rohrabacher from showing the film. In its stead, he held a full committee hearing on U.S.-Russia relations at which Rohrabacher was allowed to submit some of the pro-Russian claims into evidence. The film was ultimately shown at the Newseum, and an intern in Rohrabacher's office who later worked for the Trump transition team sent emails promoting the film from the subcommittee offices.
After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Rohrabacher defended his approach to improving Russian–American relations. He had previously met at least twice to discuss Russian sanctions with Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet spy "who met with President Trump's son, son-in-law and campaign manager in June 2016".
In a May 2017 interview with CNN, Rohrabacher said, "We have a huge double standard with Russia when it comes to prisoners and other things," and further stated that interference by the Russian intelligence services' in the 2016 U.S. election was the same as the National Security Agency (NSA) bugging German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone.
In July 2017, Rohrabacher voted for imposing new sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
In August 2017, Rohrabacher meets with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to offer Assange a pardon from President Trump if Assange can offer material supporting Seth Rich as the source of email leaks from the Democratic National Committee during 2016 and not Russians. Media sources report this meeting during February 2020.
In October 2017, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs placed restrictions on Rohrabacher's ability to use committee money to pay for foreign travel due to concerns over his interest in Russia.
In an interview with Fox Business Channel on August 24, 2018, Rohrabacher attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions, because Sessions had refused to fire Robert Mueller and shut down the Russia collusion investigation. He said: "The fact that Jeff Sessions has not quit is a disloyalty to this president and to the country, the fact is, if he disagrees with what the president wants him to do, he should resign."
It was reported in February 2020 Rohrabacher told Yahoo News his goal during a meeting with Julian Assange was to find evidence for a widely debunked conspiracy theory that WikiLeaks' real source was not Russian intelligence agents for the DNC emails but former DNC staffer Seth Rich. Stephanie Grisham, White House spokesperson for President Trump, stated that Trump barely knows Rohrabacher except that he's an ex-congressman and has not spoken with Rohrabacher on almost any subject. On February 19, 2020, Edward Fitzgerald, Julian Assange's barrister, asserted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London that Rohrabacher had been sent on behalf of President Trump in August 2017 to offer Assange a pardon from Trump if Assange could release material to show that Russian intelligence were not involved in the 2016 United States election interference.
In 2006, Rohrabacher chaired the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the U.S. House Committee on International Relations, which investigated whether the Oklahoma City bombers had assistance from foreign sources; the committee determined there was no conclusive evidence of a foreign connection. In the 113th Congress, Rohrabacher was chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats.
Rohrabacher has said that he sees Islam as the source of a major terrorist threat to the U.S. Speaking about Islam, he said during a hearing in April 2013, "I hope we all work together against a religion that will motivate people to murder children and other threats to us as a civilization."
In 2014, Rohrabacher suggested that Iraq's borders be redrawn in response to the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
In the wake of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, Rohrabacher put out a press release stating that he felt "outrage" and a "renewed commitment to defeat and destroy the radical Islamic movement that fosters such mayhem." He stressed that Americans must "be sure not to label all Muslims as terrorist murderers." Rohrabacher met Seddique Mateen, the father of the shooter, in 2014 during routine meetings with constituents. He called Mateen an "estranged individual."
On June 10, 2017, during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Lebanon's Hezbollah, a day after two ISIL attacks in Tehran, Rohrabacher said that:
Rohrabacher's statement was criticised in social media by British political journalist Mehdi Hasan, Human Rights Watch Deputy Director Jim Murphy, journalist Negar Mortazavi, and the National Iranian American Council, among others.
In a further statement to clarify his position, Rohrabacher wrote that he opposes "the use of force against unarmed civilians no matter who is the victim or who is doing the killing" but he is also against "Iran's vicious Mullah monarchy" and "when it comes to Sunni terrorists or Shiite terrorists, I prefer them to target each other rather than any other victims, especially innocent civilians and Americans." He added that it will "require support for those proud Iranians who want to win their freedom and heritage from Mullahs and are willing to fight for it. That does not include Isis, but it may include a lot of Iranians who see blowing up Khomeini's mausoleum as an expression of freedom from the yolk [sic] of Islamic terror."
On April 17, 2007, during a House hearing on trans-Atlantic relations, Rohrabacher defended the Bush administration's program of extraordinary rendition. He said that the unfair treatment of one innocent suspect is an acceptable "unfortunate consequence" of holding others who would otherwise be free to commit terror acts. After he received boos and groans from the gallery, Rohrabacher responded, "Well, I hope it's your families, I hope it's your families that suffer the consequences," and "I hope it's your family members that die." Rohrabacher was subsequently interrupted by protesters wearing orange jumpsuits who were removed from the gallery. For his comment that imprisoning and torturing one innocent person was a fair price to pay for locking up 50 terrorists who would "go out and plant a bomb and kill 20,000 people", on April 25 Rohrabacher was named "Countdown with Keith Olbermann's" "Worst Person in the World".
Rohrabacher's interest in Afghanistan extends back at least to the late 1980s, before his time in office, when he entered the country in the company of mujahedin fighters who were fighting Soviet occupation forces. Reportedly, these fighters "actually engaged Soviet troops in combat near the city of Jalalabad during the two months Rohrabacher was with them." In the years after the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989), Rohrabacher said his "passion" was to bring back the country's exiled king, Muhammad Zahir Shah.
In 2003, Rohrabacher defended the new Afghan constitution against those who saw in it mainly empowerment of warlords, saying:
Rohrabacher has since become a proponent of withdrawing from Afghanistan. He protested against the troop build-up in Afghanistan by President Obama, saying "If the Taliban is going is be defeated, it's got to be by the Afghan people themselves, not by sending more U.S. troops, which could actually be counterproductive." When Congressman Jim McGovern offered an amendment in 2011 requiring the Pentagon to draw up an exit plan from Afghanistan, Rohrabacher was just one of six Republicans to sign on. Rohrabacher voted for McGovern's Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, requiring an exit plan from Afghanistan. The bill failed by a 204–215 margin.
Rohrabacher was against former President Obama's gradual drawdown of troops, instead supporting a full withdrawal. Saying "If we're going to leave, we should leave." Rohrabacher has said that "The centralized system of government foisted upon the Afghan people is not going to hold after we leave." And "So let's quit prolonging the agony and inevitable. Karzai's regime is corrupt and non representative of Afghanistan's tribal culture. This failed strategy is not worth one more drop of American blood. Under the current strategy, our military presence alienates more Afghans that it pacifies. So if you're going to pull the plug, then we need to get the hell out now." Rohrabacher has repeatedly raised high-level concerns in the US Congress and Washington, D.C., about the significant corruption in Afghanistan, including the Kabul Bank scandal, where hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars allegedly disappeared in a short period of time at the apparent hands of close Karzai family members, including brothers Mahmoud Karzai (a.k.a. Mahmood Karzai) and Ahmed Wali Karzai. Rohrabacher worked to bring attention to the systemic corruption in the Karzai government and cut U.S. taxpayers' funding for these wasteful projects and programs, involving corruption within the Hamid Karzai government.
In April 2012, CNN reported that "A top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs committee was asked by the State Department not to go to Afghanistan because President Hamid Karzai objected to the visit. ... Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, told Security Clearance he was readying to travel with five other Republicans from Dubai to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, when the State Department requested he stay behind."
Rohrabacher was opposed to the involvement of American ground troops in the Yugoslav Wars. He advocated for the direct bombing of the military on Yugoslav soil, criticizing the ineffectiveness of western forces against the Bosnian Serbs. (NATO was limited to small fixed attacks, as these Serbs penetrated UN safe areas and attacked Bosniak forces.) Rohrabacher said they "should bomb Serbia's military infrastructure, in Serbia – get that, in Serbia – rather than dropping a couple of duds on tents, which only proves the West's gutlessness, and emboldens Serbian cutthroats." Rohrabacher considered the events in Bosnia to constitute genocide. In 1995, Rohrabacher personally visited Sarajevo in Bosnia, criticizing the devastation Serb forces inflicted on the city, saying "This is a loss to all mankind, not just to the people of Sarajevo." He also encountered vagabond children asking for money.
In 2001, the leader of the Albanian American Civic League ethnic lobby group, Joseph J. DioGuardi, praised Rohrabacher for his support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a militia that was once labeled by Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard as a terrorist organization, saying "He was the first member of Congress to insist that the United States arm the Kosova Liberation Army, and one of the few members who to this day publicly supports the independence of Kosova." Also in 2001, Rohrabacher gave a speech in support of American equipping the KLA with weaponry, comparing it to French support of America in the Revolutionary War, saying "Based on our own experience, the Kosova Liberation Army should have been armed. ... If the U.S. had armed the KLA in 1998, we would not be where we are today. The 'freedom fighters' would have secured their freedom and Kosova would be independent."
After a reconnaissance flight over the Spratly Islands in 1998, Rohrabacher said, "We can't ignore this bullying by the Communist Chinese in the Spratlys. The presence of the Chinese military troops...is not only a concern of the Philippines. It is also a concern of the U.S. and other democratic countries in the world."
In July 1999, Rohrabacher led the House floor in opposition to legislation normalizing trade ties between the United States and China. The following year, as the House weighed another China trade bill, Rohrabacher said the trade bill was a giveaway to a select number of American billionaires and the Beijing regime, adding that President Bill Clinton could call "communist China 'our strategic partner' until his face turns blue, but it won't make them any less red."
In 2011 interviews, Rohrabacher described the Chinese government under the leadership of Hu Jintao as "a gangster regime that murders its own people" and described the Chinese government as Nazis.
In December 2016, after President-elect Trump had a phone call with President of Taiwan Tsai Ing-wen, Rohrabacher said the call had "showed the dictators in Beijing that he's not a pushover" and that China "has had an enormously aggressive foreign policy".
In 2012 Rohrabacher stated,
and
Rohrabacher voted in support of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq in 2002, a position that he later said was "a mistake".
In August 2012, Rohrabacher noted on his official website that he had written a letter addressed to the U.S. State Department, noting his support of U.S. sponsorship of separatist movements in Iran. This elicited criticism from the Iranian-American community, which included challenging Rohrabacher's understanding of the historical background alluded to in his letter to the Department of State.
In June 2017, a day after an ISIL attack in Tehran, during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Rohrabacher stated: "Isn't it a good thing for us to have the United States finally backing up Sunnis who will attack Hezbollah and the Shiite threat to us, isn't that a good thing?" This comment was strongly criticized by the National Iranian American Council, which wrote, "Rohrabacher has a long history of bizarre and offensive statements on Iran, but his callousness toward the Iranian victims of ISIS terror might be his most callous and extreme thus far."
Rohrabacher supported removing the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) from the United States State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations; it was included on the list from 1997 to 2012. Rohrabacher received $10,300 from the MEK between 2013 and 2015.
In May 2011, in the wake of Osama Bin Laden's death, Rohrabacher introduced a bill to stop aid to Pakistan, stating that members of the government and of Pakistan's security force, the ISI, were either sheltering Bin Laden or completely incompetent. "We can no longer afford this foolishness. ... The time has come for us to stop subsidizing those who actively oppose us. Pakistan has shown itself not to be America's ally." Rohrabacher also demanded the return of the US helicopter that crashed in the operation to kill Bin Laden, stating "If this is not done immediately, it is probable, given Pakistan's history, that our technology has already found its way into the hands of the Communist Chinese military that is buying, building, and stealing the necessary military technology to challenge the United States."
In June 2017, while speaking to Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Tina Kaidanow, Rohrabacher said, "We need to go on the record here, in this part of our government, to say that we're not going to be providing weapons systems to Pakistan that we're afraid are going to shoot down our own people. And we know they're engaged in terrorism."
In 2007, Rohrabacher supported Mohiuddin Ahmed, a detainee in the U.S., who was said to be involved in an attempted coup in Bangladesh, during which several people were murdered. He was convicted of the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first President of Bangladesh. Bangladesh's extradition request was halted as Rohrabacher voiced concern about his legal rights, saying that he should be sent somewhere with no death penalty. His support was applauded by both Amnesty International and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Mohiuddin Ahmed was found guilty of being a participant in the assassinations and was executed on January 28, 2010.
After President-elect Donald Trump answered a congratulatory phone call from democratically elected President of Taiwan Tsai Ing-wen on December 2, 2016, Rohrabacher said Trump's phone call with Taiwan's president was "terrific" because of the diplomatic warning it sent to China. "He showed the dictators in Beijing that he's not a pushover." He emphasized, "China has had an enormously aggressive foreign policy and by him actually going to Taiwan, he's showing the people in Beijing that they cannot have this aggressive foreign policy and expect to be treated just the same by an American president."
Rohrabacher gave a "qualified defense" of the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014. On March 6, 2014, he was one of 23 members of the House of Representatives to vote against a $1 billion loan guarantee to support the new government of Ukraine. In the March 11, 2014, House of Representatives vote (402 voting yes; 7 opposed) to condemn Russia for violating Ukraine's sovereignty, Rohrabacher voted "present". Commenting on the issue, he stated, "Starting with our own American Revolution, groups of people have declared themselves, rightfully, to be under a different government or a government of their choosing. People forget that's what our Declaration of Independence is all about." He also said, "The sanctions are an abomination of hypocrisy. This is ridiculous: What we were doing with the violence and military action we took to secure the Kosovars' right to self-determination was far more destructive and had far more loss of life than what Putin's done trying to ensure the people of Crimea are not cut off from what they would choose as their destiny with Russia."
During a US Congressional delegation's visit to Uzbekistan in February 2013, Rohrabacher made several controversial statements. The chief among those statements was that the United States should treat Uzbekistan like Saudi Arabia by disregarding the former's human rights abuses in achieving America's national interests, particularly in selling armaments and drones to Uzbekistan.
In 2017, in an interview for an Albanian TV channel Vizion Plus Rohrabacher suggested that Macedonia "is not a country" and that the "Kosovars and Albanians from Macedonia should be part of Kosovo and the rest of Macedonia should be part of Bulgaria or any other country to which they believe they are related", which provoked a response from the Macedonian foreign ministry which accused him of inflaming "nationalistic rhetoric".
In the wake of the clashes at the Turkish Ambassador's Residence in May 2017, Rohrabacher called Donald Trump to never invite Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan again to the United States, and to bar Americans from purchasing Turkish government debt.
In August 2017, Rohrabacher proposed amending the Department of Defense budget whereby the United States would establish military ties with Eritrea. Rohrabacher suggested that the two countries should cooperate in fighting the War on Terror, curbing Iranian influence in the Yemeni Civil War, and securing the Red Sea region. At the time of Rohrabacher's proposal, Eritrea was subject to international sanctions due to its alleged support of Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and to U.S. sanctions against the Eritrean Navy following an alleged shipment of North Korean military hardware to Eritrea.
In August 2017, Rohrabacher attended a meeting in London with Julian Assange organized and attended by right-wing political activist Charles C. Johnson. Rohrabacher said that the discussion was about the possibility of a presidential pardon in exchange for Assange supplying information on the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee, which were published by WikiLeaks before the 2016 presidential election. In October 2017, Rohrabacher and Johnson met with Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) to discuss Assange supplying information about the source of leaked emails. However, Assange responded to news accounts of the meeting, tweeting, "WikiLeaks never has and never will reveal a source. Offers have been made to me—not the other way around. I do not speak to the public through third parties."
In March 2005, Rohrabacher introduced HR 1061, the American Property Claims Against Ethiopia Act, which would "prohibit United States assistance to the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia until the Ethiopian government returns all property of United States citizens". The bill was introduced by Rohrabacher at the behest of Gebremedhin Berhane, a former Eritrean national and friend of the Rohrabacher family, after his business was expropriated by the Ethiopian government.
On March 7, 2006, Rohrabacher introduced HR 4895, an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, "to limit the provision of the United States military assistance and the sale, transfer, or licensing of United States military equipment or technology to Ethiopia".
During an appearance on MSNBC's "The Ed Show", Rohrabacher accused Barack Obama of allowing violence in Iran to get out of hand because he did not speak forcefully enough against the country's leadership. He also said that Gorbachev tore down the Berlin Wall because Reagan told him to ("Tear down this wall").
In early 2010, he went to Honduras to commend the election of the new president. His entourage included a group of Californian property investors and businessmen, a dealer in rare coins, and CEOs from San Diego biofuels corporation (which is headed by a family friend).
Rohrabacher voted to repeal Obamacare, disputed evidence of man-made global warming, was a staunch opponent of illegal immigration, and favored the legalization of cannabis. In foreign policy, he supported withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, called for Trump to punish Turkish President Erdoğan on embassy violence, sided with Russia in the Russia–Georgia war, gave a qualified defense of the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and supported cooperating with Russia in Syria.
Rohrabacher was warned in 2012 in a secure room at the Capitol building by an agent from the FBI that Russian spies may have been trying to recruit him to act on Russia's behalf as an "agent of influence", after he met with a member of the Russian foreign ministry privately in Moscow. Following the ISIS terrorist attacks in Tehran on June 7, 2017, in which 17 innocent civilians were killed, he suggested that the attack could be viewed as 'a good thing', and surmised that President Trump might have been behind the coordination of this terrorist attack. An article in "The Atlantic" suggested that there was serious concern in the State Department of ties between Rohrabacher and the Russian government.
On November 21, 2017, "The New York Times" reported that Rohrabacher had come under scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee for his close ties to the Kremlin.
Rohrabacher had drawn public criticism for some of his positions. His controversial statements included the conspiracy theory claims, first promoted by the politically-biased conspiracy theory website Infowars, that Democrats secretly organized the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville to provoke the violence by the alt-right (which led to the murder of one anti-Nazi protester) in order to discredit President Trump. Rohrabacher had also consistently supported Russian interests in Congress and had defended Trump's controversial remarks regarding Russia.
He had been a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump.
In 2018 Sacha Baron Cohen's television program "Who Is America?" premiered showing Rohrabacher supporting the hoax "kinderguardians program" which supported training toddlers with firearms. Rohrabacher claims that he never spoke to Cohen, that he was taken out of context, and that he spoke, "broadly of making sure young people could get training in self-defense".
Rohrabacher doubts that global warming is caused by humans. During a congressional hearing on climate change on February 8, 2007, Rohrabacher mused that previous warming cycles may have been caused by carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by "dinosaur flatulence": "In fact, it is assumed at best to be unproven and at worst a liberal claptrap, trendy, but soon to go out of style in our new Congress." "Politico" and "The New York Times" reported that on May 25, 2011, Rohrabacher expressed further skepticism regarding the existence of man-made global warming and suggested that, if global warming is an issue, a possible solution could be clear-cutting rain forests, and replanting. These reports sparked strong criticism by some scientists, including Oliver Phillips, a geography professor at the University of Leeds. They noted the consensus that intact forests act as net absorbers of carbon, reducing global warming. In response, Rohrabacher stated,
Rohrabacher does not believe that global warming is a problem. At a town hall meeting with the Newport Mesa Tea Party in August 2013, Rohrabacher said "global warming is a total fraud" and part of a "game plan" by liberals to "create global government".
On May 4, 2017, Rohrabacher voted in favor of repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and passing the American Health Care Act. During his 2018 re-election campaign, Rohrabacher pledged to protect protections for individuals with preexisting conditions. Rohrabacher voted for his party's Obamacare replacement bill that included state waivers from rules that prohibit charging higher prices to people with pre-existing conditions.
Rohrabacher was an advocate for the state of California's Proposition 187, which prohibited illegal immigrants from acquiring government services. In 2004, he sponsored an amendment that would have prohibited federal reimbursement of hospital-provided emergency care and certain transportation services to undocumented aliens unless the hospital provided information about the aliens' citizenship, immigration status, financial data, and employer to the Secretary of Homeland Security. Aliens who were in the country illegally would receive reimbursement only after they were deported. The proposed bill was defeated, 331–88.
In 2005, Rohrabacher opined that the Republican Party was split on the issue of immigration: "There are those of us who identify with the national wing and patriotic wing of the party who have always been adamant on the illegal immigration issues. And, on the other side, you have those people who believe in the business and global marketplace concept. So, you have a party with two different views on one of the major issues of the day."
In early 2008, Rohrabacher endorsed Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential primary, citing his positions on stemming illegal immigration and criticizing John McCain. About McCain, he said: "He's been the enemy of those of us who have stemmed the flow of illegals into our country, whereas Romney has made some very tough commitments."
In 2011, Rohrabacher proposed the bill H.R. 787 known as the "No Social Security for Illegal Immigrants Act of 2011". The bill: "Amends title II of the Social Security Act to exclude from creditable wages and self-employment income any wages earned for services by aliens performed in the United States, and self-employment income derived from a trade or business conducted in the United States, while the alien was not authorized to be so employed or to perform a function or service in such a trade or business."
In 2013, an 18-year-old student visited Rohrabacher's office to discuss immigration reform. At some point their conversation became disagreeable, and the student said the congressman yelled at her: "I hate illegals!" He also allegedly threatened to deport her family. Rohrabacher's spokesperson has disputed both statements, averring that it was actually the student who started the confrontation by yelling at the spokesperson and telling her to "butt out".
In September 2017, Rohrabacher supported the Trump administration's rescinding of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, saying that those "in Congress must work to prevent such cynical loopholes from being created again by executive fiat" despite their possible empathy for the immigrants.
The organization NumbersUSA has given Rep. Rohrabacher an A+ rating in accordance to his stance on illegal immigration.
Rohrabacher has drawn controversy over his views on LGBT rights. He opposed same-sex marriage and endorsed Proposition 8, the ballot initiative in 2008 that would have prohibited same-sex marriage in California, during a debate at Orange Coast College, stating he "would suggest not changing the definition of marriage in our society to make a small number of people feel more comfortable".
Rohrabacher voted in favor of the Federal Marriage Amendment in both 2004 and 2006, a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman and forbade states from recognizing or legalizing same-sex marriage. After the Supreme Court issued its decision in "Hollingsworth v. Perry" in 2013, that legalized same-sex marriage in California, Rohrabacher criticized the decision, stating that the decision was "not based on the merits of the issue but on a technicality". However, Rohrabacher has appeared to have endorsed the idea of leaving marriage to religious institutions only, stating on Twitter that churches should be solely responsible for conducting marriages but that the government should only recognize them.
In May 2018, Rohrabacher provoked severe criticism after telling a meeting of the Orange County Association of Realtors that homeowners "should be able to make a decision not to sell their home to someone (if) they don't agree with their lifestyle." Though the statement did not explicitly refer to LGBT people, it was widely interpreted as such. LGBT groups denounced Rohrabacher for the remarks, and the National Association of Realtors, which had previously donated to Rohrabacher's re-election campaigns, condemned Rohrabacher, halted all of its financial support for him and repudiated its past donations to him. After Rohrabacher's constituents unseated him in favor of Harley Rouda, "The Advocate" praised the results and condemned Rohrabacher.
Rohrabacher supported the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes. He spoke against the policy of cannabis prohibition as early as May 2013, calling it a "colossal failure" in an op-ed penned for the "Orange County Register". He further outlined his views in a May 2014 op-ed in "National Review", arguing that the prohibition of cannabis has incurred a number of undesirable costs upon free society, such as an increase in gang violence, soaring incarceration rates, unconstitutional seizure of private property through civil forfeiture, corruption and militarization of police forces, and negative impacts on minority communities and relationships with Latin-American countries. Rohrabacher has called on fellow Republicans to reconsider their stance towards cannabis, citing core conservative principles such as limited government, individual liberty, respect for the Tenth Amendment, and respect for the doctor–patient relationship that Rohrabacher says lend support to loosening current laws. He also notes conservative leaders such as Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, and Grover Norquist that have espoused similar drug policy views. In April 2016, Rohrabacher announced his endorsement of California's Proposition 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act.
Rohrabacher is a strong proponent of states' rights when it comes to cannabis policy. He has introduced the Rohrabacher–Farr amendment for a number of years beginning in 2003, to prohibit the Justice Department from spending funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical cannabis laws. The amendment passed the House for the first time in May 2014, becoming law in December 2014 as part of an omnibus spending bill. Additional legislation that Rohrabacher has introduced includes the Respect State Marijuana Laws Act and the Veterans Equal Access Act. Rohrabacher has called on the DEA / DOJ to remove cannabis from the list of Schedule I drugs. In February 2017, Rohrabacher co-founded the Congressional Cannabis Caucus – along with Reps. Don Young (R–AK), Jared Polis (D–CO), and Earl Blumenauer (D–OR) – to help advance policy change regarding cannabis at the federal level. Rohrabacher earned an "A+" rating from NORML for his voting record regarding cannabis-related matters.
Rohrabacher was an opponent of the America Invents Act, a bill that is attempting to change the current Patent System. Rohrabacher opposes changing from a "first to invent system" to a "first to file system" saying it "hurts the little guy". Rohrabacher commented: "Make no mistake, 'first to file' weakens patent protection. It is likely to make vulnerable individual and small inventors, who don't have an army of lawyers on retainer. These 'little guys' have been the lifeblood of American progress and competitiveness for more than 200 years. Our system was designed to protect individual rights, and it has worked for all – not just the corporate elite." Rohrabacher went on to comment in a "Politico" op-ed: "We're told this is necessary to harmonize with Japanese and European patent law. But those systems were established by elitists and economic shoguns interested in corporate power, not individual rights."
Rohrabacher was chairman of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics from 1997 to January 2005 and has been active on space-related issues. In 2000, Space.com described Rohrabacher as "a strident advocate for supremacy in space, a philosophy shaped along a winding road from libertarian activist to White House speech writer in the Reagan administration". In 2007, Rohrabacher introduced a bill that would direct NASA to develop a strategy "for deflecting and mitigating potentially hazardous near-Earth objects". Rohrabacher has applauded the Apollo astronauts, calling them unofficial ambassadors. Rohrabacher stated "I applaud their efforts and accomplishments over the past fifty years. And I encourage all Americans to join with me in thanking them for their accomplishments and for the international role they have played in serving as unofficial Ambassadors to the world on our behalf."
On July 18, 2017, Rohrabacher asked a panel of space experts testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology if civilizations could have existed on Mars in the past. Kenneth Farley, a project scientist on NASA's Mars Rover 2020 Project, said: "I would say that is extremely unlikely."
Rohrabacher voted against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Despite efforts made by Republicans to change the bill to be more generous regarding cap deductions on new home mortgages, Rohrabacher remained staunch at voting nay on the bill, as the more than half of the new mortgages in his district are above the $750,000 cap. He stated on his Facebook page that "Due to the pressure of several members like me, the bill was improved, but not enough for my constituents."
Rohrabacher has been married to his wife, Rhonda Carmony, since 1997. In 2004, they became parents of triplets.
Rohrabacher was described by the "Los Angeles Times" as "an avid surfer". He also sings, plays guitar, and has written his own song about freedom and America.
Rohrabacher revealed in May 2016 that he uses a cannabis-infused topical rub to treat his arthritis pain, allowing him to sleep through the night. The product is legal under California state law but remains a banned substance under U.S. federal law.
In December 2018, a month after losing his bid for reelection, Rohrabacher announced that he would be moving to Maine to, among other things, write film scripts. In May 2019 he announced his appointment to the advisory board of BudTrader.com, a company that provides cannabis-related advertising services. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8953 |
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the agency was created in February 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957. By collaborating with academic, industry, and government partners, DARPA formulates and executes research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science, often beyond immediate U.S. military requirements.
DARPA-funded projects have provided significant technologies that influenced many non-military fields, such as computer networking and the basis for the modern Internet, and graphical user interfaces in information technology.
DARPA is independent of other military research and development and reports directly to senior Department of Defense management. DARPA comprises approximately 220 government employees in six technical offices, including nearly 100 program managers, who together oversee about 250 research and development programs.
The name of the organization first changed from its founding name, ARPA, to DARPA, in March 1972, changing back to ARPA in February 1993, then reverted to DARPA in March 1996.
Currently, their mission statement is "to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security".
The creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 for the purpose of forming and executing research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science, and able to reach far beyond immediate military requirements, the two relevant acts being the Supplemental Military Construction Authorization (Air Force) (Public Law 85-325) and Department of Defense Directive 5105.15, in February 1958. Its creation was directly attributed to the launching of Sputnik and to U.S. realization that the Soviet Union had developed the capacity to rapidly exploit military technology. Initial funding of ARPA was $520 million. ARPA's first director, Roy Johnson, left a $160,000 management job at General Electric for an $18,000 job at ARPA. Herbert York from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was hired as his scientific assistant.
Johnson and York were both keen on space projects, but when NASA was established later in 1958 all space projects and most of ARPA's funding were transferred to it. Johnson resigned and ARPA was repurposed to do "high-risk", "high-gain", "far out" basic research, a posture that was enthusiastically embraced by the nation's scientists and research universities. ARPA's second director was Brigadier General Austin W. Betts, who resigned in early 1961. He was succeeded by Jack Ruina who served until 1963. Ruina, the first scientist to administer ARPA, managed to raise its budget to $250 million. It was Ruina who hired J. C. R. Licklider as the first administrator of the Information Processing Techniques Office, which played a vital role in creation of ARPANET, the basis for the future Internet.
Additionally, the political and defense communities recognized the need for a high-level Department of Defense organization to formulate and execute R&D projects that would expand the frontiers of technology beyond the immediate and specific requirements of the Military Services and their laboratories. In pursuit of this mission, DARPA has developed and transferred technology programs encompassing a wide range of scientific disciplines that address the full spectrum of national security needs.
From 1958 to 1965, ARPA's emphasis centered on major national issues, including space, ballistic missile defense, and nuclear test detection. During 1960, all of its civilian space programs were transferred to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the military space programs to the individual services.
This allowed ARPA to concentrate its efforts on the Project Defender (defense against ballistic missiles), Project Vela (nuclear test detection), and Project AGILE (counterinsurgency R&D) programs, and to begin work on computer processing, behavioral sciences, and materials sciences. The DEFENDER and AGILE programs formed the foundation of DARPA sensor, surveillance, and directed energy R&D, particularly in the study of radar, infrared sensing, and x-ray/gamma ray detection.
ARPA at this point (1959) played an early role in Transit (also called NavSat) a predecessor to the Global Positioning System (GPS). "Fast-forward to 1959 when a joint effort between DARPA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory began to fine-tune the early explorers’ discoveries. TRANSIT, sponsored by the Navy and developed under the leadership of Dr. Richard Kirschner at Johns Hopkins, was the first satellite positioning system."
During the late 1960s, with the transfer of these mature programs to the Services, ARPA redefined its role and concentrated on a diverse set of relatively small, essentially exploratory research programs. The agency was renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1972, and during the early 1970s, it emphasized direct energy programs, information processing, and tactical technologies.
Concerning information processing, DARPA made great progress, initially through its support of the development of time-sharing (all modern operating systems rely on concepts invented for the Multics system, developed by a cooperation among Bell Labs, General Electric and MIT, which DARPA supported by funding Project MAC at MIT with an initial two-million-dollar grant).
DARPA supported the evolution of the ARPANET (the first wide-area packet switching network), Packet Radio Network, Packet Satellite Network and ultimately, the Internet and research in the artificial intelligence fields of speech recognition and signal processing, including parts of Shakey the robot. DARPA also funded the development of the Douglas Engelbart's NLS computer system and The Mother of All Demos; and the Aspen Movie Map, which was probably the first hypermedia system and an important precursor of virtual reality.
The Mansfield Amendment of 1973 expressly limited appropriations for defense research (through ARPA/DARPA) only to projects with direct military application. Some contend that the amendment devastated American science, since ARPA/DARPA was a major funding source for basic science projects of the time; the National Science Foundation never made up the difference as expected.
The resulting "brain drain" is also credited with boosting the development of the fledgling personal computer industry. Some young computer scientists left the universities to startups and private research laboratories such as Xerox PARC.
Between 1976 and 1981, DARPA's major projects were dominated by air, land, sea, and space technology, tactical armor and anti-armor programs, infrared sensing for space-based surveillance, high-energy laser technology for space-based missile defense, antisubmarine warfare, advanced cruise missiles, advanced aircraft, and defense applications of advanced computing. These large-scale technological program demonstrations were joined by integrated circuit research, which resulted in submicrometer electronic technology and electron devices that evolved into the Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) Program and the Congressionally-mandated charged particle beam program.
Many of the successful programs were transitioned to the Services, such as the foundation technologies in automatic target recognition, space based sensing, propulsion, and materials that were transferred to the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), later known as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), now titled the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
During the 1980s, the attention of the Agency was centered on information processing and aircraft-related programs, including the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) or Hypersonic Research Program. The Strategic Computing Program enabled DARPA to exploit advanced processing and networking technologies and to rebuild and strengthen relationships with universities after the Vietnam War. In addition, DARPA began to pursue new concepts for small, lightweight satellites (LIGHTSAT) and directed new programs regarding defense manufacturing, submarine technology, and armor/anti-armor.
On February 4, 2004 the agency shut down its so called "LifeLog Project". The project's aim would have been, "to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does".
On October 28, 2009 the agency broke ground on a new facility in Arlington, Virginia a few miles from the Pentagon.
In fall 2011, DARPA hosted the 100-Year Starship Symposium with the aim of getting the public to start thinking seriously about interstellar travel.
On June 5, 2016, NASA and DARPA announced that it planned to build new X-planes with NASA's plan setting to create a whole series of X planes over the next 10 years.
Between 2014 and 2016, DARPA shepherded the first machine-to-machine computer security competition, the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC),
bringing a group of top-notch computer security experts to search for security vulnerabilities, exploit them, and create fixes that patch those vulnerabilities in a fully-automated fashion.
In June 2018, DARPA leaders demonstrated a number of new technologies that were developed within the framework of the GXV-T program. The goal of this program is to create a lightly armored combat vehicle of not very large dimensions, which, due to maneuverability and other tricks, can successfully resist modern anti-tank weapon systems.
DARPA has six technical offices that manage the agency's research portfolio, and two additional support offices that manage special projects and transition efforts. All offices report to the DARPA director, including:
A 1991 reorganization created several offices which existed throughout the early 1990s
A 2010 reorganization merged two offices:
A list of DARPA's active and archived projects is available on the agency's website. Because of the agency's fast pace, programs constantly start and stop based on the needs of the U.S. government. Structured information about some of the DARPA's contracts and projects is publicly available.
DARPA is well known as a high-tech government agency, and as such has many appearances in popular fiction. Some realistic references to DARPA in fiction are as "ARPA" in "Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X" (DARPA consults on a technical threat), in episodes of television program "The West Wing" (the ARPA-DARPA distinction), the television program "Numb3rs" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8957 |
Dunstan
Dunstan (909 – 19 May 988) was an English bishop. He was successively Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, later canonised as a saint. His work restored monastic life in England and reformed the English Church. His 11th-century biographer Osbern, himself an artist and scribe, states that Dunstan was skilled in "making a picture and forming letters", as were other clergy of his age who reached senior rank.
Dunstan served as an important minister of state to several English kings. He was the most popular saint in England for nearly two centuries, having gained fame for the many stories of his greatness, not least among which were those concerning his famed cunning in defeating the devil.
Dunstan was born in Baltonsborough, Somerset, at the time part of the kingdom of Wessex. He was the son of Heorstan, a noble of Wessex. Heorstan was the brother of Athelm, the bishop of Wells and Winchester. It is recorded that his mother, Cynethryth, was a pious woman. Osbern's "Life of Dunstan" relates that a messenger miraculously told her of the saintly child she would give birth to:
The anonymous author of the earliest "Life" places Dunstan's birth during the reign of Athelstan, while Osbern fixed it at "the first year of the reign of King Æthelstan", 924 or 925. This date, however, cannot be reconciled with other known dates of Dunstan's life and creates many obvious anachronisms. Historians therefore assume that Dunstan was born around 910 or earlier.
As a young boy, Dunstan studied under the Irish monks who then occupied the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. Accounts tell of his youthful optimism and of his vision of the abbey being restored. While still a boy, Dunstan was stricken with a near-fatal illness and effected a seemingly miraculous recovery. Even as a child, he was noted for his devotion to learning and for his mastery of many kinds of artistic craftsmanship. With his parents' consent he was tonsured, received minor orders and served in the ancient church of St Mary. He became so well known for his devotion to learning that he is said to have been summoned by his uncle Athelm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to enter his service. He was later appointed to the court of King Athelstan.
Dunstan soon became a favourite of the king and was the envy of other members of the court. A plot was hatched to disgrace him and Dunstan was accused of being involved with witchcraft and black magic. The king ordered him to leave the court and as Dunstan was leaving the palace his enemies physically attacked him, beat him severely, bound him, and threw him into a cesspool. He managed to crawl out and make his way to the house of a friend. From there, he journeyed to Winchester and entered the service of his uncle, Ælfheah, Bishop of Winchester.
The bishop tried to persuade him to become a monk, but Dunstan was doubtful whether he had a vocation to a celibate life. The answer came in the form of an attack of swelling tumours all over Dunstan's body. This ailment was so severe that it was thought to be leprosy. It was more probably some form of blood poisoning caused by being beaten and thrown in the cesspool. Whatever the cause, it changed Dunstan's mind. He took Holy Orders in 943, in the presence of Ælfheah, and returned to live the life of a hermit at Glastonbury. Against the old church of St Mary he built a small cell five feet long and two and a half feet deep. It was there that Dunstan studied, worked at his handicrafts, and played on his harp. It is at this time, according to a late 11th-century legend, that the Devil is said to have tempted Dunstan and to have been held by the face with Dunstan's tongs.
Dunstan worked as a silversmith and in the scriptorium while he was living at Glastonbury. It is thought likely that he was the artist who drew the well-known image of Christ with a small kneeling monk beside him in the "Glastonbury Classbook", "one of the first of a series of outline drawings which were to become a special feature of Anglo-Saxon art of this period." Dunstan became famous as a musician, illuminator, and metalworker. Lady Æthelflaed, King Æthelstan's niece, made Dunstan a trusted adviser and on her death she left a considerable fortune to him. He used this money later in life to foster and encourage a monastic revival in England. About the same time, his father Heorstan died and Dunstan inherited his fortune as well. He became a person of great influence, and on the death of King Æthelstan in 940, the new King, Edmund, summoned him to his court at Cheddar and made him a minister.
Again, royal favour fostered jealousy among other courtiers and again Dunstan's enemies succeeded in their plots. The king was prepared to send Dunstan away. There were then at Cheddar certain envoys from the "Eastern Kingdom", which probably meant East Anglia. Dunstan implored the envoys to take him with them when they returned to their homes. They agreed to do so, but it never happened. The story is recorded:
Dunstan, now Abbot of Glastonbury, went to work at once on the task of reform. He had to re-create monastic life and to rebuild the abbey. He began by establishing Benedictine monasticism at Glastonbury. The Rule of St. Benedict was the basis of his restoration according to the author of 'Edgar's Establishment of the Monasteries' (written in the 960s or 970s) and according to Dunstan's first biographer, who had been a member of the community at Glastonbury. Their statements are also in accordance with the nature of his first measures as abbot, with the significance of his first buildings, and with the Benedictine leanings of his most prominent disciples.
Nevertheless, not all the members of Dunstan's community at Glastonbury were monks who followed the Benedictine Rule. In fact, Dunstan's first biographer, 'B.', was a cleric who eventually joined a community of canons at Liège after leaving Glastonbury.
Dunstan's first care was to rebuild the Church of St. Peter, rebuild the cloister, and re-establish the monastic enclosure. The secular affairs of the house were committed to his brother, Wulfric, "so that neither himself nor any of the professed monks might break enclosure." A school for the local youth was founded and soon became the most famous of its time in England. A substantial extension of the irrigation system on the surrounding Somerset Levels was also completed.
Within two years of Dunstan's appointment, in 946, King Edmund was assassinated. His successor was Eadred. The policy of the new government was supported by the Queen mother, Eadgifu of Kent, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Oda, and by the East Anglian nobles, at whose head was the powerful ealdorman Æthelstan the "Half-king". It was a policy of unification and conciliation with the Danish half of the kingdom. The goal was a firm establishment of royal authority. In ecclesiastical matters it favoured the spread of Catholic observance, the rebuilding of churches, the moral reform of the clergy and laity, and the end of the religion of the Danes in England.
Against all these reforms were the nobles of Wessex, who included most of Dunstan's own relatives, and who had an interest in maintaining established customs. For nine years Dunstan's influence was dominant, during which time he twice refused the office of bishop (that of Winchester in 951 and Crediton in 953), affirming that he would not leave the king's side so long as the king lived and needed him.
In 955, Eadred died, and the situation was at once changed. Eadwig, the elder son of Edmund, who then came to the throne, was a headstrong youth wholly devoted to the reactionary nobles. According to one legend, the feud with Dunstan began on the day of Eadwig's coronation, when he failed to attend a meeting of nobles. When Dunstan eventually found the young monarch, he was cavorting with a noblewoman named Ælfgifu and her mother, and refused to return with the bishop. Infuriated by this, Dunstan dragged Eadwig back and forced him to renounce the girl as a "strumpet". Later realising that he had provoked the king, Dunstan fled to the apparent sanctuary of his cloister, but Eadwig, incited by Ælfgifu, whom he married, followed him and plundered the monastery.
Although Dunstan managed to escape, he saw that his life was in danger. He fled England and crossed the channel to Flanders, where he found himself ignorant of the language and of the customs of the locals. The count of Flanders, Arnulf I, received him with honour and lodged him in the Abbey of Mont Blandin, near Ghent. This was one of the centres of the Benedictine revival in that country, and Dunstan was able for the first time to observe the strict observance that had seen its rebirth at Cluny at the beginning of the century. His exile was not of long duration. Before the end of 957, the Mercians and Northumbrians revolted and drove out Eadwig, choosing his brother Edgar as king of the country north of the Thames. The south remained faithful to Eadwig. At once Edgar's advisers recalled Dunstan.
On Dunstan's return, Archbishop Oda consecrated him a bishop and, on the death of Coenwald of Worcester at the end of 957, Oda appointed Dunstan to the see.
In the following year the see of London became vacant and was conferred on Dunstan, who held it simultaneously with Worcester. In October 959, Eadwig died and his brother Edgar was readily accepted as ruler of Wessex. One of Eadwig's final acts had been to appoint a successor to Archbishop Oda, who died on 2 June 958. The chosen candidate was Ælfsige of Winchester, but he died of cold in the Alps as he journeyed to Rome for the pallium. In his place Eadwig then nominated the Bishop of Wells, Byrhthelm. As soon as Edgar became king, he reversed this second choice on the ground that Byrhthelm had not been able to govern even his first diocese properly. The archbishopric was then conferred on Dunstan.
Dunstan went to Rome in 960, and received the pallium from Pope John XII. On his journey there, Dunstan's acts of charity were so lavish as to leave nothing for himself and his attendants. His steward complained, but Dunstan seems to have suggested that they trust in Jesus Christ.
On his return from Rome, Dunstan at once regained his position as virtual prime minister of the kingdom. By his advice Ælfstan was appointed to the Bishopric of London, and Oswald to that of Worcester. In 963, Æthelwold, the Abbot of Abingdon, was appointed to the See of Winchester. With their aid and with the ready support of King Edgar, Dunstan pushed forward his reforms in the English Church. The monks in his communities were taught to live in a spirit of self-sacrifice, and Dunstan actively enforced the law of celibacy whenever possible. He forbade the practices of simony (selling ecclesiastical offices for money) and ended the custom of clerics appointing relatives to offices under their jurisdiction. Monasteries were built, and in some of the great cathedrals, monks took the place of the secular canons; in the rest the canons were obliged to live according to rule. The parish priests were compelled to be qualified for their office; they were urged to teach parishioners not only the truths of the Christian faith, but also trades to improve their position. The state saw reforms as well. Good order was maintained throughout the realm and there was respect for the law. Trained bands policed the north, and a navy guarded the shores from Viking raids. There was a level of peace in the kingdom unknown in living memory.
In 973, Dunstan's statesmanship reached its zenith when he officiated at the coronation of King Edgar. Edgar was crowned at Bath in an imperial ceremony planned not as the initiation, but as the culmination of his reign (a move that must have taken a great deal of preliminary diplomacy). This service, devised by Dunstan himself and celebrated with a poem in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" forms the basis of the present-day British coronation ceremony. There was a second symbolic coronation held later. This was an important step, as other kings of Britain came and gave their allegiance to Edgar at Chester. Six kings in Britain, including the kings of Scotland and of Strathclyde, pledged their faith that they would be the king's liege-men on sea and land.
Edgar ruled as a strong and popular king for 16 years. In 975 he was succeeded by his eldest son Edward "the Martyr". His accession was disputed by his stepmother, Ælfthryth, who wished her own son Æthelred to reign. Through the influence of Dunstan, Edward was chosen and crowned at Winchester. Edgar's death had encouraged the reactionary nobles, and at once there was a determined attack upon the monks, the protagonists of reform. Throughout Mercia they were persecuted and deprived of their possessions. Their cause, however, was supported by Æthelwine, the ealdorman of East Anglia, and the realm was in serious danger of civil war. Three meetings of the Witan were held to settle these disputes, at Kyrtlington, at Calne, and at Amesbury. At the second of them the floor of the hall where the Witan was sitting gave way, and all except Dunstan, who clung to a beam, fell into the room below; several men were killed.
In March 978, King Edward was assassinated at Corfe Castle, possibly at the instigation of his stepmother, and Æthelred the Unready became king. His coronation on Low Sunday 31 March 978, was the last state event in which Dunstan took part. When the young king took the usual oath to govern well, Dunstan addressed him in solemn warning. He criticised the violent act whereby he became king and prophesied the misfortunes that were shortly to fall on the kingdom, but Dunstan's influence at court was ended. Dunstan retired to Canterbury, to teach at the cathedral school.
Only three more public acts are known. In 980, Dunstan joined Ælfhere of Mercia in the solemn translation of the relics of King Edward, soon to be regarded as a saint, from their grave at Wareham to a shrine at Shaftesbury Abbey. In 984, in obedience to a vision of St Andrew, he persuaded King Æthelred to appoint Ælfheah as Bishop of Winchester in succession to Æthelwold. In 986, Dunstan induced the king, by a donation of 100 pounds of silver, to stop his persecution of the See of Rochester.
Dunstan's retirement at Canterbury consisted of long hours, both day and night, spent in private prayer, as well as his regular attendance at Mass and the daily office. He visited the shrines of St Augustine and St Æthelberht, and there are reports of a vision of angels who sang to him heavenly canticles. He worked to improve the spiritual and temporal well-being of his people, to build and restore churches, to establish schools, to judge suits, to defend widows and orphans, to promote peace, and to enforce respect for purity. He practised his crafts, made bells and organs and corrected the books in the cathedral library. He encouraged and protected European scholars who came to England, and was active as a teacher of boys in the cathedral school. On the vigil of Ascension Day 988, it is recorded that a vision of angels warned he would die in three days. On the feast day itself, Dunstan said Mass and preached three times to the people: at the Gospel, at the benediction, and after the Agnus Dei. In this last address, he announced his impending death and wished his congregation well. That afternoon he chose the spot for his tomb, then went to his bed. His strength failed rapidly, and on Saturday morning, 19 May, he caused the clergy to assemble. Mass was celebrated in his presence, then he received Extreme Unction and the Viaticum, and died. Dunstan's final words are reported to have been, "He hath made a remembrance of his wonderful works, being a merciful and gracious Lord: He hath given food to them that fear Him."
The English people accepted him as a saint shortly thereafter. He was formally canonised in 1029. That year at the Synod of Winchester, St Dunstan's feast was ordered to be kept solemnly throughout England.
Until Thomas Becket's fame overshadowed Dunstan's, he was the favourite saint of the English people. Dunstan had been buried in his cathedral; and when that building was destroyed by a fire in 1074, his relics were translated by Archbishop Lanfranc to a tomb on the south side of the high altar in the rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral.
Part of the decoration to the side of his tomb is still visible, and consists of some painted diaperwork, which can be viewed by visitors to the Cathedral.
The monks of Glastonbury used to claim that during the sack of Canterbury by the Danes in 1012, Dunstan's body had been carried for safety to their abbey. This story was disproved by Archbishop William Warham, who opened the tomb at Canterbury in 1508. They found Dunstan's relics still to be there. Within a century, however, his shrine was destroyed during the English Reformation.
Dunstan became patron saint of English goldsmiths and silversmiths because he worked as a silversmith making church plate. The Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Anglican Communion mark his feast day on 19 May., which is why, before the Restoration the date year on London Assay Office hallmarks ran from 19 May one year to 18 May the next, not the calendar year. This was changed at the restoration of Charles II in 1660 so that the hallmarking year began on the King's birthday, 29 May.
English literature contains many references to him, for example in "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, and in this folk rhyme:
St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull'd the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.
This folk story is already shown in an initial in the "Life of Dunstan" in the Canterbury Passionale, from the second quarter of the 12th century (British Library, Harley MS 315, f. 15v.), and the tongs have become a symbol of St Dunstan.
Daniel Anlezark has tentatively suggested that Dunstan may be the medieval author of Solomon and Saturn citing the style, word choice, and Hiberno-Latin used in the texts. However, Clive Tolley examines this claim from a linguistic point-of-view and disagrees with Anlezark's claim.
Another story relates how Dunstan nailed a horseshoe to the Devil's foot when he was asked to re-shoe the Devil's cloven hoof. This caused the Devil great pain, and Dunstan only agreed to remove the shoe and release the Devil after he promised never to enter a place where a horseshoe is over the door. This is claimed as the origin of the lucky horseshoe.
At various passages in "The Deptford Trilogy" by the Canadian writer Robertson Davies, the character Dunstan Ramsay is compared with the saint of the same name, and in particular some stormy events in the character's love-life are rather humorously compared to Saint Dunstan's famous struggle with Satan.
A fictionalised account of his life is told in the 2017 historical novel" Dunstan" by Conn Iggulden.
Dunstan's tongs are included in the coat of arms of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, to reflect the saint's strong association with the East End of London.
As Bishop of London, Dunstan was also Lord of the Manor of Stepney, and may, like subsequent bishops, have lived there. Dunstan is recorded as having founded (or rebuilt) Stepney's church, in 952 AD. This church was dedicated to All Saints, but was rededicated to Dunstan after his canonisation in 1029.
It was initially the only church for the whole manor, a manor which covered most of what would later become the East End. Population growth and other factors led to Stepney parish being subdivided into a large number of daughter parishes. To this day St Dunstan's church in Stepney is known as the "Mother Church of the East End".
There are churches dedicated to Dunstan all over the world. St Dunstan's, Mayfield, St. Dunstan’s the cathedral in the weald, Cranbrook, Kent, St Dunstan's, Stepney, St Dunstan-in-the-East, London, and St Dunstan-in-the-West, London are four of the more well known in Britain. The church at the junction of London Road and Whitstable Road gives its name to the neighbourhood of Canterbury on the north bank of the River Stour.
St Dunstan's—the charity that provides support, rehabilitation, and respite care to blind ex-service personnel of the British Armed Forces—is named for Dunstan.
To this day the local secondary school of Glastonbury bares his name and the school emblem depicts his harp. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8958 |
Deprogramming
Deprogramming refers to measures that claim to assist a person who holds a controversial belief system in changing those beliefs and abandoning allegiance to the religious, political, economic, or social group associated with the belief system. The dictionary definition of deprogramming is "to free" or "to retrain" someone from specific beliefs. Some controversial methods and practices of self-identified "deprogrammers" have involved kidnapping, false imprisonment, and coercion, which have sometimes resulted in criminal convictions of the deprogrammers. Some deprogramming regimens are designed for individuals taken against their will, which has led to controversies over freedom of religion, kidnapping, and civil rights, as well as the violence which is sometimes involved.
As a technique, the deprogramming that has been practiced over the last half century has been typically commissioned by relatives, often parents of adult offspring, who objected to the subject's membership in an organization or group. It has been compared to exorcisms in both methodology and manifestation, and the process sometimes has been performed with tacit support of law enforcement and judicial officials. In response to a burgeoning number of new religious movements in the 1970s in the United States, the "father of deprogramming," Ted Patrick, introduced many of these techniques to a wider audience as a means to combat cults. Since then, deprogrammings have been carried out "by the thousands". For example, various atrocity stories served as justification for deprogramming of Unification Church members in the USA.
As a technique for encouraging people to disassociate with groups with whom they have as consenting adults chosen to associate, deprogramming is a controversial practice. Even some cult critics have denounced it on legal and ethical grounds. Similar actions, when done without force, have been referred to as "exit counseling."
Sometimes the word "deprogramming" is used in a wider (and/or ironic or humorous sense), to mean the freeing of someone (often oneself) from any previously uncritically assimilated idea. According to Carol Giambalvo, "exit cousellors are usually former cult members themselves".
Various academics have commented on the practice. For example, as defined by James T. Richardson, UNLV Professor of Sociology and Judicial Studies and Director of the Grant Sawyer Center for Justice Studies, deprogramming is a "private, self-help process whereby participants in unpopular new religious movements (NRMs) were forcibly removed from the group, incarcerated, and put through radical resocialization processes that were supposed to result in their agreeing to leave the group." Law professor Douglas Laycock, author of "Religious Liberty: The free exercise clause", wrote:
Beginning in the 1970s, many parents responded to the initial conversion with "deprogramming." The essence of deprogramming was to physically abduct the convert, isolate him and physically restrain him, and barrage him with continuous arguments and attacks against his new religion, threatening to hold him forever until he agreed to leave it.
Lawyer John LeMoult, writing in a law review journal, described such practices as the person subject to deprogramming being "seized, held against his will, subjected to mental, emotional, and even physical pressures until he renounces his beliefs", and compared this power to that of Nazis over their prisoners.
There has never been a standard procedure among deprogrammers; descriptions in anecdotal reports, studies, and interviews with former deprogrammers vary greatly. Deprogrammers generally operate on the presumption that the people they are paid to extract from religious organizations are victims of mind control (or brainwashing). Books written by deprogrammers and exit counselors say that the most essential part of freeing the mind of a person is to convince the subject that he or she had been under the mental control of others.
Ted Patrick, one of the pioneers of deprogramming, used a confrontational method, enlisting psychiatrists and psychologists to assist him in the deprogramming process. Patrick was tried and convicted of multiple felonies related to kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment of deprogramming subjects.
Sylvia Buford, an associate of Ted Patrick who has assisted him on many deprogrammings, described five stages of deprogramming:
The deprogramming accounts vary widely regarding the use of force, with the most dramatic accounts coming from deprogrammed people who returned to the group.
Steven Hassan in his book "Releasing the Bonds" spoke against coercive deprogramming methods using force or threats.
The deprogramming case observed by Dubrow-Eichel did not include any violence.
Sociologist Eileen Barker wrote in Watching for Violence:
In "Colombrito vs. Kelly", the Court accepted the definition of deprogramming by J. Le Moult published in 1978 in the Fordham Law Review:
Deprogrammer Carol Giambalvo writes in the 1998 text "Deprogramming to Thought Reform Consultation":
Alan W. Gomes (chairman of the department of theology at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University) in his 2009 book "Unmasking the Cults" reports:
The Dialog Center International (DCI) a major Christian counter-cult organization founded in 1973 by a Danish professor of missiology and ecumenical theology, Dr. Johannes Aagaard rejects deprogramming, believing that it is counterproductive, ineffective, and can harm the relationship between a cult member and concerned family members.
Professor of psychiatry Saul Levine suggests that it is doubtful that deprogramming helps many people and goes on to say that it actually causes harm to the victim by very nature of the deprogramming. For deprogramming to work, the victim must be convinced that they joined a religious group against their will. They then must renounce responsibility and accept that in some mysterious way that their minds were controlled. It is Levine's professional opinion that once deprogrammed, a person would never be certain that they were really doing what they want. He states that deprogramming destroys a person's identity and is likely to create permanent anxiety about freedom of choice and leave the deprogrammed subject dependent upon the guidance and advice of others. "Fundamentally deprogramming denies choice and creates dependency. It robs people of their sense of responsibility. Instead of encouraging people to accept that they made a mistake, it encourages people to deny their actions and blame others."
Deprogramming activities often fall outside of the law. Government agencies have at times been aware and have taken part in deprogramming to enforce official views of "correct" beliefs and behaviors. This can involve "vigorous, even violent, efforts to dissuade people from participating in groups deemed unacceptable to the government" and have been "given legal sanction by the passage of laws that make illegal the activities or even the beliefs
of the unpopular movement or group being targeted".
In the United States, from the mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s mind control was a widely accepted theory in public opinion, and the vast majority of newspaper and magazine accounts of deprogrammings assumed that recruits' relatives were well justified to seek conservatorships and to hire deprogrammers. It took nearly 20 years for public opinion to shift.
One aspect that gradually became disturbing from a civil rights point of view, was that relatives would use deception or other ethically questionable methods—even kidnapping—to get the recruit into deprogrammers' hands, without allowing the person any recourse to a lawyer or psychiatrist of their own choosing. Previously, there would be a sanity hearing first, and only then a commitment to an asylum or involuntary therapy. But with deprogramming, judges routinely granted parents legal authority over their adult children without a hearing.
One of main objections raised to deprogramming (as well as to exit counseling) is the contention that they begin with a false premise. Lawyers for some groups who have lost members due to deprogramming, as well as some civil libertarians, sociologists and psychologists, argue that it is not the religious groups but rather the deprogrammers who are the ones who deceive and manipulate people.
David Bromley and Anson Shupe wrote:
A number of factors contributed to the cessation of deprogramming:
Some of the deprogrammed adults sued the deprogrammers or the relatives who had hired them. Also in 1987, psychologist Margaret Singer became unusable as an expert witness after the American Psychological Association (APA) rejected her "Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control" (DIMPAC) report.
The American Civil Liberties Union published a statement in 1977 which said:
In the 1980s in the United States, namely in New York (Deprogramming Bill, 1981), Kansas (Deprogramming Bill, 1982), and Nebraska (conservatorship legislation for 1985), lawmakers unsuccessfully attempted to legalize involuntary deprogramming.
Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church (many of whose members were targets of deprogramming) issued this statement in 1983:
In April 1993, Joe Szimhart and another defendant were acquitted by a jury in Boise, Idaho (Idaho vs Szimhart, et al) of all charges in the alleged kidnap/deprogramming attempt of a Church Universal and Triumphant member at the end of 1991.
During the 1990s, deprogrammer Rick Ross was sued by Jason Scott, a former member of a Pentecostal group called the Life Tabernacle Church, after an unsuccessful deprogramming attempt. In 1995, the jury awarded Scott $875,000 in compensatory damages and $2,500,000 in punitive damages against Ross, which were later settled for $5,000 and 200 hours of services. More significantly, the jury also found that the leading anti-cult group known as the Cult Awareness Network was a co-conspirator in the crime and fined CAN $1,000,000 in punitive damages, forcing the group into bankruptcy. This case is often seen as effectively closing the door on the practice of involuntary deprogramming in the United States.
Anti-cult groups play a central role in maintaining the underground network of communications, referrals, transportation, and housing necessary for continued deprogramming.
Groups such as the Cult Awareness Network operated a referral scheme (NARDEC) in which they would refer people to deprogrammers in return for a 'kickback' in the form of a donation or as a commission. Deprogrammers such as Rick Ross, Steven Hassan and Carol Giambalvo were amongst the CAN referred deprogrammers.
In 1974, Kathy Crampton, whose abduction and deprogramming were televised across the US, went back to the Love Family group several days after her apparently successful deprogramming. Patrick was charged with kidnapping, but acquitted with the reasoning: "[w]here parents are, as here, of the reasonable and intelligent belief that they were not physically capable of recapturing their daughter from existing, imminent danger, then the defense of necessity transfers or transposes to the constituted agent, the person who acts upon their belief under such conditions. Here that agent is the Defendant Ted Patrick." "(District Court of the United States 1974: 79; New York Times 1974)."
In 1980, Susan Wirth, a 35-year-old teacher living in San Francisco, was abducted by her parents to be deprogrammed in reaction to her leftist political views and activities. Patrick was paid $27,000 to carry out the deprogramming, which involved handcuffing her to a bed for two weeks and denying her food. She was later released and after returning to San Francisco spoke out against deprogramming but declined to press legal charges against her parents.
In 1980, Patrick was convicted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and false imprisonment for abducting and attempting to deprogram Roberta McElfish, a 26-year-old Tucson waitress. Patrick was sentenced to one year in prison and fined $5,000.
In 1981, Stephanie Riethmiller, who lived in Ohio, was kidnapped by deprogrammers hired by her parents to end her lesbian relationship. She was held against her will and repeatedly raped. After her release she filed civil charges against her parents and the deprogrammers, which were dismissed in a trial that generated some controversy in the media.
In 1990, Patrick attempted to deprogram Elma Miller, an Amish woman who had joined a liberal sect. He was hired by her husband to return her to him and the Amish church. Criminal charges of conspiracy were filed against Miller's husband, brother, and two others but were later dropped on her request to the prosecuting attorney.
During the 1990s, Rick Ross, a noted cult intervention advocate who took part in a number of deprogramming sessions, was sued by Jason Scott, a former member of a Pentecostalist group called the Life Tabernacle Church (part of United Pentecostal Church International), after an unsuccessful coercive deprogramming. The jury awarded Scott $875,000 in compensatory damages and $1,000,000 in punitive damages against the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), and $2,500,000 against Ross (later settled for $5,000 and 200 hours of services "as an expert consultant and intervention specialist").
Deprogramming and exit counseling, sometimes seen as one and the same, are distinct approaches to convincing a person to leave a cult. During exit counseling, a subject has the ability to leave at any time and so the exit counselor focuses on building rapport rather than persuading the subject that the cult is a negative influence.
Because deprogramming entails coercion and confinement costs typically rise to $10,000 or more, mainly due to the expense of a security team. Exit counseling, by contrast, typically costs $2,000 to $4,000 for a three- to five-day intervention, although cases requiring extensive research of little-known groups can cost much more (estimated in 1993). Deprogramming, especially when it fails, also entails considerable legal and psychological risk (for example, a permanent alienation of the subject from his or her family). The psychological and legal risks in exit counseling are significantly reduced. Although deprogrammers do prepare families for the process, exit counselors tend to work with them directly, expecting those requesting the intervention to contribute more to the process; that is, exit counseling requires that families establish a reasonable and respectful level of communication with their loved one before the program itself can begin. Because deprogramming relies on coercion, which is illegal except in the case of conservatorship and is generally viewed as unethical, deprogrammers' critiques of the unethical practices of cults tend to be less credibility to the subject than the arguments of exit counselors.
Steven Hassan, author of the book "Combatting Cult Mind Control", states that he took part in a number of deprogrammings in the late 1970s, and has spoken out against them since 1980. Hassan states that he has not participated in any deprogrammings since then, although on page 114 of "Combatting", Hassan states that deprogrammings should be kept as a last resort if all other attempts fail to transform the individual. Hassan is one of the major proponents of exit counseling as a form of intercession, and he refers to his method as "strategic intervention therapy". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8960 |
Daily Planet
The Daily Planet is a fictional broadsheet newspaper appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics, commonly in association with Superman. The newspaper was first mentioned in "Action Comics" #23 (April 1940). The "Daily Planet" building's distinguishing feature is the enormous globe that sits on top of the building.
The newspaper is based in the fictional city of Metropolis, and employs Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen, with Perry White as its editor-in-chief. The building's original features appear to be based upon the Old Toronto Star Building, where Superman co-creator Joe Shuster was a newsboy when the "Toronto Star" was still called the "Daily Star". Shuster has claimed that Metropolis was visually inspired by Toronto. Over the years, however, Metropolis has come to serve as an analogue to New York City.
When Superman first appeared in comics (specifically 1938's "Action Comics" #1), his alter ego Clark Kent worked for a newspaper named the "Daily Star", under editor George Taylor. Superman co-creator Joe Shuster named the "Daily Star" after the "Toronto Daily Star" newspaper in Toronto, Ontario, which had been the newspaper that Shuster's parents received and for which Shuster had worked as a newsboy. It was not until later years that the fictional paper became the "Daily Planet." (The real-world newspaper was called the "Evening Star" prior to 1899; the "Toronto Daily Star" is now known as the "Toronto Star".)
While choosing a name for the fictitious newspaper, consideration was given to combining the names of "The Globe and Mail" (another Toronto newspaper) and the "Daily Star" to become "The Daily Globe". But when the comic strip appeared, the newspaper's name was permanently made the "Daily Planet" to avoid a name conflict with real newspapers. In "Superman" (volume 1) #5 (Summer 1940), the publisher of the "Daily Planet" is shown to be Burt Mason, a man who is determined to print the truth even when corrupt politician Alex Evell threatens him. In "Superman" #6 (September–October 1940), Mason gives free printing equipment to "The Gateston Gazette" after its editor, Jim Tirrell, is killed and its equipment is destroyed by racketeers that Tirrell insisted on reporting.
When DC made use of its multiverse means of continuity tracking between the early 1960s and mid-1980s, it was declared that the "Daily Star" was the newspaper's name in the Golden Age or "Earth-Two" versions of Clark Kent, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, while the "Daily Planet" was used in the Silver Age or "Earth-One" versions. The Clark Kent of Earth-Two eventually became the editor-in-chief of the "Daily Star", something his Earth-One counterpart did not achieve.
In the Silver and Bronze Age universes, Clark's first contact with the "Daily Planet" came when reporter (and future editor) Perry White came to Smallville to write a story about Superboy, and wound up getting an interview where the Boy of Steel first revealed his extraterrestrial origins. The story resulted in Perry earning a Pulitzer Prize. During Clark Kent's years in college, Perry White was promoted to editor-in-chief upon the retirement of the "Daily Planet"'s previous editor, the Earth-One version of George Taylor.
After graduating from Metropolis University with a degree in journalism, Clark Kent went to work at the "Planet", and quickly met Lois Lane (who had been working there for some time already). After Clark was hired, Jimmy Olsen joined the paper's staff.
In 1971, the "Daily Planet" was purchased by Morgan Edge, president of the Galaxy Broadcasting System. Edge proceeded to integrate Metropolis television station WGBS-TV's studios into the "Daily Planet" building, and named Clark Kent as the anchor for the WGBS evening news. Eventually, Clark's former schoolmate from Smallville Lana Lang joined Clark as a co-anchor.
After the 1985–1986 miniseries "Crisis on Infinite Earths", many of these elements, including Morgan Edge buying the "Daily Planet", were retroactively changed or eliminated from the Superman canon.
In the post-Crisis comics' canon, years before Clark or Lois began working for the paper, Lex Luthor owned the "Daily Planet." When Luthor, deciding to sell the paper, began taking bids for the "Planet", Perry White convinced an international conglomerate, TransNational Enterprises, to buy the paper. They agreed to this venture with only one stipulation: that Perry White would become editor-in-chief. White had served as the "Planet" editor-in-chief ever since, barring the few times he was absent. During those times people such as Sam Foswell and Clark Kent have looked after the paper. Franklin Stern, an old friend of White's, became the "Daily Planet"'s publisher.
The "Planet" saw its share of rough times during White's tenure. For example, it had many violent worker strikes. The building itself, along with most of the city, was destroyed during the "Fall of Metropolis" storyline; it is only much later that it was restored by the efforts of various superheroes. The "Planet" building sustained heavy damages after the villain Doomsday's rampage. Later, Franklin Stern decided to put the paper up for sale. Lex Luthor, disliking the heavy criticism of himself and his company that the "Planet" became noted for, purchased the "Daily Planet" and subsequently closed the paper down. Luthor fired every employee of the newspaper except for four people: Simone D'Neige, Dirk Armstrong, Jimmy Olsen, and Lois Lane. As a final insult, Luthor saw to it that the "Planet" globe was unceremoniously dumped in the Metropolis landfill. In the "Planet"'s place emerged "LexCom," a news-oriented Internet website that primarily catered to Luthor's views of "quality journalism."
After Lois Lane made a deal with Luthor where, in exchange for him returning the "Planet" to Perry, she would kill one story of his choosing with no questions asked, Luthor sold the "Daily Planet" to Perry White for the token sum of one dollar. The paper was quickly reinstated, rehiring all of its old staff. Sometime later, ownership of the "Planet" fell into the hands of Bruce Wayne, where it has remained ever since. In the "" storyline, it is named a subsidiary of Wayne Entertainment.
During the "Y2K" storyline (involving the city of Metropolis being infused with futuristic technology thanks to a descendant of the villain Brainiac), the "Daily Planet" building was "upgraded" along with the rest of Metropolis, and a holographic globe replaced the physical one. Eventually due to temporal instabilities caused by the B13 Virus, Metropolis and the Daily Planet building, globe and all, were restored to their former states.
In the current comics and media spinoffs, the "Daily Planet" is presented as a thoroughly modern news operation, including operating an Internet website much like most large newspapers. The "Planet"'s reporters also have access to the best modern equipment to aid their work, though Perry White has often been shown as still favoring his manual typewriter. In 2008, it was said that Clark (at least in this era/continuity) uses a typewriter at his desk due to his powers causing minor interference in regular desktop computers.
During this era, the "Planet"'s major competitors in Metropolis include the tabloid newspaper the "Daily Star", WGBS-TV (which also employed Jimmy Olsen and Cat Grant for a time), and Lex Luthor's various media operations. A contemporary publication is "Newstime" Magazine, where Clark Kent worked as the editor for a time. The publisher of "Newstime" is Colin Thornton, who is secretly the demon Satanus, an enemy of Superman's.
In the "" limited series, the "Daily Planet"'s publisher was Quentin Galloway, an abrasive overbearing loudmouth who bullied Jimmy Olsen, and later Clark Kent, before being told off by Lois Lane, whom Galloway could not fire because of her star status. This was meant to be a new origin for Superman but one that applied to the Post-Crisis continuity, so later "Planet" history concerning Luthor temporarily owning it and other events still applied.
During the story "Infinite Crisis", parts of the Post-Crisis history were altered. These changes were explained gradually over the next several years. The 2009 mini-series "" clarified the earlier history of the "Planet" in the new continuity. The story established that while Lex Luthor, in the revised history, owns every media in Metropolis and uses it to enforce his public image as a wealthy benefactor, the "Planet" had always stood free, refusing him ownership and even condemning his actions in editorials signed by Perry White himself. As a result, when Clark Kent is first inducted into the "Planet", the newspaper was almost bankrupt, dilapidated and unable to afford new reporters. This changed after Superman begins his career. Thanks to Superman granting exclusive interviews and photographs to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen when he debuts, the paper's circulation increased 700%.
General Sam Lane (Lois' father) attempted to capture Superman, seeing him as an alien threat. When he failed to do so, he forcibly shut down the "Planet" as part of an attempt to force Perry White and Lois to turn over any information they had on Superman that they haven't released to the public. Eventually, Superman turned the public to his favor and Sam Lane was seen in a bad light after his soldier John Corben AKA Metallo ruthlessly endangered civilians. These events lead to the people of Metropolis no longer looking at Lex Luthor as a savior and "The Daily Planet" becomes the city's top-selling paper, as well as a major player in media.
In "Final Crisis" #2, the villain Clayface triggers an explosion in The "Daily Planet" building, greatly damaging the offices, leaving many injured and at least one person dead. Lois Lane is hospitalized. Despite the chaos of "Final Crisis" and more than half of humanity being enslaved by evil, the newspaper continues to spread news and inform the public via a printing press in Superman's Fortress of Solitude. In "Final Crisis" #7, it is shown functioning once again.
With the reboot of DC's line of comics in 2011, the "Daily Planet" was shown in the "Superman" comics as being bought by Morgan Edge and merged with the Galaxy Broadcasting System, similar to the Silver/Bronze Age continuity. In "Action Comics", it is revealed that in the new history/universe, Clark Kent begins his journalism career in Metropolis roughly six years before Galaxy Broadcasting merges with the "Daily Planet". Along with being a writer for "The Daily Star", partly because editor George Taylor was a friend of his adopted parents, Clark is an active blogger who speaks against political corruption and reports on the troubles of everyday citizens who are not often the focus of news media. While working at the "Star", Clark meets "Planet" photographer Jimmy Olsen and the two become friends despite working at rival publications. Clark is also a great fan of Lois Lane's work at the "Daily Planet", eventually meeting her through Jimmy. Months after Superman makes his public debut, Clark leaves "The Daily Star" on good terms and accepts a position at "The Daily Planet".
After the merger with Galaxy Broadcasting, Lois was promoted to run the TV division, with Clark acting as an on-the-scene reporter for the TV division. Clark is later assigned the "Superman beat." But after rising tension between himself and Lois, as well as with Galaxy Broadcasting head Morgan Edge, Clark concludes that the "Daily Planet" is now more concerned with ratings and internet page views than actual journalism. He quits and goes off to begin an independent, internet news site with fellow journalist Cat Grant. Though Lois and Jimmy consider this to be a bad and risky decision, they continue to act as Clark's friends and confidants, offering aid when they can.
At the conclusion of the New 52, following the New 52 Superman's death, Lex Luthor buys the "Daily Planet".
In virtually every incarnation of the era inhabited by the Legion of Super-Heroes, the "Daily Planet" is depicted as a fixture in Metropolis, and one of Earth's major media sources. Frequently, the Flash's wife Iris West Allen (a native of the era) is depicted as a member of its staff or editorial board.
"Daily Planet's" staff at various times included:
The "Daily Planet" has been featured in all adaptations of "Superman" to other media. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8964 |
Digital Private Network Signalling System
The Digital Private Network Signalling System (DPNSS) is a network protocol used on digital trunk lines for connecting to PABX. It supports a defined set of inter-networking facilities.
DPNSS was originally defined by British Telecom. The specification for the protocol is defined in BTNR188. The specification currently comes under the Network Interoperability Consultative Committee.
DPNSS was developed in the early 1980s by BT, or its forerunner, Post Office Telecommunications in recognition that the emerging Digital Private Circuit Primary Rate product 'Megastream' had to address the market for both data and voice, the latter being significantly greater because of the market for PBXs. At the time, BT dictated what signalling could be used on its leased lines and, whilst it only had a minority interest in the sales of PBXs, was requested by the PBX manufacturers to produce a standard to prevent the creation of a plethora of conflicting PBX protocols being developed. Under the liberalization rules of the day (1979), BT was barred from manufacturing, selling or supplying PBXs of more than 200 extensions. Digital (PCM-based) PBXs were just starting to come into the marketplace with the Plessey PDX (a licensed version of the ROLM CBX) and the GEC SL1 (a licensed version of the Northern Telecom SL1). It was recognised that corporate customers would wish to network these systems across the country. At the time, 'CAS' inter node signaling was slow and inter-register signaling MF5, developed from PSTN signalling protocols, was complex and would not support sufficient features.
The support for DPNSS as BT's own signalling protocol also differentiated BT's private circuit's services from those of its emerging rival Mercury Communications.
DPNSS was an active (and successful) collaboration between PBX manufacturers and BT which started relatively slowly (BT & Plessey) but quickly snowballed with MITEL, GEC, Ericsson, Philips and eventually Nortel all joining to create a powerful and feature rich protocol.
BT and some of the UK manufacturers championed DPNSS into ECMA and CCITT (ITU) but it was eventually deprecated by the standards bodies in favour of Q931 and QSig. Nevertheless, the elegance of the protocol and its compatibility with PBX features ensured the adoption DPNSS actually grew in Europe, compared to the much slower take-up of Qsig.
There were also attempts (during 1984) to take DPNSS into North America. Unfortunately the structures for the creation of standards in North America seemed to prevent manufacturer collaboration as a route forward and the ANSI standards body was not interested in creating PBX interworking standards.
Version 1 of BTNR188 (DPNSS) was issued in 1983; the last version of DPNSS to be released 6 in 1995 included compatibility with ISDN features released in V5. A lightweight version of DPNSS 'APNSS' was developed using analogue trunks (Sometimes compressed) and a modem to support D channel signalling.
Layer 1(CCITT) ITU-G703 defines the physical and electrical interface. G704 defines the Frame structure of the 2,048 Mbs sent across the link. G732 defines the allocation of that frame structure into the 32 discrete 64Kbit 'channels', of which 0 is used for alignment of the frames and 16 is (by convention only) allocated to common channel signalling. Speech is carried as G711.
Layer 2 Timeslot 16, 64Kbs operates as HDLC LAPB, to support up to 60 PVCs or DLCs (data link connections) (30 directly associated with the bearer channels and 30 for unrelated messages) as the specification describes them. Therefore, at maximum operation, each potential traffic channel can have two simultaneous data channels available for messages. Note that HDLC operates as a statistical multiplexing system. When traffic deltas are low, a single call establishment message will have access to the full 64Kbs (allowing for overheads).
DPNSS is a layer 3 protocol functioning as common channel signalling. The functionality is divided into Levels (confusingly nothing to do with OSI layers.) Levels 1-6 deal with simple call establishment (make call/break call) and are the minimum requirements by which a PBX can be said to be DPNSS compatible. The remaining levels are allocated to telephony features, supplementary services or to administrative features. Note that support of 'levels' by a PBX is not necessarily incremental. Some levels are interdependent but a PBX may omit support of some levels (above 6) and support others.
DPNSS is a compelled protocol in that each instruction issued must be met with an appropriate response from the other PBX otherwise the message is re-transmitted (until timer expiry). This means that when interworking two PBXs features invoked on PBX A must be acknowledged by PBX B even if that feature is not supported.
DPNSS carries its protocol messages as short strings of IA5 text. It is therefore much easier to interpret in its native form than Q931/Qsig or H323/H450 and a precursor to the plain language format of SIP.
As HDLC can operate successfully in quite poor (errored) data environments, DPNSS will work over a 2 Mbit/s link running without proper synchronisation (plesiochronously) and over poor quality connections (including badly terminated connectors). When setting up PBXs to run a DPNSS connection one end must be defined as the primary or 'A' end. This is a protocol requirement and has nothing to do with link synchronisation. However, such badly synchronised links were frowned upon because of the problems associated with sending faxes and/or other modem based communication which were not specifically identified within the protocol.
For a protocol that began life in the 1980s, DPNSS is natively a long way from VoIP. However, many of the hybrid VoIP PBXs available from manufacturers worldwide provide on-board DPNSS trunk cards. Where they do not, a protocol converter is necessary. Commercially available equipment offers the ability to convert from DPNSS to Q.Sig. Note that it is also possible to tunnel DPNSS and its associated PCM (G711) over an IP network. This can be point to point where the IP network carries packetised voice N x 64 Kbs speech and a separate IP signalling channel to carry the notional 64 Kbs of DPNSS signalling. A more sophisticated solution uses intelligence on the edge of the IP network to route voice to the correct node. This is a Voice VPN.
Note that this should not be confused with the pre-VOIP 'Voice VPN' deployed by routing calls intelligently in a TDM switching platform, often Nortel DMS100 and customers PBX nodes.
Some critics of DPNSS suggest that it is too loosely defined and allows too much latitude in its interpretation of message formats and timers. It is also sometimes mistakenly believed that DPNSS is semi proprietary and that it is only possible to connect PBXs from the same manufacturer. i.e. Siemens will connect to Siemens, Mitel to Mitel etc. Experience indicates that this is not the case and BT's FeatureNet platform (Nortel's DMS100) running DPNSS, has interconnected successfully to many PBX types available in the UK. In addition, as part of the first commercial implementation of DPNSS (in the Government Telephone Network or GTN in 1983), BT insisted that the core of the network be made from PBXs of different manufacture to prove the interoperability in real life. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8965 |
Digital Access Signalling System 2
Digital Access Signalling System 2 (DASS2) is an obsolescent protocol defined by British Telecom for digital links to PSTN based on ISDN. Although still available on request, it has been superseded by ETS 300 102 ("EuroISDN").
DASS2 is an improved version over DASS1, based on experiences with DPNSS.
In the UK, the ISDN concept was first introduced to customers by BT with their
DASS2 connections. DASS2 (Digital Access Signalling System) is a BT-designed
signalling standard, and was introduced before the Q.931 standard was finalised
by the international community. British Telecom used the term ISDN when
describing their DASS2 lines.
DASS2 lines are provided to customers on a 2Mbit/s link and can handle 30 simultaneous calls (64kbit/s each). DASS2 is still offered by BT and other UK carriers. Q.931 is the name of the CCITT document that describes the agreed signalling format for International ISDN. CCITT had previously been known as "International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee". The organisation set out the internationally agreed standards for telecommunications, and subsequently evolved into the ITU. In the United Kingdom, the Q.931-based protocol is ETS 300 102 (also known as EuroISDN). This is a very close implementation of the original CCITT specification. It is a 2Mbit/s service as
with DASS2, but the feature capability is far greater and has negated the problems associated with DASS2, including echo problems and circuit spikes. In the UK, both DASS 2 and EuroISDN (ETS 300 102) lines are available to customers with EuroISDN as the preferred signalling type. Customers normally choose the desired signalling system, as this will be dictated by their CPE (Customer Premises Equipment),
usually a PABX.
Most modern PABXs can handle many different types of signalling system, however
the trend seems to be away from the DASS2 (which is no longer being developed by
BT and has been known to deny problems with their DASS2 circuits), and towards the internationally recognised Q.931 standard, which is utilised by many country's telephony service providers.
The CCITT specify the standards for the layers 1, 2 and 3 signalling messages. The layer 3 messages are the messages which actually control the call setup, teardown, and routing.
The layer 3 messages or "call control messages" are the minimum messages that must be understood by the interfacing equipment. Individual service providers may
publish their own documentation which details further messages that will be
transported in addition to Q.931 messages. There are a number of additional
European documents that cover supplementary services. These cover features that may be instigated by exchanges via the ISDN and require a higher degree of layer 3 implementation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8967 |
Devanagari
Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari ("Nāgarī", ), is a left-to-right abugida (alphasyllabary), based on the ancient "Brāhmī" script, used in the Indian subcontinent. It was developed in ancient India from the 1st to the 4th century CE and was in regular use by the 7th century CE. The Devanagari script, composed of 47 primary characters including 14 vowels and 33 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages. The ancient Nagari script for Sanskrit had two additional consonantal characters.
The orthography of this script reflects the pronunciation of the language. Unlike the Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case. It is written from left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines and is recognisable by a horizontal line that runs along the top of full letters. In a cursory look, the Devanagari script appears different from other Indic scripts such as Bengali, Odia or Gurmukhi, but a closer examination reveals they are very similar except for angles and structural emphasis.
Among the languages using it – as either their only script or one of their scripts – are Marathi, Pāḷi, Sanskrit, Hindi, Nepali, Sherpa, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, Chhattisgarhi, Haryanvi, Magahi, Nagpuri, Rajasthani, Bhili, Dogri, Maithili, Kashmiri, Konkani, Sindhi, Bodo, Nepalbhasa, Mundari and Santali. The Devanagari script is closely related to the Nandinagari script commonly found in numerous ancient manuscripts of South India, and it is distantly related to a number of southeast Asian scripts.
"Devanagari" is a compound of ""deva"" and ""nāgarī"" . "Deva" means "heavenly or divine" and is also one of the terms for a deity in Hinduism. "Nagari" comes from नगरम् ("nagaram"), which means abode or city. Hence, "Devanagari" denotes "from the abode of divinity or deities".
' is the Sanskrit feminine of ' "relating or belonging to a town or city, urban". It is a phrasing with "lipi" ("script") as "" "script relating to a city", or "spoken in city".
The use of the name ' emerged from the older term '. According to Fischer, Nagari emerged in the northwest Indian subcontinent around 633 CE, was fully developed by the 11th-century, and was one of the major scripts used for the Sanskrit literature.
Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. Some of the earliest epigraphical evidence attesting to the developing Sanskrit Nagari script in ancient India, in a form similar to Devanagari, is from the 1st to 4th century CE inscriptions discovered in Gujarat. It is a descendant of the 3rd century BCE Brahmi script through the Gupta script, along with Siddham and Sharada. Variants of script called "Nāgarī", recognisably close to Devanagari, are first attested from the 1st century CE Rudradaman inscriptions in Sanskrit, while the modern standardised form of Devanagari was in use by about 1000 CE. Medieval inscriptions suggest widespread diffusion of the Nagari-related scripts, with biscripts presenting local script along with the adoption of Nagari scripts. For example, the mid 8th-century Pattadakal pillar in Karnataka has text in both Siddha Matrika script, and an early Telugu-Kannada script; while, the Kangra Jawalamukhi inscription in Himachal Pradesh is written in both Sharada and Devanagari scripts.
The Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE, and it was fully developed by about the end of first millennium. The use of Sanskrit in Nagari script in medieval India is attested by numerous pillar and cave temple inscriptions, including the 11th-century Udayagiri inscriptions in Madhya Pradesh, and an inscribed brick found in Uttar Pradesh, dated to be from 1217 CE, which is now held at the British Museum. The script's proto- and related versions have been discovered in ancient relics outside of India, such as in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Indonesia; while in East Asia, "Siddha Matrika" script considered as the closest precursor to Nagari was in use by Buddhists. Nagari has been the "primus inter pares" of the Indic scripts. It has long been used traditionally by religiously educated people in South Asia to record and transmit information, existing throughout the land in parallel with a wide variety of local scripts (such as Modi, Kaithi, and Mahajani) used for administration, commerce, and other daily uses.
Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir. An early version of Devanagari is visible in the Kutila inscription of Bareilly dated to Vikram Samvat 1049 (i.e. 992 CE), which demonstrates the emergence of the horizontal bar to group letters belonging to a word. One of the oldest surviving Sanskrit texts from the early post-Maurya period consists of 1,413 Nagari pages of a commentary by Patanjali, with a composition date of about 150 BCE, the surviving copy transcribed about 14th century CE.
Under the rule of Songtsen Gampo of the Tibetan Empire, Thonmi Sambhota traveled to India to marry a Nepali princess and find a writing system suitable for the Tibetan language. Thus he invented the Tibetan script, based on the Nagari used in Kashmir. He added 6 new characters for sounds that did not exist in Sanskrit.
Other scripts closely related to Nagari such as Siddham Matrka were in use in Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and other parts of East Asia by between 7th to 10th-century.
Most of the southeast Asian scripts have roots in the Dravidian scripts, except for a few found in south-central regions of Java and isolated parts of southeast Asia that resemble Devanagari or its prototype. The Kawi script in particular is similar to the Devanagari in many respects though the morphology of the script has local changes. The earliest inscriptions in the Devanagari-like scripts are from around the 10th-century, with many more between 11th- and 14th-century. Some of the old-Devanagari inscriptions are found in Hindu temples of Java, such as the Prambanan temple. The Ligor and the Kalasan inscriptions of central Java, dated to the 8th-century, are also in the Nagari script of North India. According to the epigraphist and Asian Studies scholar Lawrence Briggs, these may be related to the 9th-century copper plate inscription of Devapaladeva (Bengal) which is also in early Devanagari script. The term Kawi in Kawi script is a loan word from "Kavya" (poetry). According to anthropologists and Asian Studies scholars John Norman Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, the 8th-century version of early Nagari or Devanagari script was adopted in Java, Bali (Indonesia), and Khmer (Cambodia) around 8th or 9th-century, as evidenced by the many inscriptions of this period.
The letter order of Devanagari, like nearly all Brahmic scripts, is based on phonetic principles that consider both the manner and place of articulation of the consonants and vowels they represent. This arrangement is usually referred to as the "" "garland of letters". The format of Devanagari for Sanskrit serves as the prototype for its application, with minor variations or additions, to other languages.
The vowels and their arrangement are:
The table below shows the consonant letters (in combination with inherent vowel "a") and their arrangement. To the right of the Devanagari letter it shows the Latin script transliteration using International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, and the phonetic value (IPA) in Hindi.
For a list of the 297 (33×9) possible Sanskrit consonant-(short) vowel syllables see Āryabhaṭa numeration.
Table: Consonants with vowel diacritics. Vowels in their independent form on the left and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant " on the right. " is without any added vowel sign, where the vowel " is inherent. ISO 15919 transliteration is on the top two rows.
A vowel combines with a consonant in their diacritic form. For example, the vowel () combines with the consonant () to form the syllabic letter (), with halant removed and added vowel sign which is indicated by diacritics. The vowel () combines with the consonant () to form () with halant removed. But, the diacritic series of ... () is without any added vowel sign, as the vowel अ (a) is inherent.
As mentioned, successive consonants lacking a vowel in between them may physically join together as a "conjunct consonant" or ligature. When Devanagari is used for writing languages other than Sanskrit, conjuncts are used mostly with Sanskrit words and loan words. Native words typically use the basic consonant and native speakers know to suppress the vowel when it is conventional to do so. For example, the native Hindi word "karnā" is written ("ka-ra-nā"). The government of these clusters ranges from widely to narrowly applicable rules, with special exceptions within. While standardised for the most part, there are certain variations in clustering, of which the Unicode used on this page is just one scheme. The following are a number of rules:
The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit is written with various symbols depending on shakha. In the Rigveda, "anudātta" is written with a bar below the line (), "svarita" with a stroke above the line () while "udātta" is unmarked.
The end of a sentence or half-verse may be marked with the "" symbol (called a "daṇḍa", meaning "bar", or called a ', meaning "full stop/pause"). The end of a full verse may be marked with a double-"daṇḍa", a "" symbol. A comma (called an ', meaning "short stop/pause") is used to denote a natural pause in speech. Punctuation marks of Western origin, such as the colon, semi-colon, exclamation mark, dash, and question mark are in use in Devanagari script since at least the 1900s, matching their use in European languages.
The following letter variants are also in use, particularly in older texts.
A variety of Unicode fonts are in use for Devanagari. These include Akshar, Annapurna, Arial, CDAC-Gist Surekh, CDAC-Gist Yogesh, Chandas, Gargi, Gurumaa, Jaipur, Jana, Kalimati, Kanjirowa, Lohit Devanagari, Mangal, Raghu, Sanskrit2003, Santipur OT, Siddhanta, and Thyaka.
The form of Devanagari fonts vary with function. According to Harvard College for Sanskrit studies:
The Google Fonts project has a number of Unicode fonts for Devanagari in a variety of typefaces in serif, sans-serif, display and handwriting categories.
There are several methods of Romanisation or transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script.
The Hunterian system is the ""national system of romanisation in India"" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India.
A standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard of 2001. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic graphemes to the Latin script. The Devanagari-specific portion is nearly identical to the academic standard for Sanskrit, IAST.
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is the academic standard for the romanisation of Sanskrit. IAST is the de facto standard used in printed publications, like books, magazines, and electronic texts with Unicode fonts. It is based on a standard established by the "Congress of Orientalists" at Athens in 1912. The ISO 15919 standard of 2001 codified the transliteration convention to include an expanded standard for sister scripts of Devanagari.
The National Library at Kolkata romanisation, intended for the romanisation of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST.
Compared to IAST, Harvard-Kyoto looks much simpler. It does not contain all the diacritic marks that IAST contains. It was designed to simplify the task of putting large amount of Sanskrit textual material into machine readable form, and the inventors stated that it reduces the effort needed in transliteration of Sanskrit texts on the keyboard. This makes typing in Harvard-Kyoto much easier than IAST. Harvard-Kyoto uses capital letters that can be difficult to read in the middle of words.
ITRANS is a lossless transliteration scheme of Devanagari into ASCII that is widely used on Usenet. It is an extension of the Harvard-Kyoto scheme. In ITRANS, the word "devanāgarī" is written "devanaagarii" or "devanAgarI". ITRANS is associated with an application of the same name that enables typesetting in Indic scripts. The user inputs in Roman letters and the ITRANS pre-processor translates the Roman letters into Devanagari (or other Indic languages). The latest version of ITRANS is version 5.30 released in July, 2001. It is similar to Velthuis system and was created by Avinash Chopde to help print various Indic scripts with personal computers.
The disadvantage of the above ASCII schemes is case-sensitivity, implying that transliterated names may not be capitalised. This difficulty is avoided with the system developed in 1996 by Frans Velthuis for TeX, loosely based on IAST, in which case is irrelevant.
ALA-LC romanisation is a transliteration scheme approved by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association, and widely used in North American libraries. Transliteration tables are based on languages, so there is a table for Hindi, one for Sanskrit and Prakrit, etc.
WX is a Roman transliteration scheme for Indian languages, widely used among the natural language processing community in India. It originated at IIT Kanpur for computational processing of Indian languages. The salient features of this transliteration scheme are as follows.
ISCII is an 8-bit encoding. The lower 128 codepoints are plain ASCII, the upper 128 codepoints are ISCII-specific.
It has been designed for representing not only Devanagari but also various other Indic scripts as well as a Latin-based script with diacritic marks used for transliteration of the Indic scripts.
ISCII has largely been superseded by Unicode, which has, however, attempted to preserve the ISCII layout for its Indic language blocks.
The Unicode Standard defines three blocks for Devanagari: Devanagari (U+0900–U+097F), Devanagari Extended (U+A8E0–U+A8FF), and Vedic Extensions (U+1CD0–U+1CFF).
InScript is the standard keyboard layout for Devanagari as standardized by the Government of India. It is inbuilt in all modern major operating systems. Microsoft Windows supports the InScript layout (using the Mangal font), which can be used to input unicode Devanagari characters. InScript is also available in some touchscreen mobile phones.
This layout was used on manual typewriters when computers were not available or were uncommon. For backward compatibility some typing tools like Indic IME still provide this layout.
Such tools work on phonetic transliteration. The user writes in Roman and the IME automatically converts it into Devanagari. Some popular phonetic typing tools are Akruti, Baraha IME and Google IME.
The Mac OS X operating system includes two different keyboard layouts for Devanagari: one is much like INSCRIPT/KDE Linux, the other is a phonetic layout called "Devanagari QWERTY".
Any one of Unicode fonts input system is fine for Indic language Wikipedia and other wikiprojects, including Hindi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Nepali Wikipedia. Some people use inscript. Majority uses either Google phonetic transliteration or input facility provided on Wikipedia. On Indic language wikiprojects Phonetic facility provided initially was java-based later supported by Narayam extension for phonetic input facility. Currently Indic language Wiki projects are supported by , that offers both phonetic keyboard (Aksharantaran, Marathi: , Hindi: ) and InScript keyboard (Marathi: ).
The Ubuntu Linux operating system supports several keyboard layouts for Devanagari, including Harvard-Kyoto, WX notation, Bolanagari and phonetic. The 'remington' typing method in Ubuntu IBUS is similar to the Krutidev typing method, popular in Rajasthan. The 'itrans' method is useful for those who know English well (and the English keyboard) but not familiar with typing in Devanagari.
Thousands of manuscripts of ancient and medieval era Sanskrit texts in Devanagari have been discovered since the 19th century. Major catalogues and census include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8968 |
Diplomatic mission
A diplomatic mission or foreign mission is a group of people from one state or an organization present in another state to represent the sending state/organization officially in the receiving state. In practice, the phrase "diplomatic mission" usually denotes the resident mission, namely the embassy, which is the main office of a country's diplomatic representatives to another country; this is usually, but not necessarily, in the receiving state's capital city. Consulates, on the other hand, are smaller diplomatic missions which are normally located in major cities of the receiving state (but can be located in the capital, usually when the sending country has no embassy in the receiving state). As well as being a diplomatic mission to the country in which it is situated, it may also be a non-resident permanent mission to one or more other countries. There are thus resident and non-resident embassies.
A country may have several different types of diplomatic missions in another country.
An embassy is a diplomatic mission generally located in the capital city of another country which offers a full range of services, including consular services.
A high commission is an embassy of a Commonwealth country located in another Commonwealth country.
A permanent mission is a diplomatic mission to a major international organization.
A consulate general is a diplomatic mission located in a major city, usually other than the capital city, which provides a full range of consular services.
A consulate is a diplomatic mission that is similar to a consulate general, but may not provide a full range of services.
A legation was a diplomatic representative office of lower rank than an embassy. Where an embassy was headed by an ambassador, a legation was headed by a minister. Ambassadors outranked ministers and had precedence at official events. Legations were originally the most common form of diplomatic mission, but they fell out of favor after World War II and were upgraded to embassies.
A consulate headed by an Honorary Consul is a diplomatic mission headed by an Honorary Consul which provides only a limited range of services.
The head of an embassy is known as an ambassador or high commissioner. The term "embassy" is commonly used also as a section of a building in which the work of the diplomatic mission is carried out, but, strictly speaking, it is the diplomatic delegation itself that is the embassy, while the office space and the diplomatic work done is called the "chancery". Therefore, the embassy operates in the chancery.
The members of a diplomatic mission can reside within or outside the building that holds the mission's chancery, and their private residences enjoy the same rights as the premises of the mission as regards inviolability and protection.
All missions to the United Nations are known simply as "permanent missions", while EU member states' missions to the European Union are known as "permanent representations", and the head of such a mission is typically both a permanent representative and an ambassador. European Union missions abroad are known as EU delegations. Some countries have more particular naming for their missions and staff: a Vatican mission is headed by a nuncio (Latin for "envoy") and consequently known as an "apostolic nunciature". Under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's missions used the name "people's bureau", headed by a secretary.
Missions between Commonwealth countries are known as "high commissions", and their heads are high commissioners. Generally speaking, ambassadors and high commissioners are regarded as equivalent in status and function, and embassies and high commissions are both deemed to be diplomatic missions.
In the past, a diplomatic mission headed by a lower-ranking official (an "envoy" or "minister resident") was known as a "legation". Since the ranks of envoy and minister resident are effectively obsolete, the designation of "legation" is no longer used today. (See diplomatic rank.)
A consulate is similar to, but not the same as a diplomatic office, but with focus on dealing with individual persons and businesses, as defined by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. A consulate or consulate general is generally a representative of the embassy in locales outside of the capital city. For instance, the Philippines has its Embassy of the Philippines in Washington, D.C., but also maintains seven consulates-general and four consulates elsewhere in the US. The person in charge of a consulate or consulate-general is known as a consul or consul-general, respectively. Similar services may also be provided at the embassy (to serve the region of the capital) in what is normally called a consular section.
In cases of dispute, it is common for a country to recall its head of mission as a sign of its displeasure. This is less drastic than cutting diplomatic relations completely, and the mission will still continue operating more or less normally, but it will now be headed by a "chargé d'affaires" (usually the deputy chief of mission) who may have limited powers. A "chargé d'affaires ad interim" also heads the mission during the interim between the end of one chief of mission's term and the beginning of another.
Contrary to popular belief, most diplomatic missions do not enjoy full extraterritorial status and – in those cases – are not sovereign territory of the represented state. Rather, the premises of diplomatic missions usually remain under the jurisdiction of the host state while being afforded special privileges (such as immunity from most local laws) by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Diplomats themselves still retain full diplomatic immunity, and (as an adherent to the Vienna Convention) the host country may not enter the premises of the mission without permission of the represented country, even to put out a fire. International rules designate an attack on an embassy as an attack on the country it represents. The term "extraterritoriality" is often applied to diplomatic missions, but normally only in this broader sense.
As the host country may not enter the representing country's embassy without permission, embassies are sometimes used by refugees escaping from either the host country or a third country. For example, North Korean nationals, who would be arrested and deported from China upon discovery, have sought sanctuary at various third-country embassies in China. Once inside the embassy, diplomatic channels can be used to solve the issue and send the refugees to another country. See the list of people who took refuge in a diplomatic mission for a list of some notable cases.
Notable violations of embassy extraterritoriality include repeated invasions of the British Embassy, Beijing (1967), the hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran, Iran (1979–1981), and the Japanese embassy hostage crisis at the ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru (1996-1997).
The Vienna Convention states:The functions of a diplomatic mission consist, "inter alia", in representing the sending State in the receiving State; protecting in the receiving State the interests of the sending State and of its nationals, within the limits permitted by international law; negotiating with the Government of the receiving State; ascertaining by all lawful means conditions and developments in the receiving State, and reporting thereon to the Government of the sending State; promoting friendly relations between the sending State and the receiving State, and developing their economic, cultural and scientific relations.
Diplomatic missions between members of the British Commonwealth of Nations are not called embassies, but high commissions, for Commonwealth nations share a special diplomatic relationship. It is generally expected that an embassy of a Commonwealth country in a non-Commonwealth country will do its best to provide diplomatic services to citizens from other Commonwealth countries if the citizen's country does not have an embassy in that country. Canadian and Australian nationals enjoy even greater cooperation between their respective consular services, as outlined in the Canada-Australia Consular Services Sharing Agreement. The same kind of procedure is also followed multilaterally by the member states of the European Union (EU). European citizens in need of consular help in a country without diplomatic or consular representation of their own country may turn to any consular or diplomatic mission of another EU member state.
The rights and immunities (such as diplomatic immunity) of diplomatic missions are codified in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
Some cities may host more than one mission from the same country. An example is Rome, where many states maintain missions to Italy and another to the Holy See. It is not customary for these missions to share premises nor diplomatic personnel. At present, only the Iraqi missions to Italy and the Holy See share premises; however, two ambassadors are appointed, one to each country. In the case of the UN's Food Agencies, the Head of Mission to the Italian Republic is usually accredited as permanent representative. The United States maintains a separate United States Mission to the UN Agencies in Rome, whose head is the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. Kolkata in India hosts two Bangladeshi Deputy High Commissions, one at Park Circus and another, opened later, at Mirza Galib Street. This was done to reduce overcrowding inside the Deputy High Commission. Both the Deputy High Commissions issue Bangladeshi visas.
Governments of states not recognized by the receiving state and of territories that make no claim to be sovereign states may set up offices abroad that do not have official diplomatic status as defined by the Vienna Convention. Examples are the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Offices that represent the government of the Republic of China; Somaliland's Representative Offices in London, Addis Ababa, Rome, and Washington, D.C.; the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices that represent the government of that territory. Such offices assume some of the non-diplomatic functions of diplomatic posts, such as promoting trade interests and providing assistance to its citizens and residents. They are nevertheless not diplomatic missions, their personnel are not diplomats and do not have diplomatic visas, although there may be legislation providing for personal immunities and tax privileges, as in the case of the Hong Kong offices in London and Toronto, for example. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8970 |
DEC Alpha
Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), designed to replace their 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer (CISC) ISA. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors originally developed and fabricated by DEC. These microprocessors were most prominently used in a variety of DEC workstations and servers, which eventually formed the basis for almost all of their mid-to-upper-scale lineup. Several third-party vendors also produced Alpha systems, including PC form factor motherboards.
Operating systems that supported Alpha included OpenVMS (previously known as OpenVMS AXP), Tru64 UNIX (previously known as DEC OSF/1 AXP and Digital UNIX), Windows NT (discontinued after NT 4.0; and pre-release Windows 2000 RC1), Linux (Debian, SUSE, Gentoo and Red Hat), BSD UNIX (NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD up to 6.x), Plan 9 from Bell Labs, as well as the L4Ka::Pistachio kernel. The Alpha architecture was sold, along with most parts of DEC, to Compaq in 1998. Compaq, already an Intel customer, phased out Alpha in favor of the forthcoming Hewlett-Packard/Intel Itanium architecture, and sold all Alpha intellectual property to Intel in 2001, effectively killing the product. Hewlett-Packard purchased Compaq later that same year, continuing development of the existing product line until 2004, and selling Alpha-based systems, largely to the existing customer base, until April 2007.
Alpha was born out of an earlier RISC project named Prism (Parallel Reduced Instruction Set Machine), itself the product of several earlier projects. PRISM was intended to be a flexible design, supporting both Unix-like applications, as well as Digital's existing VMS programs from the VAX after minor conversion. A new Unix-like operating system known as Mica would run applications natively, supporting VMS under emulation running at the same time.
During development, the Palo Alto design team were working on a Unix-only workstation that originally included the PRISM. However, development of the workstation was well ahead of the PRISM, and the engineers proposed that they release the machines using the MIPS R2000 processor instead, moving its release date up considerably. DEC management doubted the need to produce a new computer architecture to replace their existing VAX and DECstation lines, and eventually ended the PRISM project in 1988.
By the time of cancellation, however, second-generation RISC chips (such as the newer SPARC architecture) were offering much better price/performance ratios than the VAX lineup. It was clear a third generation would completely outperform the VAX in all ways, not just on cost.
Another study was started to see if a new RISC architecture could be defined that could directly support the VMS operating system. The new design used most of the basic PRISM concepts, but was re-tuned to allow VMS and VMS programs to run at reasonable speed with no conversion at all. The decision was also made to upgrade the design to a full 64-bit implementation from PRISM's 32-bit, a conversion all of the major RISC vendors were undertaking. Eventually that new architecture became Alpha. The primary Alpha instruction set architects were Richard L. Sites and Richard T. Witek. The PRISM's Epicode was developed into the Alpha's PALcode, providing an abstracted interface to platform- and processor implementation-specific features.
The main contribution of Alpha to the microprocessor industry, and the main reason for its performance, was not so much the architecture but rather its implementation. At that time (as it is now), the microchip industry was dominated by automated design and layout tools. The chip designers at Digital continued pursuing sophisticated manual circuit design in order to deal with the overly complex VAX architecture. The Alpha chips showed that manual circuit design applied to a simpler, cleaner architecture allowed for much higher operating frequencies than those that were possible with the more automated design systems. These chips caused a renaissance of custom circuit design within the microprocessor design community.
Originally, the Alpha processors were designated the DECchip 21x64 series, with "DECchip" replaced in the mid-1990s with "Alpha". The first two digits, "21" signifies the 21st century, and the last two digits, "64" signifies 64 bits. The Alpha was designed as 64-bit from the start and there is no 32-bit version. The middle digit corresponded to the generation of the Alpha architecture. Internally, Alpha processors were also identified by EV numbers, EV officially standing for "Extended VAX" but having an alternative humorous meaning of "Electric Vlasic", giving homage to the Electric Pickle experiment at Western Research Lab.
The first few generations of the Alpha chips were some of the most innovative of their time.
A persistent report attributed to DEC insiders suggests the choice of the AXP tag for the processor was made by DEC's legal department, which was still smarting from the VAX trademark fiasco. After a lengthy search the tag "AXP" was found to be entirely unencumbered. Within the computer industry, a joke got started that the acronym AXP meant "Almost eXactly PRISM".
The Alpha architecture was intended to be a high-performance design. Digital intended the architecture to support a one-thousandfold increase in performance over twenty-five years. To ensure this, any architectural feature that impeded multiple instruction issue, clock rate or multiprocessing was removed. As a result, the Alpha does not have:
The Alpha does not have condition codes for integer instructions to remove a potential bottleneck at the condition status register. Instructions resulting in an overflow, such as adding two numbers whose result does not fit in 64 bits, write the 32 or 64 least significant bits to the destination register. The carry is generated by performing an unsigned compare on the result with either operand to see if the result is smaller than either operand. If the test was true, the value one is written to the least significant bit of the destination register to indicate the condition.
The architecture defined a set of 32 integer registers and a set of 32 floating-point registers in addition to a program counter, two lock registers and a floating-point control register (FPCR). It also defined registers that were optional, implemented only if the implementation required them. Lastly, registers for PALcode were defined.
The integer registers were denoted by R0 to R31 and floating-point registers were denoted by F0 to F31. The R31 and F31 registers were hardwired to zero and writes to those registers by instructions are ignored. Digital considered using a combined register file, but a split register file was determined to be better as it enabled two-chip implementations to have a register file located on each chip and integer-only implementations to omit the floating-point register file containing the floating point registers. A split register file was also determined to be more suitable for multiple instruction issue due to the reduced number of read and write ports. The number of registers per register file was also considered, with 32 and 64 being contenders. Digital concluded that 32 registers was more suitable as it required less die space, which improved clock frequencies. This number of registers was deemed not to be a major issue in respect to performance and future growth, as thirty-two registers could support at least eight-way instruction issue.
The program counter is a 64-bit register which contains a longword-aligned virtual byte address, that is, the low two bits of the program counter are always zero. The PC is incremented by four to the address of the next instruction when an instruction is decoded. A lock flag and locked physical address register are used by the load-locked and store-conditional instructions for multiprocessor support. The floating-point control register (FPCR) is a 64-bit register defined by the architecture intended for use by Alpha implementations with IEEE 754-compliant floating-point hardware.
In the Alpha architecture, a "byte" was defined as an 8-bit datum (octet), a "word" as a 16-bit datum, a "longword" as a 32-bit datum, a "quadword" as a 64-bit datum, and an "octaword" as a 128-bit datum.
The Alpha architecture originally defined six data types:
To maintain a level of compatibility with the VAX, the 32-bit architecture that preceded the Alpha, two other floating-point data types were included:
The Alpha has a 64-bit linear virtual address space with no memory segmentation. Implementations can implement a smaller virtual address space with a minimum size of 43 bits. Although the unused bits were not implemented in hardware such as TLBs, the architecture required implementations to check whether they are zero to ensure software compatibility with implementations with a larger (or full) virtual address space.
The Alpha ISA has a fixed instruction length of 32 bits. It has six instruction formats.
The integer operate format is used by integer instructions. It contains a 6-bit opcode field, followed by the Ra field, which specifies the register containing the first operand and the Rb field, specifies the register containing the second operand. Next is a 3-bit field which is unused and reserved. A 1-bit field contains a "0", which distinguished this format from the integer literal format. A 7-bit function field follows, which is used in conjunction with the opcode to specify an operation. The last field is the Rc field, which specifies the register which the result of a computation should be written to. The register fields are all 5 bits long, required to address 32 unique locations, the 32 integer registers.
The integer literal format is used by integer instructions which use a literal as one of the operands. The format is the same as the integer operate format except for the replacement of the 5-bit Rb field and the 3 bits of unused space with an 8-bit literal field which is zero-extended to a 64-bit operand.
The floating-point operate format is used by floating-point instructions. It is similar to the integer operate format, but has an 11-bit function field made possible by using the literal and unused bits which are reserved in integer operate format.
The memory format is used mostly by load and store instructions. It has a 6-bit opcode field, a 5-bit Ra field, a 5-bit Rb field and a 16-bit displacement field.
Branch instructions have a 6-bit opcode field, a 5-bit Ra field and a 21-bit displacement field. The Ra field specifies a register to be tested by a conditional branch instruction, and if the condition is met, the program counter is updated by adding the contents of the displacement field with the program counter. The displacement field contains a signed integer and if the value of the integer is positive, if the branch is taken then the program counter is incremented. If the value of the integer is negative, then program counter is decremented if the branch is taken. The range of a branch thus is ±1 Mi instructions, or ±4 MiB. The Alpha Architecture was designed with a large range as part of the architecture's forward-looking goal.
The CALL_PAL format is used by the codice_1 instruction, which is used to call PALcode subroutines. The format retains the opcode field but replaces the others with a 26-bit function field, which contains an integer specifying a PAL subroutine.
The control instructions consist of conditional and unconditional branches, and jumps. The conditional and unconditional branch instructions use the branch instruction format, while the jump instructions use the memory instruction format.
Conditional branches test whether the least significant bit of a register is set or clear, or compare a register as a signed quadword to zero, and branch if the specified condition is true. The conditions available for comparing a register to zero are equality, inequality, less than, less than or equal to, greater than or equal to, and greater than. The new address is computed by longword aligning and sign extending the 21-bit displacement and adding it to the address of the instruction following the conditional branch.
Unconditional branches update the program counter with a new address computed in the same way as conditional branches. They also save the address of the instruction following the unconditional branch to a register. There are two such instructions, and they differ only in the hints provided for the branch prediction hardware.
There are four jump instructions. These all perform the same operation, saving the address of the instruction following the jump, and providing the program counter with a new address from a register. They differ in the hints provided to the branch prediction hardware. The unused displacement field is used for this purpose.
The integer arithmetic instructions perform addition, multiplication, and subtraction on longwords and quadwords; and comparison on quadwords. There is no instruction(s) for division as the architects considered the implementation of division in hardware to be adverse to simplicity. In addition to the standard add and subtract instructions, there are "scaled" versions. These versions shift the second operand to the left by two or three bits before adding or subtracting. The "Multiply Longword" and "Multiply Quadword" instructions write the least significant 32 or 64 bits of a 64- or 128-bit result to the destination register, respectively. Since it is useful to obtain the most significant half, the "Unsigned Multiply Quadword High" (UMULH) instruction is provided. UMULH is used for implementing multi-precision arithmetic and division algorithms. The concept of a separate instruction for multiplication that returns the most significant half of a result was taken from PRISM.
The instructions that operate on longwords ignore the most significant half of the register and the 32-bit result is sign-extended before it is written to the destination register. By default, the add, multiply, and subtract instructions, with the exception of UMULH and scaled versions of add and subtract, do not trap on overflow. When such functionality is required, versions of these instructions that perform overflow detection and trap on overflow are provided.
The compare instructions compare two registers or a register and a literal and write '1' to the destination register if the specified condition is true or '0' if not. The conditions are equality, inequality, less than or equal to, and less than. With the exception of the instructions that specify the former two conditions, there are versions that perform signed and unsigned compares.
The integer arithmetic instructions use the integer operate instruction formats.
The logical instructions consist of those for performing bitwise logical operations and conditional moves on the integer registers. The bitwise logical instructions perform AND, NAND, NOR, OR, XNOR, and XOR between two registers or a register and literal. The conditional move instructions test a register as a signed quadword to zero and move if the specified condition is true. The specified conditions are equality, inequality, less than or equal to, less than, greater than or equal to, and greater than. The shift instructions perform arithmetic right shift, and logical left and right shifts. The shift amount is given by a register or literal. Logical and shift instructions use the integer operate instruction formats.
Later, the Alpha included byte-word extensions, a set of instructions to manipulate 8-bit and 16-bit data types. These instructions were first introduced in the 21164A (EV56) microprocessor and are present in all subsequent implementations. These instructions performed operations that previously required multiple instructions to implement, which improved code density and the performance of certain applications. BWX also made the emulation of x86 machine code and the writing of device drivers easier.
Motion Video Instructions (MVI) was an instruction set extension to the Alpha ISA that added instructions for single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) operations. Alpha implementations that implement MVI, in chronological order, are the Alpha 21164PC (PCA56 and PCA57), Alpha 21264 (EV6) and Alpha 21364 (EV7). Unlike most other SIMD instruction sets of the same period, such as MIPS' MDMX or SPARC's Visual Instruction Set, but like PA-RISC's Multimedia Acceleration eXtensions (MAX-1, MAX-2), MVI was a simple instruction set composed of a few instructions that operate on integer data types stored in existing integer registers.
MVI's simplicity was due to two reasons. Firstly, Digital had determined that the Alpha 21164 was already capable of performing DVD decoding through software, therefore not requiring hardware provisions for the purpose, but was inefficient in MPEG-2 encoding. The second reason was the requirement to retain the fast cycle times of implementations. Adding many instructions would have complicated and enlarged the instruction decode logic, reducing an implementation's clock frequency.
MVI consisted of 13 instructions:
Floating-point extensions (FIX) was an extension the Alpha Architecture. It introduced nine instructions for floating-point square-root and for transferring data to and from the integer registers and floating-point registers. The Alpha 21264 (EV6) was the first microprocessor to implement these instructions.
Count Extensions (CIX) was an extension to the architecture which introduced three instructions for counting bits. These instructions were categorized as integer arithmetic instructions. They were first implemented on the Alpha 21264A (EV67).
At the time of its announcement, Alpha was heralded as an architecture for the next 25 years. While this was not to be, Alpha has nevertheless had a reasonably long life. The first version, the Alpha 21064 (otherwise known as the EV4) was introduced in November 1992 running at up to 192 MHz; a slight shrink of the die (the EV4S, shrunk from 0.75 µm to 0.675 µm) ran at 200 MHz a few months later. The 64-bit processor was a superpipelined and superscalar design, like other RISC designs, but nevertheless outperformed them all and DEC touted it as the world's fastest processor. Careful attention to circuit design, a hallmark of the Hudson design team, like a huge centralized clock circuitry, allowed them to run the CPU at higher speeds, even though the microarchitecture was fairly similar to other RISC chips. In comparison, the less expensive Intel Pentium ran at 66 MHz when it was launched the following spring.
The Alpha 21164 or EV5 became available in 1995 at processor frequencies of up to 333 MHz. In July 1996 the line was speed bumped to 500 MHz, in March 1998 to 666 MHz. Also in 1998 the Alpha 21264 (EV6) was released at 450 MHz, eventually reaching (in 2001 with the 21264C/EV68CB) 1.25 GHz. In 2003, the Alpha 21364 or EV7 "Marvel" was launched, essentially an EV68 core with four 1.6 GB/s inter-processor communication links for improved multiprocessor system performance, running at 1 or 1.15 GHz.
In 1996, the production of Alpha chips was licensed to Samsung Electronics Company. Following the purchase of Digital by Compaq the majority of the Alpha products were placed with API NetWorks, Inc. (previously Alpha Processor Inc.), a private company funded by Samsung and Compaq. In October 2001, Microway became the exclusive sales and service provider of API NetWorks' Alpha-based product line.
On June 25, 2001, Compaq announced that Alpha would be phased out by 2004 in favor of Intel's Itanium, canceled the planned EV8 chip, and sold all Alpha intellectual property to Intel. HP, new owner of Compaq later the same year, announced that development of the Alpha series would continue for a few more years, including the release of a 1.3 GHz EV7 variant called the EV7z. This would be the final iteration of Alpha, the 0.13 µm EV79 also being canceled.
Alpha was also implemented in the "Piranha", a research prototype developed by Compaq's Corporate Research and Nonstop Hardware Development groups at the Western Research Laboratory and Systems Research Center. "Piranha" was a multicore design for transaction processing workloads that contained eight simple cores. It was described at the 27th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June 2000.
To illustrate the comparative performance of Alpha-based systems, some SPEC performance numbers (SPECint95, SPECfp95) are listed below. Note that the SPEC results claim to report the measured performance of a whole computer system (CPU, bus, memory, compiler optimizer), not just the CPU. Also note that the benchmark and scale changed from 1992 to 1995. However, the figures give a rough impression of the performance of the Alpha architecture (64-bit), compared with the contemporary HP (64-bit) and Intel-based offerings (32-bit). Perhaps the most obvious trend is that while Intel could always get reasonably close to Alpha in integer performance, in floating point performance the difference was considerable. On the other side, HP (PA-RISC) is also reasonably close to Alpha, but these CPUs are running at significantly lower clock rates (MHz). The tables lack two important values: the power consumption and the price of a CPU.
The first generation of DEC Alpha-based systems comprised the DEC 3000 AXP series workstations and low-end servers, DEC 4000 AXP series mid-range servers, and DEC 7000 AXP and 10000 AXP series high-end servers. The DEC 3000 AXP systems used the same TURBOchannel bus as the previous MIPS-based DECstation models, whereas the 4000 was based on FutureBus+ and the 7000/10000 shared an architecture with corresponding VAX models.
DEC also produced a PC-like Alpha workstation with an EISA bus, the DECpc AXP 150 (codename "Jensen", also known as the DEC 2000 AXP). This was the first Alpha system to support Windows NT. DEC later produced Alpha versions of their Celebris XL and Digital Personal Workstation PC lines, with 21164 processors.
Digital also produced single board computers based on the VMEbus for embedded and industrial use. The first generation included the 21068-based AXPvme 64 and AXPvme 64LC, and the 21066-based AXPvme 160. These were introduced on March 1, 1994. Later models such as the AXPvme 100, AXPvme 166 and AXPvme 230 were based on the 21066A processor, while the Alpha VME 4/224 and Alpha VME 4/288 were based on the 21064A processor. The last models, the Alpha VME 5/352 and Alpha VME 5/480, were based on the 21164 processor.
The 21066 chip was used in the DEC Multia VX40/41/42 compact workstation and the ALPHAbook 1 laptop from Tadpole Technology.
In 1994, DEC launched a new range of AlphaStation and AlphaServer systems. These used 21064 or 21164 processors and introduced the PCI bus, VGA-compatible frame buffers and PS/2-style keyboards and mice. The AlphaServer 8000 series superseded the DEC 7000/10000 AXP and also employed XMI and FutureBus+ buses.
The AlphaStation XP1000 was the first workstation based on the 21264 processor. Later AlphaServer/Station models based on the 21264 were categorised into "DS" (departmental server), "ES" (enterprise server) or "GS" (global server) families.
The final 21364 chip was used in the AlphaServer ES47, ES80 and GS1280 models and the AlphaStation ES47.
A number of OEM motherboards were produced by DEC, such as the 21066 and 21068-based AXPpci 33 "NoName", which was part of a major push into the OEM market by the company, the 21164-based AlphaPC 164 and AlphaPC 164LX, the 21164PC-based AlphaPC 164SX and AlphaPC 164RX and the 21264-based AlphaPC 264DP. Several third parties such as Samsung and API also produced OEM motherboards such as the API UP1000 and UP2000.
To assist third parties in developing hardware and software for the platform, DEC produced Evaluation Boards, such as the EB64+ and EB164 for the Alpha 21064A and 21164 microprocessors respectively.
The 21164 and 21264 processors were used by NetApp in various network-attached storage systems, while the 21064 and 21164 processors were used by Cray in their T3D and T3E massively parallel supercomputers.
The fastest supercomputer based on Alpha processors was the ASCI Q at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The machine was built as an HP AlphaServer SC45/GS Cluster. It had 4096 Alpha (21264 EV-68, 1.25 GHz) CPUs, and reached an Rmax of 7.727 Teraflops. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8971 |
Dagger
A dagger is a knife with a very sharp point and usually two sharp edges, typically designed or capable of being used as a thrusting or stabbing weapon. Daggers have been used throughout human history for close combat confrontations, and many cultures have used adorned daggers in ritual and ceremonial contexts. The distinctive shape and historic usage of the dagger have made it iconic and symbolic. A dagger in the modern sense is a weapon designed for close-proximity combat or self-defense; due to its use in historic weapon assemblages, it has associations with assassination and murders. Double-edged knives, however, play different sorts of roles in different social contexts. In some cultures, they are neither a weapon nor a tool, but a potent symbol of manhood; in others they are ritual objects used in body modifications such as circumcision.
A wide variety of thrusting knives have been described as daggers, including knives that feature only a single cutting edge, such as the European rondel dagger or the Persian pesh-kabz, or, in some instances, no cutting edge at all, such as the stiletto of the Renaissance. However, in the last hundred years or so, in most contexts, a dagger has certain definable characteristics, including a short blade with a sharply tapered point, a central spine or fuller, and usually two cutting edges sharpened the full length of the blade, or nearly so. Most daggers also feature a full crossguard to keep the hand from riding forwards onto the sharpened blade edges.
Daggers are primarily weapons, so knife legislation in many places restricts their manufacture, sale, possession, transport, or use.
The earliest daggers were made of materials such as flint, ivory or bone in Neolithic times.
Copper daggers appeared first in the early Bronze Age, in the 3rd millennium BC, and copper daggers of Early Minoan III (2400–2000 BC) were recovered at Knossos.
In ancient Egypt, daggers were usually made of copper or bronze, while royalty had gold weapons. At least since pre-dynastic Egypt, (c. 3100 BC) daggers were adorned as ceremonial objects with golden hilts and later even more ornate and varied construction. One early silver dagger was recovered with midrib design. The 1924 opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun revealed two daggers, one with a gold blade, and one of smelted iron. It is held that mummies of the Eleventh Dynasty were buried with bronze sabres; and there is a bronze dagger of Thut-mes III. (Eighteenth Dynasty), circa B.C. 1600. As late as Mene-ptah II. of the Nineteenth Dynasty (B.C 1300), we read it in the list of his loot, after the Prosopis battle, of bronze armour, swords and daggers.
Iron production did not begin until 1200 BC, and iron ore was not found in Egypt, making the iron dagger rare, and the context suggests that the iron dagger was valued on a level equal to that of its ceremonial gold counterpart. These facts, and the composition of the dagger had long suggested a meteoritic origin, however, evidence for its meteoritic origin was not entirely conclusive until June 2016 when researchers using x-ray fluorescence spectrometry confirmed similar proportions of metals (Iron, 10% nickel, and 0.6% cobalt) in a meteorite discovered in the area, deposited by an ancient meteor shower.
One of the earliest objects made of smelted iron is a dagger dating to before 2000 BC, found in a context that suggests it was treated as an ornamental object of great value. Found in a Hattic royal tomb dated about 2500 BC, at Alaca Höyük in northern Anatolia, the dagger has a smelted iron blade and a gold handle.
The artisans and blacksmiths of Iberia in what is now southern Spain and southwestern France produced various iron daggers and swords of high quality from the 5th to the 3rd century BC, in ornamentation and patterns influenced by Greek, Punic (Carthaginian), and Phoenician culture. The exceptional purity of Iberian iron and the sophisticated method of forging, which included cold hammering, produced double-edged weapons of excellent quality. One can find technologically advanced designs such as folding knives rusted among the artifacts of many Second Iberian Iron Age cremation burials or in Roman Empire excavations all around Spain and the Mediterranean. Iberian infantrymen carried several types of iron daggers, most of them based on shortened versions of double-edged swords, but the true Iberian dagger had a triangular-shaped blade. Iberian daggers and swords were later adopted by Hannibal and his Carthaginian armies. The Lusitanii, a pre-Celtic people dominating the lands west of Iberia (most of modern Portugal and Extremadura) successfully held off the Roman Empire for many years with a variety of innovative tactics and light weapons, including iron-bladed short spears and daggers modeled after Iberian patterns.
During the Roman Empire, legionaries were issued a "pugio" (from the Latin "pugnō", or “fight”), a double-edged iron thrusting dagger with a blade of 7–12 inches. The design and fabrication of the "pugio" was taken directly from Iberian daggers and short swords; the Romans even adopted the triangular-bladed Iberian dagger, which they called the "parazonium". Like the "gladius", the "pugio" was most often used as a thrusting (stabbing weapon). As an extreme close-quarter combat weapon, the "pugio" was the Roman soldier's last line of defense. When not in battle, the "pugio" served as a convenient utility knife.
The term "dagger" appears only in the Late Middle Ages, reflecting the fact that while the dagger had been known in antiquity, it had disappeared during the Early Middle Ages, replaced by the hewing knife or seax.
The dagger reappeared in the 12th century as the "knightly dagger", or more properly cross-hilt or quillon dagger, and was developed into a common arm and tool for civilian use by the late medieval period.
The earliest known depiction of a cross-hilt dagger is the so-called "Guido relief" inside the Grossmünster of Zürich (c. 1120). A number of depictions of the fully developed cross-hilt dagger are found in the Morgan Bible (c. 1240).
Many of these cross-hilt daggers resemble miniature swords, with cross guards and pommels very similar in form to swords of the period. Others, however, are not an exact match to known sword designs, having for example pommel caps, large hollow star shaped pommels on so-called “Burgundian Heraldic daggers” or antenna style cross and pommel, reminiscent of Hallstatt era daggers.
The cross-hilt type persisted well into the Renaissance
The Old French term "dague" appears to have referred to these weapons in the 13th century, alongside other terms such as "poignal" and "basilard". The Middle English "dagger" is used from the 1380s.
During this time, the dagger was often employed in the role of a secondary defense weapon in close combat. The knightly dagger evolved into the larger baselard knife in the 14th century. During the 14th century, it became fairly common for knights to fight on foot to strengthen the infantry defensive line. This necessitated greater dagger usage. At Agincourt (1415) archers used them to dispatch dismounted knights by thrusting the narrow blades through helmet vents and other apertures. The baselard was considered an intermediate between a short sword and a long dagger, and became popular also as a civilian weapon. Sloane MS. 2593 (c. 1400) records a song satirizing the use of oversized baselard knives as fashion accessories. Weapons of this sort called "anelace", somewhere between a large dagger and a short sword, were much in use in 14th century England as civilians' accoutrements, worn "suspended by a ring from the girdle".
In the Late Middle Ages, knives with blade designs that emphasized thrusting attacks, such as the stiletto, became increasingly popular, and some thrusting knives commonly referred to as 'daggers' ceased to have a cutting edge. This was a response to the deployment of heavy armor, such as maille and plate armour, where cutting attacks were ineffective and focus was on thrusts with narrow blades to punch through mail or aim at armour plate intersections (or the eye slits of the helmet visor). These late medieval thrusting weapons are sometimes classed by the shape of their hilt as either roundel, bollock or ear daggers.
The term "dagger" is coined in this time, as are the Early Modern German equivalents "dolch" ("tolch") and "degen" ("tegen").
In the German school of fencing, Johannes Liechtenauer (Ms. 3227a) and his successors (specifically Andres Lignizer in Cod. 44 A 8) taught fighting with the dagger.
These techniques in some respects resemble modern knife fighting, but emphasized thrusting strokes almost exclusively, instead of slashes and cuts. When used offensively, a standard attack frequently employed the reverse or icepick grip, stabbing downward with the blade to increase thrust and penetrative force. This was done primarily because the blade point frequently had to penetrate or push apart an opponent's steel chain mail or plate armor in order to inflict an injury. The disadvantage of employing the medieval dagger in this manner was that it could easily be blocked by a variety of techniques, most notably by a block with the weaponless arm while simultaneously attacking with a weapon held in the right hand. Another disadvantage was the reduction in effective blade reach to the opponent when using a reverse grip. As the wearing of armor fell out of favor, dagger fighting techniques began to evolve which emphasized the use of the dagger with a conventional or forward grip, while the reverse or icepick grip was retained when attacking an unsuspecting opponent from behind, such as in an assassination.
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The dagger was very popular as a fencing and personal defense weapon in 17th- and 18th-century Spain, where it was referred to as the "daga" or "puñal". During the Renaissance Age the dagger was used as part of everyday dress, and daggers were the only weapon commoners were allowed to carry on their person.
In English, the terms "poniard" and "dirk" are loaned during the late 16th to early 17th century, the latter in the spelling "dork, durk" (presumably via Low German, Dutch or Scandinavian "dolk, dolch", ultimately from a West Slavic "tulich"), the modern spelling "dirk" dating to 18th-century Scots.
Beginning with the 17th century, another form of dagger—the plug bayonet and later the socket bayonet—was used to convert muskets and other longarms into spears by mounting them on the barrel. They were periodically used for eating; the arm was also used for a variety of other tasks such as mending boots, house repairs and farm jobs. The final function of the dagger was as an obvious and ostentatious means of enhancing a man's personal apparel, conforming to fashion which dictated that all men carried them.
WW1 trench warfare caused daggers and fighting knives to come back in play. They also replaced the sabres worn by officers, which were too long and clumsy for trench warfare. They were worn with pride as a sign of having served front line duty.
Daggers achieved public notoriety in the 20th century as ornamental uniform regalia during the Fascist dictatorships of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Dress daggers were used by several other countries as well, including Japan, but never to the same extent. As combat equipment they were carried by many infantry and commando forces during the Second World War. British Commando and other elite units were issued an especially slender dagger, the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, developed by William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes from real-life close-combat experiences gained while serving on the Shanghai Municipal Police Force. The F-S dagger proved very popular with the commandos, who used it primarily for sentry elimination. Some units of the U.S. Marine Corps Raiders in the Pacific were issued a similar fighting dagger, the Marine Raider Stiletto, though this modified design proved less than successful when used in the type of knife combat encountered in the Pacific theater due to this version using inferior materials and manufacturing techniques.
During the Vietnam War, the Gerber Mark II, designed by US Army Captain Bud Holzman and Al Mar, was a popular fighting knife pattern that was privately purchased by many U.S. soldiers and marines who served in that war.
Aside from military forces, most daggers are no longer carried openly, but concealed in clothing. One of the more popular forms of the concealable dagger is the "boot knife". The boot knife is nothing more than a shortened dagger that is compact enough to be worn on the lower leg, usually by means of a sheath clipped or strapped to a boot or other footwear.
The dagger is symbolically ambiguous. Daggers are commonly used as part of the insignias of elite military units or special forces, such as the US Army Airborne Special Operations unit or the Commando Dagger patch for those who have completed the British All Arms Commando Course. Daggers may be associated with deception, stealth, and/or treachery due to the ease of concealment and surprise that someone could inflict with one on an unsuspecting victim, and indeed many assassinations have been carried out with the use of a dagger, including that of Julius Caesar. A cloak and dagger attack is one in which a deceitful, traitorous, or concealed enemy attacks a person. On the other hand, for some cultures and military organizations the dagger symbolizes courage and daring in combat.
Dagger reputation was tainted by its periodic use, or alleged employment, in the commission of disreputable, secretive and unsavoury deeds. Perhaps these are exaggerated; however, it became associated with assassinations performed when the concealed weapon was suddenly flourished and used to kill. Consequently, it developed connotations with murky, cowardly assaults in dark alleys, upon shadowy staircases, and of hired murderers emerging from concealment to stab innocent, sleeping victims.
To a degree, some antipathy towards the dagger has remained unchanged up to modern times. This is perhaps, partly due to the periodic, contemporary broadcasting of bloodthirsty films and television series depicting gangsters employing the stiletto daggers. History is punctuated with accounts of daggers being used in assassinations and coup d'état attempts. On March 15, 44BC, Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated by a large group of conspirators who stabbed him repeatedly with their daggers. This took place in Rome in a room behind the Theatre of Pompey which was being used for government business whilst the Senate was being rebuilt.
To some degree, the dagger regained a little social prestige during the rapier age when personal combat became less brutal. Its involvement in this formalized, regulated martial endeavor did something to restore its reputation. When its advantages and purpose eventually declined and weapon carrying ceased, the dagger was saved from obsolescence by its retention as a field sports gadget. In the nineteenth century the custom of wearing a general purpose knife practically ceased and the hunting knife became a specialized instrument. However, its combat and military traditions were incorporated in the bayonet weapon which has continued in use until the present day.
Daggers are a popular form of what is known as the "art knife", due in part to the symmetry of the blade. One of the most famous examples is knifemaker Buster Warenski's replication of the gold dagger found in Tutankhamun's tomb. Warenski's dagger was made with a cast gold blade and the knife contained 32 ounces of pure gold in its construction. One of the knives required of an American Bladesmith Society Mastersmith is the construction of an "art knife" or a "European style" dagger. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8972 |
Dominican Order
The Dominican Order, known formally as the Order of Preachers (, postnominal abbreviation OP), is a mendicant order of the Catholic Church founded in France by the Spanish priest Saint Dominic. It was approved by Pope Innocent III via the Papal bull "Religiosam vitam" on 22 December 1216. Members of the order, who are referred to as "Dominicans", generally carry the letters "OP" after their names, standing for "Ordinis Praedicatorum", meaning "of the Order of Preachers". Membership in the order includes friars, nuns, active sisters, and affiliated lay or secular Dominicans (formerly known as tertiaries, though recently there has been a growing number of associates who are unrelated to the tertiaries).
Founded to preach the Gospel and to oppose heresy, the teaching activity of the order and its scholastic organisation placed the Preachers in the forefront of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The order is famed for its intellectual tradition, having produced many leading theologians and philosophers. In the year 2018 there were 5,747 Dominican friars, including 4,299 priests. The Dominican Order is headed by the Master of the Order, as of 2019, Gerard Timoner III. Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Alexandria are the co-patronesses of the Order.
A number of other names have been used to refer to both the order and its members.
The Dominican Order came into being in the Middle Ages at a time when men of God were no longer expected to stay behind the walls of a cloister. Instead, they travelled among the people, taking as their examples the apostles of the primitive Church. Out of this ideal emerged two orders of mendicant friars: one, the Friars Minor, was led by Francis of Assisi; the other, the Friars Preachers, by Dominic of Guzman. Like his contemporary, Francis, Dominic saw the need for a new type of organization, and the quick growth of the Dominicans and Franciscans during their first century of existence confirms that the orders of mendicant friars met a need. argues the Dominicans and other mendicant orders were an adaptation to the rise of the profit economy in medieval Europe.
Dominic sought to establish a new kind of order, one that would bring the dedication and systematic education of the older monastic orders like the Benedictines to bear on the religious problems of the burgeoning population of cities, but with more organizational flexibility than either monastic orders or the secular clergy. The Order of Preachers was founded in response to a then perceived need for informed preaching. Dominic's new order was to be trained to preach in the vernacular languages.
Dominic inspired his followers with loyalty to learning and virtue, a deep recognition of the spiritual power of worldly deprivation and the religious state, and a highly developed governmental structure. At the same time, Dominic inspired the members of his order to develop a "mixed" spirituality. They were both active in preaching, and contemplative in study, prayer and meditation. The brethren of the Dominican Order were urban and learned, as well as contemplative and mystical in their spirituality. While these traits affected the women of the order, the nuns especially absorbed the latter characteristics and made those characteristics their own. In England, the Dominican nuns blended these elements with the defining characteristics of English Dominican spirituality and created a spirituality and collective personality that set them apart.
As an adolescent, he had a particular love of theology and the Scriptures became the foundation of his spirituality. During his studies in Palencia, Spain, he experienced a dreadful famine, prompting Dominic to sell all of his beloved books and other equipment to help his neighbours. After he completed his studies, Bishop Martin Bazan and Prior Diego d'Achebes appointed Dominic to the cathedral chapter and he became a Canon Regular under the Rule of Saint Augustine and the Constitutions for the cathedral church of Osma. At the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, he was ordained to the priesthood.
In 1203, Dominic de Guzmán joined Diego de Acebo on a diplomatic mission to Denmark for the monarchy of Spain, to arrange the marriage between the son of King Alfonso VIII of Castile and a niece of King Valdemar II of Denmark. At that time the south of France was the stronghold of the Cathar movement. The Cathars (also known as Albigensians, due to their stronghold in Albi, France) were a heretical neo-gnostic sect. They believed that matter was evil and only the spirit was good; this was a fundamental challenge to the notion of the incarnation, central to Catholic theology. The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, in southern France.
Dominic saw the need for a response that would attempt to sway members of the Albigensian movement back to mainstream Christian thought. Dominic became inspired into a reforming zeal after they encountered Albigensian Christians at Toulouse. Diego immediately saw one of the paramount reasons for the spread of the unorthodox movement- the representatives of the Holy Church acted and moved with an offensive amount of pomp and ceremony. In contrast, the Cathars generally led ascetic lifestyles. For these reasons, Diego suggested that the papal legates begin to live a reformed apostolic life. The legates agreed to change if they could find a strong leader.
The prior took up the challenge, and he and Dominic dedicated themselves to the conversion of the Cathars. Despite this particular mission, Dominic met limited success converting Cathars by persuasion, "for though in his ten years of preaching a large number of converts were made, it has to be said that the results were not such as had been hoped for".
Dominic became the spiritual father to several Albigensian women he had reconciled to the faith, and in 1206 he established them in a convent in Prouille, near Toulouse. This convent would become the foundation of the Dominican nuns, thus making the Dominican nuns older than the Dominican friars. Diego sanctioned the building of a monastery for girls whose parents had sent them to the care of the Albigensians because their families were too poor to fulfill their basic needs.> The monastery in Prouille would later become Dominic's headquarters for his missionary effort. After two years on the mission field, Diego died while traveling back to Spain.
Dominic founded the Dominican Order in 1215 at a time when men of God were no longer expected to stay behind the walls of a cloister. Dominic established a religious community in Toulouse in 1214, to be governed by the rule of Saint Augustine and statutes to govern the life of the friars, including the Primitive Constitution. (The statutes borrowed somewhat from the Constitutions of Prémontré). The founding documents establish that the order was founded for two purposes: preaching and the salvation of souls.
Dominic established a religious community in Toulouse in 1214, to be governed by the rule of Saint Augustine and statutes to govern the life of the friars, including the Primitive Constitution.
In July 1215, with the approbation of Bishop Foulques of Toulouse, Dominic ordered his followers into an institutional life. Its purpose was revolutionary in the pastoral ministry of the Catholic Church. These priests were organized and well trained in religious studies. Dominic needed a framework—a rule—to organize these components. The Rule of Saint Augustine was an obvious choice for the Dominican Order, according to Dominic's successor Jordan of Saxony, in the Libellus de principiis, because it lent itself to the "salvation of souls through preaching". By this choice, however, the Dominican brothers designated themselves not monks, but canons-regular. They could practice ministry and common life while existing in individual poverty.
Dominic's education at Palencia gave him the knowledge he needed to overcome the Manicheans. With charity, the other concept that most defines the work and spirituality of the order, study became the method most used by the Dominicans in working to defend the Church against the perils that hounded it, and also of enlarging its authority over larger areas of the known world. In Dominic's thinking, it was impossible for men to preach what they did not or could not understand. When the brethren left Prouille, then, to begin their apostolic work, Dominic sent Matthew of Paris to establish a school near the University of Paris. This was the first of many Dominican schools established by the brethren, some near large universities throughout Europe. The women of the order also established schools for the children of the local gentry.
The Order of Preachers was approved in December 1216 and January 1217 by Pope Honorius III in the papal bulls "Religiosam vitam" and "Nos attendentes". On January 21, 1217, Honorius issued the bull "Gratiarum omnium" recognizing Dominic's followers as an order dedicated to study and universally authorized to preach, a power formerly reserved to local episcopal authorization.
On August 15, 1217, Dominic dispatched seven of his followers to the great university center of Paris to establish a priory focused on study and preaching. The Convent of St. Jacques, would eventually become the order's first "studium generale". Dominic was to establish similar foundations at other university towns of the day, Bologna in 1218, Palencia and Montpellier in 1220, and Oxford just before his death in 1221.
In 1219 Pope Honorius III invited Dominic and his companions to take up residence at the ancient Roman basilica of Santa Sabina, which they did by early 1220. Before that time the friars had only a temporary residence in Rome at the convent of San Sisto Vecchio which Honorius III had given to Dominic circa 1218 intending it to become a convent for a reformation of nuns at Rome under Dominic's guidance. In May 1220 at Bologna the order's first General Chapter mandated that each new priory of the order maintain its own "studium conventuale", thus laying the foundation of the Dominican tradition of sponsoring widespread institutions of learning. The official foundation of the Dominican convent at Santa Sabina with its "studium conventuale" occurred with the legal transfer of property from Honorius III to the Order of Preachers on June 5, 1222. This "studium" was transformed into the order's first "studium provinciale" by Thomas Aquinas in 1265. Part of the curriculum of this "studium" was relocated in 1288 at the "studium" of Santa Maria sopra Minerva which in the 16th century world be transformed into the College of Saint Thomas (). In the 20th century the college would be relocated to the convent of Saints Dominic and Sixtus and would be transformed into the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, "Angelicum".
The Dominican friars quickly spread, including to England, where they appeared in Oxford in 1221. In the 13th century the order reached all classes of Christian society, fought heresy, schism, and paganism by word and book, and by its missions to the north of Europe, to Africa, and Asia passed beyond the frontiers of Christendom. Its schools spread throughout the entire Church; its doctors wrote monumental works in all branches of knowledge, including the extremely important Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Its members included popes, cardinals, bishops, legates, inquisitors, confessors of princes, ambassadors, and "paciarii" (enforcers of the peace decreed by popes or councils).
The order's origins in battling heterodoxy influenced its later development and reputation. Many later Dominicans battled heresy as part of their apostolate. Indeed, many years after Dominic reacted to the Cathars, the first Grand Inquistor of Spain, Tomás de Torquemada, would be drawn from the Dominican Order. The order was appointed by Pope Gregory IX the duty to carry out the Inquisition. Torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth. In his Papal Bull "Ad extirpanda" of 1252, Pope Innocent IV authorised the Dominicans' use of torture under prescribed circumstances.
The expansion of the order produced changes. A smaller emphasis on doctrinal activity favoured the development here and there of the ascetic and contemplative life and there sprang up, especially in Germany and Italy, the mystical movement with which the names of Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Suso, Johannes Tauler, and Catherine of Siena are associated. (See German mysticism, which has also been called "Dominican mysticism".) This movement was the prelude to the reforms undertaken, at the end of the century, by Raymond of Capua, and continued in the following century. At the same time the order found itself face to face with the Renaissance. It struggled against pagan tendencies in Renaissance humanism, in Italy through Dominici and Savonarola, in Germany through the theologians of Cologne but it also furnished humanism with such advanced writers as Francesco Colonna (probably the writer of the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili") and Matteo Bandello. Many Dominicans took part in the artistic activity of the age, the most prominent being Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolomeo.
Although Dominic and the early brethren had instituted female Dominican houses at Prouille and other places by 1227, houses of women attached to the Order became so popular that some of the friars had misgivings about the increasing demands of female religious establishments on their time and resources. Nonetheless, women's houses dotted the countryside throughout Europe. There were seventy-four Dominican female houses in Germany, forty-two in Italy, nine in France, eight in Spain, six in Bohemia, three in Hungary, and three in Poland. Many of the German religious houses that lodged women had been home to communities of women, such as Beguines, that became Dominican once they were taught by the traveling preachers and put under the jurisdiction of the Dominican authoritative structure. A number of these houses became centers of study and mystical spirituality in the 14th century, as expressed in works such as the sister-books. There were one hundred and fifty-seven nunneries in the order by 1358. After that year, the number lessened considerably due to the Black Death.
In places besides Germany, convents were founded as retreats from the world for women of the upper classes. These were original projects funded by wealthy patrons, including other women. Among these was Countess Margaret of Flanders who established the monastery of Lille, while Val-Duchesse at Oudergem near Brussels was built with the wealth of Adelaide of Burgundy, Duchess of Brabant (1262).
Female houses differed from male Dominican houses in that they were enclosed. The sisters chanted the Divine Office and kept all the monastic observances. The nuns lived under the authority of the general and provincial chapters of the order. They shared in all the applicable privileges of the order. The friars served as their confessors, priests, teachers and spiritual mentors.
Women could be professed to the Dominican religious life at the age of thirteen. The formula for profession contained in the Constitutions of Montargis Priory (1250) requires that nuns pledge obedience to God, the Blessed Virgin, their prioress and her successors according to the Rule of Saint Augustine and the institute of the order, until death. The clothing of the sisters consisted of a white tunic and scapular, a leather belt, a black mantle, and a black veil. Candidates to profession were questioned to reveal whether they were actually married women who had merely separated from their husbands. Their intellectual abilities were also tested. Nuns were to be silent in places of prayer, the cloister, the dormitory, and refectory. Silence was maintained unless the prioress granted an exception for a specific cause. Speaking was allowed in the common parlor, but it was subordinate to strict rules, and the prioress, subprioress or other senior nun had to be present.
As well as sewing, embroidery and other genteel pursuits, the nuns participated in a number of intellectual activities, including reading and discussing pious literature. In the Strassburg monastery of Saint Margaret, some of the nuns could converse fluently in Latin. Learning still had an elevated place in the lives of these religious. In fact, Margarette Reglerin, a daughter of a wealthy Nuremberg family, was dismissed from a convent because she did not have the ability or will to learn.
In England, the Dominican Province began at the second general chapter of the Dominican Order in Bologna during the spring of 1221. Dominic dispatched twelve friars to England under the guidance of their English prior, Gilbert of Fresney. They landed in Dover on August 5, 1221. The province officially came into being at its first provincial chapter in 1230.
The English Province was a component of the international order from which it obtained its laws, direction, and instructions. It was also, however, a group of Englishmen. Its direct supervisors were from England, and the members of the English Province dwelt and labored in English cities, towns, villages, and roadways. English and European ingredients constantly came in contact. The international side of the province's existence influenced the national, and the national responded to, adapted, and sometimes constrained the international.
The first Dominican site in England was at Oxford, in the parishes of St. Edward and St. Adelaide. The friars built an oratory to the Blessed Virgin Mary and by 1265, the brethren, in keeping with their devotion to study, began erecting a school. Actually, the Dominican brothers likely began a school immediately after their arrival, as priories were legally schools. Information about the schools of the English Province is limited, but a few facts are known. Much of the information available is taken from visitation records. The "visitation" was a section of the province through which visitors to each priory could describe the state of its religious life and its studies to the next chapter. There were four such visits in England and Wales—Oxford, London, Cambridge and York. All Dominican students were required to learn grammar, old and new logic, natural philosophy and theology. Of all of the curricular areas, however, theology was the most important. This is not surprising when one remembers Dominic's zeal for it.
Dartford Priory was established long after the primary period of monastic foundation in England had ended. It emulated, then, the monasteries found in Europe—mainly France and German—as well as the monastic traditions of their English Dominican brothers. The first nuns to inhabit Dartford were sent from Poissy Priory in France. Even on the eve of the Dissolution, Prioress Jane Vane wrote to Cromwell on behalf of a postulant, saying that though she had not actually been professed, she was professed in her heart and in the eyes of God. This is only one such example of dedication. Profession in Dartford Priory seems, then, to have been made based on personal commitment, and one's personal association with God.
As heirs of the Dominican priory of Poissy in France, the nuns of Dartford Priory in England were also heirs to a tradition of profound learning and piety. Strict discipline and plain living were characteristic of the monastery throughout its existence.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, as a settler in the New World, was galvanized by witnessing the brutal torture and genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. He became famous for his advocacy of the rights of Native Americans, whose cultures, especially in the Caribbean, he describes with care.
Gaspar da Cruz (c.1520–1570), who worked all over the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia, was probably the first Christian missionary to preach (unsuccessfully) in Cambodia. After a (similarly unsuccessful) stint, in 1556, in Guangzhou, China, he eventually returned to Portugal and became the first European to publish a book devoted exclusively to China in 1569/1570.
The beginning of the 16th century confronted the order with the upheavals of Revolution. The spread of Protestantism cost it six or seven provinces and several hundreds of convents, but the discovery of the New World opened up a fresh field of activity. In the 18th century, there were numerous attempts at reform, accompanied by a reduction in the number of devotees. The French Revolution ruined the order in France, and crises that more or less rapidly followed considerably lessened or wholly destroyed numerous provinces.
During the early 19th century, the number of Preachers seems never to have sunk below 3,500. Statistics for 1876 show 3,748, but 500 of these had been expelled from their convents and were engaged in work. Statistics for 1910 show a total of 4,472 nominally or actually engaged in proper activities of the order. By the year 2013 there were 6058 Dominican friars, including 4,470 priests.
In the revival movement France held a foremost place, owing to the reputation and convincing power of the orator, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire (1802–1861). He took the habit of a Friar Preacher at Rome (1839), and the province of France was canonically erected in 1850. From this province were detached the province of Lyon, called Occitania (1862), that of Toulouse (1869), and that of Canada (1909). The French restoration likewise furnished many laborers to other provinces, to assist in their organization and progress. From it came the master general who remained longest at the head of the administration during the 19th century, Père Vincent Jandel (1850–1872). Here should be mentioned the province of Saint Joseph in the United States. Founded in 1805 by Edward Fenwick, afterwards first Bishop of Cincinnati, Ohio (1821–1832). In 1905, it established a large house of studies at Washington, D.C., called the Dominican House of Studies.
The province of France has produced many preachers. The conferences of Notre-Dame-de-Paris were inaugurated by Père Lacordaire. The Dominicans of the province of France furnished Lacordaire (1835–1836, 1843–1851), Jacques Monsabré, and Joseph Ollivier. The pulpit of Notre Dame has been occupied by a succession of Dominicans. Père Henri Didon (1840-1900) was a Dominican. The house of studies of the province of France publishes "L'Année Dominicaine" (founded 1859), "La Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques" (1907), and "La Revue de la Jeunesse" (1909). French Dominicans founded and administer the École Biblique et Archéologique française de Jérusalem founded in 1890 by Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938), one of the leading international centres for biblical research. It is at the "École Biblique" that the famed Jerusalem Bible (both editions) was prepared. Likewise Cardinal Yves Congar was a product of the French province of the Order of Preachers.
Doctrinal development has had an important place in the restoration of the Preachers. Several institutions, besides those already mentioned, played important parts. Such is the Biblical school at Jerusalem, open to the religious of the order and to secular clerics, which publishes the "Revue Biblique." The "Pontificium Collegium Internationale Angelicum", the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas ("Angelicum") established in Rome in 1908 by Master Hyacinth Cormier, opened its doors to regulars and seculars for the study of the sacred sciences. In addition to the reviews above are the "Revue Thomiste," founded by Père Thomas Coconnier (d. 1908), and the "Analecta Ordinis Prædicatorum" (1893). Among numerous writers of the order in this period are: Cardinals Thomas Zigliara (d. 1893) and Zephirin González (d. 1894), two esteemed philosophers; Alberto Guillelmotti (d. 1893), historian of the Pontifical Navy, and historian Heinrich Denifle (d. 1905).
During the Reformation, many of the convents of Dominican nuns were forced to close. One which managed to survive, and afterwards founded many new houses, was St Ursula's in Augsburg. In the seventeenth century, convents of Dominican women were often asked by their bishops to undertake apostolic work, particularly educating girls and visiting the sick. St Ursula's returned to an enclosed life in the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth century, after Napoleon had closed many European convents, King Louis I of Bavaria in 1828 restored the Religious Orders of women in his realm, provided that the nuns undertook some active work useful to the State (usually teaching or nursing). In 1877, Bishop Ricards in South Africa requested that Augsburg send a group of nuns to start a teaching mission in King Williamstown. From this mission were founded many Third Order Regular congregations of Dominican sisters, with their own constitutions, though still following the Rule of Saint Augustine and affiliated to the Dominican Order. These include the Dominican Sisters of Oakford, KwazuluNatal (1881), the Dominican Missionary Sisters, Zimbabwe, (1890) and the Dominican Sisters of Newcastle, KwazuluNatal (1891).
The Dominican Order has influenced the formation of other Orders outside of the Roman Catholic Church, such as the Anglican Order of Preachers which is a Dominican Order within the worldwide Anglican Communion. Since not all members are obliged to take solemn or simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, it operates more like a third order with a third order style structure, with no contemporary or canonical ties to the historical order founded by Dominic of Guzman.
The Pax Mongolica of the 13th and 14th centuries that united vast parts of the European-Asian continents enabled western missionaries to travel east. "Dominican friars were preaching the Gospel on the Volga Steppes by 1225 (the year following the establishment of the Kipchak Khanate by Batu), and in 1240 Pope Gregory IX despatched others to Persia and Armenia." The most famous Dominican was Jordanus de Severac who was sent first to Persia then in 1321, together with a companion (Nicolas of Pistoia) to India. Father Jordanus' work and observations are recorded in two letters he wrote to the friars of Armenia, and a book, "Mirabilia", translated as "Wonders of the East".
Another Dominican, Father Recold of Monte Croce, worked in Syria and Persia. His travels took him from Acre to Tabriz, and on to Baghdad. There "he was welcomed by the Dominican fathers already there, and with them entered into a disputation with the Nestorians." Although a number of Dominicans and Franciscans persevered against the growing faith of Islam throughout the region, all Christian missionaries were soon expelled with Timur's death in 1405.
By the 1850s, the Dominicans had half a million followers in the Philippines and well-established missions in the Chinese province of Fujian and Tonkin, Vietnam, performing thousands of baptisms each year.
The Friars, Nuns, Sisters, Members of Priestly Fraternities of Saint Dominic, Dominican Laity and Dominican Youths together form the Order of Preachers.
The Dominican nuns were founded by Dominic in 1206 even before he had established the friars in 1216. Dominican Nuns are consecrated to God and live the mission of the Order of Preachers to preach the Gospel for the salvation of souls through a life of prayer, penance, hearing the Word of God and contemplating the mysteries of Salvation. The Nuns of the Order of Preachers are to seek, ponder and call upon the Lord Jesus Christ in solitude so that the WORD proceeding from the mouth of God may not return to Him empty, but may accomplish those things for which It was sent. (Isaiah 55:10) Living in the heart of the Preaching Family, the nuns live in the WORD of God which the friars, sisters and laity preach. In the cloister the nuns devote themselves totally to God and perpetuate that singular gift which Dominic had of bearing sinners, the down-trodden and the afflicted in the inmost sanctuary of his compassion. They incarnate in their lives the cry of Dominic:
“O Lord, what will become of sinners!” The nuns celebrated their 800th anniversary in 2006.
Women have been part of the Dominican Order since the beginning, but distinct active congregations of Dominican sisters in their current form are largely a product of the nineteenth century and afterwards. They draw their origins both from the Dominican nuns and the communities of women tertiaries (lay women) who lived in their own homes and gathered regularly to pray and study: the most famous of these was the Mantellate attached to Saint Dominic's church in Siena, to which Catherine of Siena belonged. In the seventeenth century, some European Dominican monasteries (e.g. St Ursula's, Augsburg) temporarily became no longer enclosed, so they could engage in teaching or nursing or other work in response to pressing local need. Any daughter houses they founded, however, became independent. But in the nineteenth century, in response to increasing missionary fervor, monasteries were asked to send groups of women to found schools and medical clinics around the world. Large numbers of Catholic women traveled to Africa, the Americas, and the East to teach and support new communities of Catholics there, both settlers and converts. Owing to the large distances involved, these groups needed to be self-governing, and they frequently planted new self-governing congregations in neighboring mission areas in order to respond more effectively to the perceived pastoral needs. Following on from this period of growth in the nineteenth century, and another great period of growth in those joining these congregations in the 1950s, there are currently 24,600 Sisters belonging to 150 Dominican Religious Congregations present in 109 countries affiliated to Dominican Sisters International.
As well as the friars, Dominican sisters live their lives supported by four common values, often referred to as the Four Pillars of Dominican Life, they are: community life, common prayer, study and service. Dominic called this fourfold pattern of life the "holy preaching". Henri Matisse was so moved by the care that he received from the Dominican Sisters that he collaborated in the design and interior decoration of their Chapelle du Saint-Marie du Rosaire in Vence, France.
The Priestly Fraternities of St. Dominic are diocesan priests who are formally affiliated to the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) through a Rule of life that they profess, and so strive for evangelical perfection under the overall direction of the Dominican friars. The origins of the Dominican fraternities can be traced from the Dominican third Order secular, which then included both priests and lay persons as members. Now existing as a separate association from that of the laity, and with its own distinct rule to follow, the Priestly Fraternities of St. Dominic continues to be guided by the Order in embracing the gift of the spirituality of Dominic in the unique context of the diocesan priests. Along with the special grace of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, which helps them to perform the acts of the sacred ministry worthily, they receive new spiritual help from the profession, which makes them members of the Dominican Family and sharers in the grace and mission of the Order. While the Order provides them with these spiritual aids and directs them to their own sanctification, it leaves them free for the complete service of the local Church, under the jurisdiction of their own Bishop.
Lay Dominicans are governed by their own rule, the Rule of the Lay Fraternities of St. Dominic, promulgated by the Master in 1987. It is the fifth Rule of the Dominican Laity; the first was issued in 1285. Lay Dominicans are also governed by the Fundamental Constitution of the Dominican Laity, and their provinces provide a General Directory and Statutes. According to their Fundamental Constitution of the Dominican Laity, sec. 4, "They have a distinctive character in both their spirituality and their service to God and neighbor. As members of the Order, they share in its apostolic mission through prayer, study and preaching according to the state of the laity."
Pope Pius XII, in Chosen Laymen, an Address to the Third Order of St. Dominic (1958), said, "The true condition of salvation is to meet the divine invitation by accepting the Catholic 'credo' and by observing the commandments. But the Lord expects more from you [Lay Dominicans], and the Church urges you to continue seeking the intimate knowledge of God and His works, to search for a more complete and valuable expression of this knowledge, a refinement of the Christian attitudes which derive from this knowledge."
The two greatest saints among them are Catherine of Siena and Rose of Lima, who lived ascetic lives in their family homes, yet both had widespread influence in their societies.
Today, there is a growing number of Associates who share the Dominican charism. Dominican Associates are Christian women and men; married, single, divorced, and widowed; clergy members and lay persons who were first drawn to and then called to live out the charism and continue the mission of the Dominican Order – to praise, to bless, to preach. Associates do not take vows, but rather make a commitment to be partners with vowed members, and to share the mission and charism of the Dominican Family in their own lives, families, churches, neighborhoods, workplaces, and cities. They are most often associated with a particular apostolic work of a congregation of active Dominican sisters.
The Dominican emphasis on learning and on charity distinguishes it from other monastic and mendicant orders. As the order first developed on the European continent, learning continued to be emphasized by these friars and their sisters in Christ. These religious also struggled for a deeply personal, intimate relationship with God. When the order reached England, many of these attributes were kept, but the English gave the order additional, specialized characteristics.
Humbert of Romans, the master general of the order from 1254 to 1263, was a great administrator, as well as preacher and writer. It was under his tenure as master general that the sisters in the order were given official membership. He also wanted his friars to reach excellence in their preaching, and this was his most lasting contribution to the order. Humbert is at the center of ascetic writers in the Dominican Order. He advised his readers,
"[Young Dominicans] are also to be instructed not to be eager to see visions or work miracles, since these avail little to salvation, and sometimes we are fooled by them; but rather they should be eager to do good in which salvation consists. Also, they should be taught not to be sad if they do not enjoy the divine consolations they hear others have; but they should know the loving Father for some reason sometimes withholds these. Again, they should learn that if they lack the grace of compunction or devotion they should not think they are not in the state of grace as long as they have good will, which is all that God regards".
The English Dominicans took this to heart, and made it the focal point of their mysticism.
By 1300, the enthusiasm for preaching and conversion within the order lessened. Mysticism, full of the ideas Albertus Magnus expostulated, became the devotion of the greatest minds and hands within the organization. It became a "powerful instrument of personal and theological transformation both within the Order of Preachers and throughout the wider reaches of Christendom.
Although Albertus Magnus did much to instill mysticism in the Order of Preachers, it is a concept that reaches back to the Hebrew Bible. In the tradition of Holy Writ, the impossibility of coming face to face with God is a recurring motif, thus the commandment against graven images (Exodus 20.4–5). As time passed, Jewish and early Christian writings presented the idea of 'unknowing,' where God's presence was enveloped in a dark cloud. All of these ideas associated with mysticism were at play in the spirituality of the Dominican community, and not only among the men. In Europe, in fact, it was often the female members of the order, such as Catherine of Siena, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Christine of Stommeln, Margaret Ebner, and Elsbet Stagl, that gained reputations for having mystical experiences. Notable male members of the order associated with mysticism include Meister Eckhart and Henry Suso.
Another who contributed significantly to the spirituality of the order is Saint Albert the Great, whose influence on the brotherhood permeated nearly every aspect of Dominican life. One of Albert's greatest contributions was his study of Dionysius the Areopagite, a mystical theologian whose words left an indelible imprint in the medieval period. Magnus' writings made a significant contribution to German mysticism, which became vibrant in the minds of the Beguines and women such as Hildegard of Bingen and Mechthild of Magdeburg. Mysticism refers to the conviction that all believers have the capability to experience God's love. This love may manifest itself through brief ecstatic experiences, such that one may be engulfed by God and gain an immediate knowledge of Him, which is unknowable through the intellect alone.
Albertus Magnus championed the idea, drawn from Dionysus, that positive knowledge of God is possible, but obscure. Thus, it is easier to state what God is not, than to state what God is:
"... we affirm things of God only relatively, that is, casually, whereas we deny things of God absolutely, that is, with reference to what He is in Himself. And there is no contradiction between a relative affirmation and an absolute negation. It is not contradictory to say that someone is white-toothed and not white".
Albert the Great wrote that wisdom and understanding enhance one's faith in God. According to him, these are the tools that God uses to commune with a contemplative. Love in the soul is both the cause and result of true understanding and judgement. It causes not only an intellectual knowledge of God, but a spiritual and emotional knowledge as well. Contemplation is the means whereby one can obtain this goal of understanding. Things that once seemed static and unchanging become full of possibility and perfection. The contemplative then knows that God is, but she does not know what God is. Thus, contemplation forever produces a mystified, imperfect knowledge of God. The soul is exalted beyond the rest of God's creation but it cannot see God Himself.
Concerning humanity as the image of Christ, English Dominican spirituality concentrated on the moral implications of image-bearing rather than the philosophical foundations of the imago Dei. The process of Christ's life, and the process of image-bearing, amends humanity to God's image. The idea of the "image of God" demonstrates both the ability of man to move toward God (as partakers in Christ's redeeming sacrifice), and that, on some level, man is always an image of God. As their love and knowledge of God grows and is sanctified by faith and experience, the image of God within man becomes ever more bright and clear.
English Dominican mysticism in the late medieval period differed from European strands of it in that, whereas European Dominican mysticism tended to concentrate on ecstatic experiences of union with the divine, English Dominican mysticism's ultimate focus was on a crucial dynamic in one's personal relationship with God. This was an essential moral imitation of the Savior as an ideal for religious change, and as the means for reformation of humanity's nature as an image of divinity. This type of mysticism carried with it four elements. First, spiritually it emulated the moral essence of Christ's life. Second, there was a connection linking moral emulation of Christ's life and humanity's disposition as images of the divine. Third, English Dominican mysticism focused on an embodied spirituality with a structured love of fellow men at its center. Finally, the supreme aspiration of this mysticism was either an ethical or an actual union with God.
For English Dominican mystics, the mystical experience was not expressed just in one moment of the full knowledge of God, but in the journey of, or process of, faith. This then led to an understanding that was directed toward an experiential knowledge of divinity. It is important to understand, however, that for these mystics it was possible to pursue mystical life without the visions and voices that are usually associated with such a relationship with God. They experienced a mystical process that allowed them, in the end, to experience what they had already gained knowledge of through their faith only.
The centre of all mystical experience is, of course, Christ. English Dominicans sought to gain a full knowledge of Christ through an imitation of His life. English mystics of all types tended to focus on the moral values that the events in Christ's life exemplified. This led to a "progressive understanding of the meanings of Scripture—literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical"—that was contained within the mystical journey itself. From these considerations of Scripture comes the simplest way to imitate Christ: an emulation of the moral actions and attitudes that Jesus demonstrated in His earthly ministry becomes the most significant way to feel and have knowledge of God.
The English concentrated on the spirit of the events of Christ's life, not the literality of events. They neither expected nor sought the appearance of the stigmata or any other physical manifestation. They wanted to create in themselves that environment that allowed Jesus to fulfill His divine mission, insofar as they were able. At the center of this environment was love: the love that Christ showed for humanity in becoming human. Christ's love reveals the mercy of God and His care for His creation. English Dominican mystics sought through this love to become images of God. Love led to spiritual growth that, in turn, reflected an increase in love for God and humanity. This increase in universal love allowed men's wills to conform to God's will, just as Christ's will submitted to the Father's will.
As the image of God grows within man, he learns to rely less on an intellectual pursuit of virtue and more on an affective pursuit of charity and meekness. Thus, man then directs his path to that One, and the love for, and of, Christ guides man's very nature to become centered on the One, and on his neighbor as well. Charity is the manifestation of the pure love of Christ, both for and by His follower.
Although the ultimate attainment for this type of mysticism is union with God, it is not necessarily visionary, nor does it hope only for ecstatic experiences; instead, mystical life is successful if it is imbued with charity. The goal is just as much to become like Christ as it is to become one with Him. Those who believe in Christ should first have faith in Him without becoming engaged in such overwhelming phenomena.
The Dominican Order was affected by a number of elemental influences. Its early members imbued the order with a mysticism and learning. The Europeans of the order embraced ecstatic mysticism on a grand scale and looked to a union with the Creator. The English Dominicans looked for this complete unity as well, but were not so focused on ecstatic experiences. Instead, their goal was to emulate the moral life of Christ more completely. The Dartford nuns were surrounded by all of these legacies, and used them to create something unique. Though they are not called mystics, they are known for their piety toward God and their determination to live lives devoted to, and in emulation of, Him.
Devotion to the Virgin Mary was another very important aspect of Dominican spirituality. As an order, the Dominicans believed that they were established through the good graces of Christ's mother, and through prayers she sent missionaries to save the souls of nonbelievers. Dominican brothers and sisters who were unable to participate in the Divine Office sang the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin each day and saluted her as their advocate.
Throughout the centuries, the Holy Rosary has been an important element among the Dominicans. Pope Pius XI stated that: "The Rosary of Mary is the principle and foundation on which the very Order of Saint Dominic rests for making perfect the life of its members and obtaining the salvation of others."
Histories of the Holy Rosary often attribute its origin to Dominic himself through the Virgin Mary. Our Lady of the Rosary is the title related to the Marian apparition to Dominic in 1208 in the church of Prouille in which the Virgin Mary gave the Rosary to him. For centuries, Dominicans have been instrumental in spreading the rosary and emphasizing the Catholic belief in the power of the rosary.
On January 1, 2008, the master of the order declared a year of dedication to the Rosary.
"List of Dominican friars" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8973 |
Don McLean
Donald McLean III (born October 2, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter, best known for his 1971 hit song "American Pie", an 8.5-minute folk rock "cultural touchstone" about the loss of innocence of the early rock and roll generation.
His other hit singles include "Vincent", "Dreidel", a rendition of Roy Orbison's "Crying", a rendition of the Skyliners' "Since I Don't Have You", and "Wonderful Baby".
His composition "And I Love You So" has been sung by Elvis Presley, Perry Como, Helen Reddy, Glen Campbell, and others, and in 2000, Madonna had a hit with a rendition of "American Pie".
In 2004, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In January 2018, BMI certified that "American Pie" and "Vincent" had reached five million and three million airplays respectively.
McLean's grandfather and father, both also named Donald McLean, had roots originating in Scotland. McLean's mother, Elizabeth Bucci, originated from Abruzzo in central Italy. He has other extended family in Los Angeles and Boston.
Though some of his early musical influences included Frank Sinatra and Buddy Holly, as a teenager, McLean became interested in folk music, particularly the Weavers' 1955 recording "At Carnegie Hall". He often missed long periods of school because of childhood asthma, particularly music lessons, and although McLean slipped back in his studies, his love of music was allowed to flourish. By age 16, he had bought his first guitar and began making contacts in the music business, becoming friends with the folk singers Erik Darling and Fred Hellerman of the Weavers. Hellerman said, "He called me one day and said, 'I'd like to come and visit you', and that's what he did! We became good friends — he has the most remarkable music memory of anyone I've ever known."
When McLean was 15, his father died. Fulfilling his father's request, McLean graduated from Iona Preparatory School in 1963, and briefly attended Villanova University, dropping out after four months. After leaving Villanova, McLean became associated with the famed folk music agent Harold Leventhal for several months before teaming up with his personal manager, Herb Gart, for 18 years. For the next six years, he performed at venues and events including The Bitter End and the Gaslight Cafe in New York, the Newport Folk Festival, the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., and the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Gart's 18-year tenure as McLean's manager ended acrimoniously in the 1980s. Following Gart's death in September 2018, McLean wrote:
McLean attended night school at Iona College and received a bachelor's degree in business administration in 1968. He turned down a scholarship to Columbia University Graduate School in favor of pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter, performing at such venues as Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York and the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Later that year, with the help of a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, McLean began reaching a wider audience, with visits to towns up and down the Hudson River. He learned the art of performing from his friend and mentor Pete Seeger. McLean accompanied Seeger on his Clearwater boat trip up the Hudson River in 1969 to raise awareness about environmental pollution in the river. During this time, McLean wrote songs that appeared on his first album "Tapestry". McLean co-edited the book "Songs and Sketches of the First Clearwater Crew", with sketches by Thomas B. Allen, for which Pete Seeger wrote the foreword. Seeger and McLean sang "Shenandoah" on the 1974 Clearwater album. McLean still thinks about his experiences of working with Seeger: "Hardly a day goes by when I don't think of Pete and how generous and supportive he was. If you could understand his politics and you got to know him, he really was some kind of modern day saint."
McLean recorded "Tapestry" in 1969 in Berkeley, California during the student riots. After being rejected 72 times by labels, the album was released by Mediarts, a label that had not existed when he first started to look for a label. He worked on the album for a couple of years before putting it out. It attracted good reviews but little notice outside the folk community, though on the Easy Listening chart "Castles in the Air" was a success, and in 1973 "And I Love You So" became a number 1 Adult Contemporary hit for Perry Como.
McLean's major break came when Mediarts was taken over by United Artists Records, thus securing the promotion of a major label for his second album, "American Pie." The album launched two number one hits in the title song and "Vincent". "American Pie"'s success made McLean an international star and piqued interest in his first album, which charted more than two years after its initial release.
McLean's magnum opus "American Pie" is a sprawling, impressionistic ballad inspired partly by the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) in a plane crash in 1959, and developments in American youth culture in the subsequent decade. The song popularized the expression "The Day the Music Died" in reference to the crash.
The song was recorded on May 26, 1971, and a month later received its first radio airplay on New York's WNEW-FM and WPLJ-FM to mark the closing of Fillmore East, the famous New York concert hall. "American Pie" reached number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100 from January 15 to February 5, 1972, and remains McLean's most successful single release. The single also topped the "Billboard" Easy Listening chart. With a total running time of 8:36 encompassing both sides of the single, it is also the longest song to reach number 1. Some stations played only part one of the original split-sided single release.
WCFL DJ Bob Dearborn unraveled the lyrics and first published his interpretation on January 7, 1972, four days after the song reached number 1 on rival station WLS, six days before it reached number 1 on WCFL, and eight days before it reached number 1 nationally (see "Further reading" under "American Pie"). Numerous other interpretations, which together largely converged on Dearborn's interpretation, quickly followed. McLean declined to say anything definitive about the lyrics until 1978. Since then McLean has stated that the lyrics are also somewhat autobiographical and present an abstract story of his life from the mid-1950s until the time he wrote the song in the late 1960s.
In 2001, "American Pie" was voted number 5 in a poll of the 365 Songs of the Century compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
On April 7, 2015, McLean's original working manuscript for "American Pie" sold for $1,205,000 (£809,524/€1,109,182) at Christie's auction rooms, New York, making it the third highest auction price achieved for an American literary manuscript.
"Vincent" is a tribute to the 19th-century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh. The inspiration came to McLean one morning while looking at a book about Van Gogh. As he studied a print of Van Gogh's painting "The Starry Night", he realized that a song could be written about the artist through the painting. Although it reached only number 12 on the "Billboard" Hot 100, it proved to be a huge hit worldwide, including reaching number 1 in the UK Singles Chart. Mike Mills of R.E.M. said "You can't change a note in that song". The song was performed by NOFX on their album "45 or 46 Songs That Weren't Good Enough to Go on Our Other Records" and appears on the Fat Wreck Chords compilation "Survival of the Fattest". "Vincent" was sung by Josh Groban on his 2001 debut album. In 2018, singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding recorded a new, stripped back, acoustic guitar-driven version of the song.
Personnel from the "American Pie" album sessions were retained for his third album "Don McLean", including the producer, Ed Freeman, Rob Rothstein on bass, and Warren Bernhardt on piano. The song "The Pride Parade" provides an insight into McLean's immediate reaction to stardom. McLean told "Melody Maker" in 1973 that "Tapestry" was an album by someone previously concerned with external situations. "American Pie" combines externals with internals, and the resultant success of that album makes the third one ("Don McLean") entirely introspective."
Other songs written by McLean for the album include "Dreidel" (number 21 on the Billboard chart) and "If We Try" (number 58), which was recorded by Olivia Newton-John. "On the Amazon" from the 1920s musical Mr. Cinders was an unusual choice but became an audience favorite in concerts and featured in "Till Tomorrow", a documentary film about McLean produced by Bob Elfstrom (Elfstrom held the role of Jesus Christ in Johnny and June Cash's "Gospel Road)". The film shows McLean in concert at Columbia University as he was interrupted by a bomb scare. He left the stage while the audience stood up and checked under their seats for anything that resembled a bomb. After the all-clear, McLean re-appeared and sang "On the Amazon" from exactly where he had left off. Don Heckman reported the bomb scare in his review for "The New York Times" titled "Don McLean Survives Two Obstacles."
The fourth album "Playin' Favorites" was a top-40 hit in the UK in 1973 and included the Irish folk classic, "Mountains of Mourne" and Buddy Holly's "Everyday", a live rendition of which returned McLean to the UK Singles Chart. McLean said "The last album ("Don McLean") was a study in depression whereas the new one ("Playin' Favorites") is almost the quintessence of optimism."
The 1974 album "Homeless Brother", produced by Joel Dorn, was McLean's final studio recording for United Artists. The album featured fine New York session musicians, including Ralph McDonald on percussion, Hugh McCracken on guitar and a guest appearance by Yusef Lateef on flute. The Persuasions sang the background vocals on "Crying in the Chapel", and Cissy Houston provided a backing vocal on "La La Love You". The album's title song was inspired by Jack Kerouac's book "Lonesome Traveler", in which Kerouac tells the story of America's "homeless brothers" or hobos. The song features background vocals by Pete Seeger.
The song "The Legend of Andrew McCrew" was based on an article published in "The New York Times" concerning a black Dallas hobo named Anderson McCrew who was killed when he leapt from a moving train. No one claimed him, so a carnival took his body, mummified it, and toured all over the South with him, calling him "The Famous Mummy Man." McLean's song inspired radio station WGN in Chicago to tell the story and give the song airplay in order to raise money for a headstone for McCrew's grave. Their campaign was successful, and McCrew's body was exhumed and buried in the Lincoln Cemetery in Dallas. The tombstone had an inscription with words from the fourth verse of McLean's song:
What a way to live a life, and what a way to die
Left to live a living death with no one left to cry
A petrified amazement, a wonder beyond worth
A man who found more life in death than life gave him at birth
Joel Dorn later collaborated on the McLean career retrospective "", released in 2005 on Dorn's label, Hyena Records. In 2006, Dorn reflected on working with McLean:Of the more than 200 studio albums I've produced in the past 40 plus years, there is a handful; maybe 15 or so that I can actually listen to from top to bottom. "Homeless Brother" is one of them. It accomplished everything I set out to do. And it did so because it was a true collaboration. Don brought so much to the project that all I really had to do was capture what he did, and complement it properly when necessary.
In 1977 a brief liaison with Arista Records that yielded the album "Prime Time", and in October 1978, the single "It Doesn't Matter Anymore". This was a track from the album "Chain Lightning" that should have been the second of four with Arista. McLean had started recording in Nashville, Tennessee, with Elvis Presley's backing singers, the Jordanaires, and many of Presley's musicians. However the Arista deal broke down following artistic disagreements between McLean and the Arista chief, Clive Davis. Consequently, McLean was left without a record contract in the United States, but through continuing deals, "Chain Lightning" was released by EMI in Europe and by Festival Records in Australia.
In April 1980, the Roy Orbison song "Crying" from the album began picking up airplay on Dutch radio stations and McLean was called to Europe to appear on several important musical variety shows to plug the song and support its release as a single by EMI. The song achieved number 1 status in the Netherlands first, followed by the UK and then Australia.
McLean's number 1 successes in Europe and Australia led to a new deal in the United States with Millennium Records, which issued "Chain Lightning" two and a half years after it had been recorded in Nashville and two years after its release in Europe. It charted on February 14, 1981, and reached number 28, and "Crying" climbed to number 5 on the pop singles chart. Orbison himself thought that McLean's version was the best interpretation he'd ever heard of one of his songs. Orbison thought McLean did a better job than he did and even went so far as to say that the voice of Don McLean is one of the great instruments of 20th-century America. According to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, "McLean's voice could cut through steel - he is a very pure singer and he's up there with the best of them. He's a very talented singer and songwriter and he deserves his success."
McLean had further chart successes in the United States in the early 1980s with "Since I Don't Have You", a new recording of "Castles in the Air" and "It's Just the Sun". In 1987, the release of the country-based album" Love Tracks" gave rise to the hit singles "Love in My Heart" (a top-10 in Australia), "You Can't Blame the Train" (U.S. country number 49), and "Eventually". The latter two songs were written by Terri Sharp. In 1991, EMI reissued "American Pie" as a single in the United Kingdom, and McLean performed on "Top of the Pops". In 1992, previously unreleased songs became available on "Favorites and Rarities", and "Don McLean Classics" featured new studio recordings of "Vincent" and "American Pie".
McLean has continued to record new material, including "River of Love" in 1995 on Curb Records, and more recently, the albums "You've Got to Share", "Don McLean Sings Marty Robbins" and "The Western Album" for his own Don McLean Music label. "Addicted to Black" was released in May 2009.
McLean's other well-known songs include the following.
The "American Pie" album features a version of Psalm 137, titled "Babylon". The song is based on a canon by Philip Hayes and was arranged by McLean and Lee Hays (of The Weavers). "Babylon" was performed in the "Mad Men" episode of the same name despite the fact that the song would not be released until 10 years after the time in which the episode is set.
In 1981, McLean had an international number one hit with a version of the Roy Orbison classic "Crying". It was only after the record became a success overseas that it was released in the United States. The single hit reached number 5 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in 1981. Orbison himself once described McLean as "the voice of the century", and in a subsequent re-recording of the song, Orbison incorporated elements of McLean's version.
For the 1982 animated cult movie "The Flight of Dragons", produced by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr., McLean sang the opening theme. However, no soundtrack has ever been released. Another hit song associated with McLean (though never recorded by him) is "Killing Me Softly with His Song", which was inspired by Lori Lieberman after she, also a singer-songwriter, saw him singing his composition "Empty Chairs" in concert. Afterwards she shared it with her manager Norman Gimbel, who had long been searching for a way to use a phrase he had copied from a novel translated from Spanish, "killing me softly with his blues". Gimbel passed the lyrics to his songwriting partner Charles Fox who composed the music to "Killing Me Softly with His Song". Lieberman recorded the song and released it in 1972. This initial version was heard by Roberta Flack who recorded it with slight changes to create a number one hit. Two decades later it was recorded by the Fugees who had another hit.
McLean's albums did not match the commercial success of "American Pie", but he became a major concert attraction in the United States and overseas. His repertoire included old concert hall numbers and the catalogues of singers such as Buddy Holly and Frank Sinatra. The years spent playing gigs in small clubs and coffee houses in the 1960s transformed into well-paced performances. McLean's first concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York and the Albert Hall in London in 1972 were critically acclaimed.
In recent years, McLean continued to tour the United States, Canada and Europe (2011, 2012) and Australia (2013). In June 2011, McLean appeared at the Glastonbury Festival in Pilton, UK, and in 2014 at California's Stagecoach Country Music Festival.
During 2018, McLean embarked on a world tour with concerts in North America, UK, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Israel, Norway and Finland. His concert at the London Palladium was reviewed positively by "The Times":
The "Jerusalem Post" noted that "McLean was the consummate professional in presenting his master class of the Great American Songbook" in their review of his Tel Aviv concert, June 2018
Don McLean's alma mater, Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, conferred an honorary doctorate on him in 2001. McLean has since been vocal in his criticism of the College: "Iona was, in my day, a college for the average student who wanted to go home after class. The educational experience was perfect for me. I loved the small Greek revival style campus buildings and I got to put on little shows in Doorley Hall auditorium. Since those days, the Irish Christian Brothers have been virtually destroyed by the disgusting behavior of many in their order as charges of mass child molestation have destroyed their ranks. No punishment is harsh enough when you think of trusting Catholic parents giving their children over to these cynical monsters. I am very disappointed in the Irish Christian Brothers and Iona College."
In February 2002, "American Pie" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2004, McLean was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Garth Brooks presented the award and said "Don McLean: his work, like the man himself, is very deep and very compassionate. His pop anthem 'American Pie' is a cultural phenomenon".
Two years later, Brooks repaid the favor by appearing as a guest (with Nanci Griffith) on McLean's first American TV special, broadcast as the PBS program "Starry Starry Night". A month later, McLean wound up the 20th century by performing "American Pie" at the Lincoln Memorial Gala in Washington D.C.
The biography "The Don McLean Story: Killing Us Softly With His Songs" was published in 2007. Biographer Alan Howard conducted extensive interviews for this, the only book-length biography of the often reclusive McLean to date.
In February 2012 McLean won the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Life Time Achievement award.
In March 2012, the PBS network broadcast a feature-length documentary about the life and music of McLean called "Don McLean: American Troubadour" produced by four-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Jim Brown.
McLean is one of the primary influences on the UK singer-songwriter Jake Bugg, who said McLean's song "Vincent" was "the first song I liked" after hearing it on an episode of "The Simpsons". He devoured McLean's back catalog and then delved into the artists that inspired McLean, including Buddy Holly and the Weavers. Tupac Shakur also cited McLean's "Vincent" as a personal inspiration.
McLean is credited as the writer of Drake's song "Doing It Wrong", featuring Stevie Wonder. The song includes lyrics from two McLean compositions – "The Wrong Thing to Do" and "When a Good Thing Goes Bad" – both of which were featured on his 1977 album "Prime Time".
In March 2017, McLean's single "American Pie" was designated an "aural treasure" by the Library of Congress, "worthy of preservation" in the National Recording Registry "as part of America’s patrimony". In 1991, a re-issue of "American Pie" reached the UK top 20 singles chart and in July 2017, "American Pie" peaked at number 6 on the "Billboard" Rock Digital Songs Sales chart, nearly 50 years after its first release.
In May 2019, the UCLA Student Alumni Association awarded McLean its George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement. However, the award was rescinded before it was formally bestowed, because of McLean being convicted of domestic abuse. In response, McLean issued the following statement: "UCLA awarded this lifetime achievement award and then took it back because you found out about my squabble with my ex-wife. This has been all over the Internet for three years. Are you people morons? This is settled law. Maybe I need to give you some bribe money to grease the college wheels? I am guilty of nothing to do with assault and you had better make that clear. We live in a dark age of accusation and not law."
On November 7, 2019, McLean returned to New Rochelle to view a new mural depicting a likeness of his younger self, with lyrics from "American Pie", on the side of a building on the corner of 134 North Avenue and Bonnefoy Place, painted by artist Loic Ercolessi for a non-profit organization, Street Art for Mankind. The mural includes the likeness of singer/songwriter Alicia Keys, with lyrics to the song "Empire State of Mind", which she performed with Jay-Z.
Throughout McLean's career artists including Garth Brooks, Madonna, Drake, Josh Groban and others have recorded his songs. At a ceremony in October 2019, plaques certified by the Recording Industry Association of America for gold, platinum, and multi-platinum sales in the United States as well as presentations from Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom were bestowed on McLean. He said: "As a songwriter your songs are like your children, and you are hopeful everyone loves them as much as you do, but rarely is that the case. I am so grateful that songs I have written have touched so many lives and have been recorded by so many great artists."
McLean was raised in the Catholic faith of his mother, Elizabeth McLean; his father, Donald McLean, was a Protestant. When McLean was 15, his father died months after their only vacation to Washington D.C.
Don McLean has been married twice, both marriages ending in divorce. His first wife was Carol Sauvion, of Philadelphia, who went on to win an Emmy and Peabody Award for her PBS television series "Craft in America". They were married from 1969 to 1976 and they had no children. His second wife was Patrisha Shnier McLean, of Montreal, Canada, from 1987 to 2016. They have two children— Jackie and Wyatt —and two grandchildren, Rosa and Mya.
The end of the marriage saw McLean arrested and charged with misdemeanor domestic violence stemming from an incident that occurred at his home in Camden, Maine. No other details from the incident were reported. Originally charged with six misdemeanors, McLean pleaded guilty to four as part of a plea agreement. One of the four charges, domestic violence assault, was dismissed. For the remaining three McLean paid around $3,000 in fines and was not sentenced to any jail time. McLean said that it had been “hard emotional times for my wife, my children and me...the very painful breakdown of an almost 30-year relationship. Our hearts are broken and we must carry on."
McLean is an ambassador for Teen Cancer America and performed at the Teen Cancer America and UCLA Health fundraising Backyard Concert in 2018. During the show, McLean sang a duet of his song "Vincent" with Ed Sheeran. The Don McLean Foundation is a charity setup by McLean to be funded by all his income in perpetuity. Its headquarters is based at Lakeview, the Don McLean Maine residence, and it will serve as a center for fundraisers and conferences as well as a nature preserve. Organizations that support the needy in the State of Maine and throughout the United States will be beneficiaries. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8987 |
DirkJan
DirkJan is a Dutch comic strip series, created in 1989 by Dutch author and artist Mark Retera. It is also the name of its main character. The series is a gag-a-day comic.
DirkJan is a loser who stumbles through life in mostly three-panel gag-a-day comic strips. He started out in 1989 as a student at the current Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where he lived in a typical student house with all the stereotypical side-kicks, such as the frat boy, the beer drinker, the bossy girl who checks if everybody keeps to the house rules, and the tramps who use the heated shared hallway to stay the night. Early DirkJans contained many references to the student life of Nijmegen.
DirkJan was first published in "Critic", the magazine for the local union of psychology students. It then moved on to monthly publication in the student magazine of Nijmegen (Algemeen Nijmeegs Studentenblad, ANS). DirkJan became known nationally when the then only commercial comics magazine of the Netherlands SjoSji (now defunct) started publishing the strip.
With the last move, the nature of the strip changed. Most of the student side-kicks got cancelled and DirkJan left university, first for jail (DJ is a notorious Kabouter abuser) and then to wander the globe and indeed space.
As of November 2016, there are 22 DirkJan albums, tentatively named 'DirkJan 1' through 'DirkJan 22'. Several newspapers in the Netherlands publish the comic in their daily edition.
The amateur comics magazine Iris (1990–1995) republished a number of DirkJan comics, some of which were refused for publication in SjoSji. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8992 |
Duck Hunt
In "Duck Hunt", players use the NES Zapper in combination with a CRT television to shoot ducks that appear on the screen. The ducks appear one or two at a time, and the player is given three shots to shoot them down. The player receives points upon shooting each duck. If the player shoots the required number of ducks in a single round, the player will advance to the next round; otherwise, the player will receive a game over.
The game initially received few reviews but was given mild critical praise. Prior to the NES version, Nintendo also made a "Duck Hunt" game based on Laser Clay Shooting System released in 1976.
Beginning with the nationwide roll-out of the NES in 1986, "Duck Hunt" was one of several titles Nintendo included as a pack-in game with some of its releases. The initial Deluxe Set included "Duck Hunt" and "Gyromite". The later Action Set was packaged with "Duck Hunt" and "Super Mario Bros.", which was the pack-in for an upgraded Basic Set; unlike with those releases, Nintendo opted to place both games on one cartridge as opposed to having separate individual cartridges. The last NES release to include "Duck Hunt" as a pack-in was the Power Set, which came with the Power Pad; for that particular release, the multicart added "World Class Track Meet" as a third selectable game with "Duck Hunt" and "Super Mario Bros." The game was released as a Virtual Console title for the Wii U in 2014.
"Duck Hunt" is a shooter game in which the objective is to shoot moving targets on the television screen in mid-flight. The game is played from a first-person perspective and requires the NES Zapper light gun, which the player aims and fires at the screen. It also requires a CRT television screen since the Zapper gun will not work with LCD or HDTV's. Each round consists of a total of ten targets to shoot. Depending on the game mode the player selects prior to beginning play, one or two targets will appear on the screen at any given time, and the player has three attempts to hit them before they disappear.
If the player fails to shoot any of the ducks, the dog will laugh, and the game is over.
The player is required to successfully shoot a minimum number of targets in order to advance to the next round. Therefore, failure will result directly in a game over. The difficulty increases as the player advances to higher rounds; targets will move faster, and the minimum number of targets to shoot will increase. The player receives points upon shooting a target and will also receive bonus points for shooting all ten targets in a single round. "Duck Hunt" keeps track of the players' highest score for all games played in a single session; it is lost, however, upon shutting the game off.
"Duck Hunt" has three different game modes to choose from. In "Game A" and "Game B", the targets are flying ducks in a woodland area, and in "Game C" the targets are clay pigeons that are launched away from the player's perspective into the distance. In "Game A", one duck will appear on the screen at a time while in "Game B" two ducks will appear at a time. "Game A" allows a second player to control the movement of the flying ducks by using a normal NES controller. The gameplay starts at Round 1 and may continue up to Round 99. If the player completes Round 99, he or she will advance to Round 0, which is a kill screen (in "Game A") where the game behaves erratically, such as targets that move haphazardly or do not appear at all and eventually ends.
"Duck Hunt" was released as an arcade game in the "Nintendo VS." series in 1984 as "Vs. Duck Hunt", and is included in the PlayChoice-10 arcade console. The console supports two light guns, allowing two players at once.
Gameplay consists of alternating rounds of Games B and C, with 12 ducks/targets per round instead of 10 and sometimes requires the player to shoot three ducks/targets at a time instead of two. In addition, the player is given a limited number of lives; every duck/target that is not hit costs one life. When all lives are gone, the game ends.
After every second round, a bonus stage is played in which ducks can be shot for points as they fly out of the grass. However, the hunting dog occasionally jumps out, putting himself in the line of fire and creating a distraction. If the player shoots the dog, the bonus stage immediately ends.
"Duck Hunt" is based on a 1976 electronic toy version titled "Beam Gun: Duck Hunt", part of the "Beam Gun" series. The toy version was designed by Gunpei Yokoi and Masayuki Uemura for Nintendo. Nintendo Research & Development 1 developed both "Duck Hunt" for the NES and the NES Zapper. The game was supervised by Takehiro Izushi, and was produced by Gunpei Yokoi. The music was composed by Hirokazu Tanaka, who did music for several other Nintendo games at the time. The game's music was represented in the classic games medley on the Video Games Live concert tour. Designer Hiroji Kiyotake created the graphics and characters.
"Duck Hunt" has been placed in several combination ROM cartridges. In the Action Set configuration of the NES in the late 1980s, "Duck Hunt" was included with "Super Mario Bros." This particular cartridge is found very often in the United States, due to it being included with the purchase of a NES. A Power Set was also available, which included the Action Set, the Power Pad and a 3-in-1 cartridge that included "Duck Hunt", "World Class Track Meet", and "Super Mario Bros."
"Duck Hunt" was re-released as a downloaded Virtual Console title for the Wii U console in Japan on December 24, 2014, and internationally on December 25. This version is modified to require a Wii Remote controller in place of the NES Zapper to aim and shoot targets on the screen.
Allgame called the game an "attractive but repetitive target shooter" and "utterly mindless… the game is fun for a short time, but gets old after a few rounds of play". Several user groups have rated the game positively. 1UP.com users gave it an 8.7 out of 10, and the GameSpot community gave the Mario-Duck Hunt package a 9.1 out of 10. It was rated the 150th best game made on a Nintendo System in Nintendo Power's Top 200 Games list. IGN also placed the game at number 77 on its "Top 100 NES Games of All Time" feature. Jeremy Parish of "USgamer" stated that "Duck Hunt" paired with the NES Zapper "made the NES memorable" and was one of the key factors behind the success of the NES. Parish related "Duck Hunt" to the Wii Remote of the Wii in that they made their respective consoles more approachable and reach a wider demographic.
"Duck Hunt" features a nameless non-playable hunting dog, known simply as "Dog" according to his collectable trophy in "Super Smash Bros. for Wii U", and often referred to by the media as the "Duck Hunt Dog" or the "Laughing Dog". The dog accompanies the player in the "Game A" and "Game B" modes, in which he serves to both provoke the ducks and retrieve any fallen ones. The dog is infamous and iconic for laughing at the player whenever the player fails to shoot any of the ducks on screen. The dog has been labelled as "one of the most annoying video game characters ever" by numerous gaming critics and journalists, including IGN, GamesRadar, and ScrewAttack, and many have expressed the desire to be able to shoot the dog. Both IGN and "Nintendo Power" have referred to the dog as something players "love to hate".
The dog's perceived "smugness" has helped him appear on several "best of" lists. In their lists for "Top 10 Video Game Dogs", 1UP.com placed the dog seventh, praising his confidence for "laughing at a frustrated human with a loaded rifle", while GameSpy placed the dog in tenth. GameDaily and Official Nintendo Magazine have included the dog in their "Greatest Video Game Moments" lists. Brian Crecente of Kotaku listed him as one of his favorite video game dogs, stating that the dog's character design reminded him of Tex Avery cartoons. Video game developer Mastiff referenced the dog in promoting their video game "Remington Great American Bird Hunt", stating that Rockford, a dog in the game, will never laugh at players for missing the ducks.
UGO.com listed the ability to kill the dog as one of the best video game urban legends, stating that it is one of the few video game urban legends based in actual truth, since players could shoot the dog in the arcade "Vs. Duck Hunt". The dog makes a cameo appearance in the NES game "Barker Bill's Trick Shooting" (another Zapper game) and he can be shot. In "Wii Play" (2006) and its sequel "" (2011) some elements from "Duck Hunt" and "Hogan's Alley" are included in the mini-games "Shooting Range" and "Trigger Twist" in which some of the various targets are ducks and cans.
In the 2014 fighting games "Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS" and "Wii U", the dog and one of the ducks appear collectively as playable characters under the name "Duck Hunt", or "Duck Hunt Duo" in PAL releases. Masahiro Sakurai, the creator and director of the "Super Smash Bros." series, stated that "Duck Hunt"s commercial success as "the most-sold shooting game in the world" was one of the primary reasons for the team's inclusion. In the games, the Duck Hunt team utilizes multiple attacks related to the NES Zapper, including throwing clay pigeons; kicking an explosive version of the can from "Hogan's Alley"; being able to summon the cast of "Wild Gunman" to fire at opponents with their guns; or comically dodging shots fired at opponents from the Zapper. The games also feature an unlockable "Duck Hunt"-themed stage. Both the Duck Hunt team and stage reappear in "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate", and the team is featured in the June 2019 trailer announcing Banjo and Kazooie as downloadable content for "Ultimate".
In the 2015 Sony film "Pixels", the dog has a cameo appearance, where he is given as a "trophy" by the aliens when Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler) and Ludlow Lamonsoff (Josh Gad) defeat the creatures of the video game "Centipede". He stays in the house of an old woman in London.
The premise for the psychological horror VR game "Duck Season" by Stress Level Zero is based in part on "Duck Hunt". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8993 |
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson (December 29, 1808 July 31, 1875) was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. He assumed the presidency as he was vice president at the time of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnson was a Democrat who ran with Lincoln on the National Union ticket, coming to office as the Civil War concluded. He favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union without protection for the former slaves. This led to conflict with the Republican-dominated Congress, culminating in his impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1868. He was acquitted in the Senate by one vote. His main accomplishment as president was the Alaska purchase.
Johnson was born in poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina and never attended school. He was apprenticed as a tailor and worked in several frontier towns before settling in Greeneville, Tennessee. He served as alderman and mayor there before being elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1835. After brief service in the Tennessee Senate, Johnson was elected to the House of Representatives in 1843, where he served five two-year terms. He became governor of Tennessee for four years, and was elected by the legislature to the Senate in 1857. In his congressional service, he sought passage of the Homestead Bill which was enacted soon after he left his Senate seat in 1862. Southern slave states seceded to form the Confederate States of America, including Tennessee, but Johnson remained firmly with the Union. He was the only sitting senator from a Confederate state who did not resign his seat upon learning of his state's secession. In 1862, Lincoln appointed him as military governor of Tennessee after most of it had been retaken. In 1864, Johnson was a logical choice as running mate for Lincoln, who wished to send a message of national unity in his re-election campaign; their ticket easily won. Johnson was sworn in as vice president in March 1865 and gave a rambling speech, after which he secluded himself to avoid public ridicule. Six weeks later, the assassination of Lincoln made him president.
Johnson implemented his own form of Presidential Reconstruction, a series of proclamations directing the seceded states to hold conventions and elections to reform their civil governments. Southern states returned many of their old leaders and passed Black Codes to deprive the freedmen of many civil liberties, but Congressional Republicans refused to seat legislators from those states and advanced legislation to overrule the Southern actions. Johnson vetoed their bills, and Congressional Republicans overrode him, setting a pattern for the remainder of his presidency. Johnson opposed the Fourteenth Amendment which gave citizenship to former slaves. In 1866, he went on an unprecedented national tour promoting his executive policies, seeking to break Republican opposition. As the conflict grew between the branches of government, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act restricting Johnson's ability to fire Cabinet officials. He persisted in trying to dismiss Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, but ended up being impeached by the House of Representatives and narrowly avoided conviction in the Senate. He did not win the 1868 Democratic presidential nomination and left office the following year.
Johnson returned to Tennessee after his presidency and gained some vindication when he was elected to the Senate in 1875, making him the only former president to serve in the Senate. He died five months into his term. Johnson's strong opposition to federally guaranteed rights for black Americans is widely criticized. He is regarded by many historians as one of the worst presidents in American history.
Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808, to Jacob Johnson (1778–1812) and Mary ("Polly") McDonough (1783–1856), a laundress. He was of English, Scots-Irish, and Irish ancestry. He had a brother William, four years his senior, and an older sister Elizabeth, who died in childhood. Johnson's birth in a two-room shack was a political asset in the mid-19th century, and he would frequently remind voters of his humble origins. Jacob Johnson was a poor man, as had been his father, William Johnson, but he became town constable of Raleigh before marrying and starting a family. Both Jacob and Mary were illiterate, and had worked as tavern servants, while Johnson never attended school and grew up in poverty. Jacob died of an apparent heart attack while ringing the town bell, shortly after rescuing three drowning men, when his son Andrew was three. Polly Johnson worked as a washerwoman and became the sole support of her family. Her occupation was then looked down on, as it often took her into other homes unaccompanied. Since Andrew did not resemble either of his siblings, there are rumors that he may have been fathered by another man. Polly Johnson eventually remarried to a man named Turner Doughtry, who was as poor as she was.
Johnson's mother apprenticed her son William to a tailor, James Selby. Andrew also became an apprentice in Selby's shop at age ten and was legally bound to serve until his 21st birthday. Johnson lived with his mother for part of his service, and one of Selby's employees taught him rudimentary literacy skills. His education was augmented by citizens who would come to Selby's shop to read to the tailors as they worked. Even before he became an apprentice, Johnson came to listen. The readings caused a lifelong love of learning, and one of his biographers, Annette Gordon-Reed, suggests that Johnson, later a gifted public speaker, learned the art as he threaded needles and cut cloth.
Johnson was not happy at James Selby's, and after about five years, both he and his brother ran away. Selby responded by placing a reward for their return: "Ten Dollars Reward. Ran away from the subscriber, two apprentice boys, legally bound, named William and Andrew Johnson ... [payment] to any person who will deliver said apprentices to me in Raleigh, or I will give the above reward for Andrew Johnson alone." The brothers went to Carthage, North Carolina, where Andrew Johnson worked as a tailor for several months. Fearing he would be arrested and returned to Raleigh, Johnson moved to Laurens, South Carolina. He found work quickly, met his first love, Mary Wood, and made her a quilt as a gift. However, she rejected his marriage proposal. He returned to Raleigh, hoping to buy out his apprenticeship, but could not come to terms with Selby. Unable to stay in Raleigh, where he risked being apprehended for abandoning Selby, he decided to move west.
Johnson left North Carolina for Tennessee, traveling mostly on foot. After a brief period in Knoxville, he moved to Mooresville, Alabama. He then worked as a tailor in Columbia, Tennessee, but was called back to Raleigh by his mother and stepfather, who saw limited opportunities there and who wished to emigrate west. Johnson and his party traveled through the Blue Ridge Mountains to Greeneville, Tennessee. Andrew Johnson fell in love with the town at first sight, and when he became prosperous purchased the land where he had first camped and planted a tree in commemoration.
In Greeneville, Johnson established a successful tailoring business in the front of his home. In 1827, at the age of 18, he married 16-year-old Eliza McCardle, the daughter of a local shoemaker. The pair were married by Justice of the Peace Mordecai Lincoln, first cousin of Thomas Lincoln, whose son would become president. The Johnsons were married for almost 50 years and had five children: Martha (1828), Charles (1830), Mary (1832), Robert (1834), and Andrew Jr. (1852). Though she suffered from tuberculosis, Eliza supported her husband's endeavors. She taught him mathematics skills and tutored him to improve his writing. Shy and retiring by nature, Eliza Johnson usually remained in Greeneville during Johnson's political rise. She was not often seen during her husband's presidency; their daughter Martha usually served as official hostess.
Johnson's tailoring business prospered during the early years of the marriage, enabling him to hire help and giving him the funds to invest profitably in real estate. He later boasted of his talents as a tailor, "my work never ripped or gave way." He was a voracious reader. Books about famous orators aroused his interest in political dialogue, and he had private debates on the issues of the day with customers who held opposing views. He also took part in debates at Greeneville College.
In 1843, Johnson purchased his first slave, Dolly, who was 14 years old at the time. Soon after, he purchased Dolly's half-brother Sam. Dolly had three children—Liz, Florence and William. In 1857, Andrew Johnson purchased Henry, who was 13 at the time and would later accompany the Johnson family to the White House. Sam Johnson and his wife Margaret had nine children. Sam became a commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau and was known for being a proud man who negotiated the nature of his work with the Johnson family. Notably, he received some monetary compensation for his labors and negotiated with Andrew Johnson to receive a tract of land which Andrew Johnson deeded to him in 1867. Ultimately, Johnson owned at least ten slaves. He was said to have had a compassionate and familial relationship toward them.
Andrew Johnson's slaves were freed on August 8, 1863. A year later, all of Tennessee's slaves were freed. As a sign of appreciation, Andrew Johnson was given a watch by the newly-emancipated slaves inscribed with "…for his untiring energy in the cause of Freedom."
Johnson helped organize a mechanics' (working men's) ticket in the 1829 Greeneville municipal election. He was elected town alderman, along with his friends Blackston McDannel and Mordecai Lincoln. Following the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion, a state convention was called to pass a new constitution, including provisions to disenfranchise free people of color. The convention also wanted to reform real estate tax rates, and provide ways of funding improvements to Tennessee's infrastructure. The constitution was submitted for a public vote, and Johnson spoke widely for its adoption; the successful campaign provided him with statewide exposure. On January 4, 1834, his fellow aldermen elected him mayor of Greeneville.
In 1835, Johnson made a bid for election to the "floater" seat which Greene County shared with neighboring Washington County in the Tennessee House of Representatives. According to his biographer, Hans L. Trefousse, Johnson "demolished" the opposition in debate and won the election with almost a two to one margin. During his Greeneville days, Johnson joined the Tennessee Militia as a member of the 90th Regiment. He attained the rank of colonel, though while an enrolled member, Johnson was fined for an unknown offense. Afterwards, he was often addressed or referred to by his rank.
In his first term in the legislature, which met in the state capital of Nashville, Johnson did not consistently vote with either the Democratic or the newly formed Whig Party, though he revered President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat and fellow Tennessean. The major parties were still determining their core values and policy proposals, with the party system in a state of flux. The Whig Party had organized in opposition to Jackson, fearing the concentration of power in the Executive Branch of the government; Johnson differed from the Whigs as he opposed more than minimal government spending and spoke against aid for the railroads, while his constituents hoped for improvements in transportation. After Brookins Campbell and the Whigs defeated Johnson for reelection in 1837, Johnson would not lose another race for thirty years. In 1839, he sought to regain his seat, initially as a Whig, but when another candidate sought the Whig nomination, he ran as a Democrat and was elected. From that time he supported the Democratic party and built a powerful political machine in Greene County. Johnson became a strong advocate of the Democratic Party, noted for his oratory, and in an era when public speaking both informed the public and entertained it, people flocked to hear him.
In 1840, Johnson was selected as a presidential elector for Tennessee, giving him more statewide publicity. Although Democratic President Martin Van Buren was defeated by former Ohio senator William Henry Harrison, Johnson was instrumental in keeping Tennessee and Greene County in the Democratic column. He was elected to the Tennessee Senate in 1841, where he served a two-year term. He had achieved financial success in his tailoring business, but sold it to concentrate on politics. He had also acquired additional real estate, including a larger home and a farm (where his mother and stepfather took residence), and among his assets numbered eight or nine slaves.
Having served in both houses of the state legislature, Johnson saw election to Congress as the next step in his political career. He engaged in a number of political maneuvers to gain Democratic support, including the displacement of the Whig postmaster in Greeneville, and defeated Jonesborough lawyer John A. Aiken by 5,495 votes to 4,892. In Washington, he joined a new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Johnson advocated for the interests of the poor, maintained an anti-abolitionist stance, argued for only limited spending by the government and opposed protective tariffs. With Eliza remaining in Greeneville, Congressman Johnson shunned social functions in favor of study in the Library of Congress. Although a fellow Tennessee Democrat, James K. Polk, was elected president in 1844, and Johnson had campaigned for him, the two men had difficult relations, and President Polk refused some of his patronage suggestions.
Johnson believed, as did many Southern Democrats, that the Constitution protected private property, including slaves, and thus prohibited the federal and state governments from abolishing slavery. He won a second term in 1845 against William G. Brownlow, presenting himself as the defender of the poor against the aristocracy. In his second term, Johnson supported the Polk administration's decision to fight the Mexican War, seen by some Northerners as an attempt to gain territory to expand slavery westward, and opposed the Wilmot Proviso, a proposal to ban slavery in any territory gained from Mexico. He introduced for the first time his Homestead Bill, to grant to people willing to settle the land and gain title to it. This issue was especially important to Johnson because of his own humble beginnings.
In the presidential election of 1848, the Democrats split over the slavery issue, and abolitionists formed the Free Soil Party, with former president Van Buren as their nominee. Johnson supported the Democratic candidate, former Michigan senator Lewis Cass. With the party split, Whig nominee General Zachary Taylor was easily victorious, and carried Tennessee. Johnson's relations with Polk remained poor; the President recorded of his final New Year's reception in 1849 that
Johnson, due to national interest in new railroad construction and in response to the need for better transportation in his own district, also supported government assistance for the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad.
In his campaign for a fourth term, Johnson concentrated on three issues: slavery, homesteads and judicial elections. He defeated his opponent, Nathaniel G. Taylor, in August 1849, with a greater margin of victory than in previous campaigns. When the House convened in December, the party division caused by the Free Soil Party precluded the formation of the majority needed to elect a Speaker. Johnson proposed adoption of a rule allowing election of a Speaker by a plurality; some weeks later others took up a similar proposal, and Democrat Howell Cobb was elected.
Once the Speaker election had concluded and Congress was ready to conduct legislative business, the issue of slavery took center stage. Northerners sought to admit California, a free state, to the Union. Kentucky's Henry Clay introduced in the Senate a series of resolutions, the Compromise of 1850, to admit California and pass legislation sought by each side. Johnson voted for all the provisions except for the abolition of slavery in the nation's capital. He pressed resolutions for constitutional amendments to provide for popular election of senators (then elected by state legislatures) and of the president (chosen by the Electoral College), and limiting the tenure of federal judges to 12 years. These were all defeated.
A group of Democrats nominated Landon Carter Haynes to oppose Johnson as he sought a fifth term; the Whigs were so pleased with the internecine battle among the Democrats in the general election that they did not nominate a candidate of their own. The campaign included fierce debates: Johnson's main issue was the passage of the Homestead Bill; Haynes contended it would facilitate abolition. Johnson won the election by more than 1600 votes. Though he was not enamored of the party's presidential nominee in 1852, former New Hampshire senator Franklin Pierce, Johnson campaigned for him. Pierce was elected, but he failed to carry Tennessee. In 1852, Johnson managed to get the House to pass his Homestead Bill, but it failed in the Senate. The Whigs had gained control of the Tennessee legislature, and, under the leadership of Gustavus Henry, redrew the boundaries of Johnson's First District to make it a safe seat for their party. The "Nashville Union" termed this "Henry-mandering"; lamented Johnson, "I have no political future."
If Johnson considered retiring from politics upon deciding not to seek reelection, he soon changed his mind. His political friends began to maneuver to get him the nomination for governor. The Democratic convention unanimously named him, though some party members were not happy at his selection. The Whigs had won the past two gubernatorial elections, and still controlled the legislature. That party nominated Henry, making the "Henry-mandering" of the First District an immediate issue. The two men debated in county seats the length of Tennessee before the meetings were called off two weeks before the August 1853 election due to illness in Henry's family. Johnson won the election by 63,413 votes to 61,163; some votes for him were cast in return for his promise to support Whig Nathaniel Taylor for his old seat in Congress.
Tennessee's governor had little power: Johnson could propose legislation but not veto it, and most appointments were made by the Whig-controlled legislature. Nevertheless, the office was a "bully pulpit" that allowed him to publicize himself and his political views. He succeeded in getting the appointments he wanted in return for his endorsement of John Bell, a Whig, for one of the state's U.S. Senate seats. In his first biennial speech, Johnson urged simplification of the state judicial system, abolition of the Bank of Tennessee, and establishment of an agency to provide uniformity in weights and measures; the last was passed. Johnson was critical of the Tennessee common school system and suggested funding be increased via taxes, either statewide or county by county—a mixture of the two was passed. Reforms carried out during Johnson's time as governor included the foundation of the State's public library (making books available to all) and its first public school system, and the initiation of regular state fairs to benefit craftsmen and farmers.
Although the Whig Party was on its final decline nationally, it remained strong in Tennessee, and the outlook for Democrats there in 1855 was poor. Feeling that reelection as governor was necessary to give him a chance at the higher offices he sought, Johnson agreed to make the run. Meredith P. Gentry received the Whig nomination. A series of more than a dozen vitriolic debates ensued. The issues in the campaign were slavery, the prohibition of alcohol, and the nativist positions of the Know Nothing Party. Johnson favored the first, but opposed the others. Gentry was more equivocal on the alcohol question, and had gained the support of the Know Nothings, a group Johnson portrayed as a secret society. Johnson was unexpectedly victorious, albeit with a narrower margin than in 1853.
When the presidential election of 1856 approached, Johnson hoped to be nominated; some Tennessee county conventions designated him a "favorite son". His position that the best interests of the Union were served by slavery in some areas made him a practical compromise candidate for president. He was never a major contender; the nomination fell to former Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan. Though he was not impressed by either, Johnson campaigned for Buchanan and his running mate, John C. Breckinridge, who were elected.
Johnson decided not to seek a third term as governor, with an eye towards election to the U.S. Senate. In 1857, while returning from Washington, his train derailed, causing serious damage to his right arm. This injury would trouble him in the years to come.
The victors in the 1857 state legislative campaign would, once they convened in October, elect a United States Senator. Former Whig governor William B. Campbell wrote to his uncle, "The great anxiety of the Whigs is to elect a majority in the legislature so as to defeat Andrew Johnson for senator. Should the Democrats have the majority, he will certainly be their choice, and there is no man living to whom the Americans and Whigs have as much antipathy as Johnson." The governor spoke widely in the campaign, and his party won the gubernatorial race and control of the legislature. Johnson's final address as governor gave him the chance to influence his electors, and he made proposals popular among Democrats. Two days later the legislature elected him to the Senate. The opposition was appalled, with the Richmond "Whig" newspaper referring to him as "the vilest radical and most unscrupulous demagogue in the Union".
Johnson gained high office due to his proven record as a man popular among the small farmers and self-employed tradesmen who made up much of Tennessee's electorate. He called them the "plebeians"; he was less popular among the planters and lawyers who led the state Democratic Party, but none could match him as a vote-getter. After his death, one Tennessee voter wrote of him, "Johnson was always the same to everyone ... the honors heaped upon him did not make him forget to be kind to the humblest citizen." Always seen in impeccably tailored clothing, he cut an impressive figure, and had the stamina to endure lengthy campaigns with daily travel over bad roads leading to another speech or debate. Mostly denied the party's machinery, he relied on a network of friends, advisers, and contacts. One friend, Hugh Douglas, stated in a letter to him, "you have been in the way of our would be great men for a long time. At heart many of us never wanted you to be Governor only none of the rest of us Could have been elected at the time and we only wanted to use you. Then we did not want you to go to the Senate but "the people would send you"."
The new senator took his seat when Congress convened in December 1857 (the term of his predecessor, James C. Jones, had expired in March). He came to Washington as usual without his wife and family; Eliza would visit Washington only once during Johnson's first time as senator, in 1860. Johnson immediately set about introducing the Homestead Bill in the Senate, but as most senators who supported it were Northern (many associated with the newly founded Republican Party), the matter became caught up in suspicions over the slavery issue. Southern senators felt that those who took advantage of the provisions of the Homestead Bill were more likely to be Northern non-slaveholders. The issue of slavery had been complicated by the Supreme Court's ruling earlier in the year in "Dred Scott v. Sandford" that slavery could not be prohibited in the territories. Johnson, a slaveholding senator from a Southern state, made a major speech in the Senate the following May in an attempt to convince his colleagues that the Homestead Bill and slavery were not incompatible. Nevertheless, Southern opposition was key to defeating the legislation, 30–22. In 1859, it failed on a procedural vote when Vice President Breckinridge broke a tie against the bill, and in 1860, a watered-down version passed both houses, only to be vetoed by Buchanan at the urging of Southerners. Johnson continued his opposition to spending, chairing a committee to control it.
He argued against funding to build infrastructure in Washington, D.C., stating that it was unfair to expect state citizens to pay for the city's streets, even if it was the seat of government. He opposed spending money for troops to put down the revolt by the Mormons in Utah Territory, arguing for temporary volunteers as the United States should not have a standing army.
In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown and sympathizers raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia). Tensions in Washington between pro- and anti-slavery forces increased greatly. Johnson gave a major speech in the Senate in December, decrying Northerners who would endanger the Union by seeking to outlaw slavery. The Tennessee senator stated that "all men are created equal" from the Declaration of Independence did not apply to African Americans, since the Constitution of Illinois contained that phrase—and that document barred voting by African Americans. Johnson, by this time, was a wealthy man who owned a few household slaves, 14 slaves, according to the 1860 Federal Census.
Johnson hoped that he would be a compromise candidate for the presidential nomination as the Democratic Party tore itself apart over the slavery question. Busy with the Homestead Bill during the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, he sent two of his sons and his chief political adviser to represent his interests in the backroom deal-making. The convention deadlocked, with no candidate able to gain the required two-thirds vote, but the sides were too far apart to consider Johnson as a compromise. The party split, with Northerners backing Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas while Southerners, including Johnson, supported Vice President Breckinridge for president. With former Tennessee senator John Bell running a fourth-party candidacy and further dividing the vote, the Republican Party elected its first president, former Illinois representative Abraham Lincoln. The election of Lincoln, known to be against the spread of slavery, was unacceptable to many in the South. Although secession from the Union had not been an issue in the campaign, talk of it began in the Southern states.
Johnson took to the Senate floor after the election, giving a speech well received in the North, "I will not give up this government ... No; I intend to stand by it ... and I invite every man who is a patriot to ... rally around the altar of our common country ... and swear by our God, and all that is sacred and holy, that the Constitution shall be saved, and the Union preserved." As Southern senators announced they would resign if their states seceded, he reminded Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis that if Southerners would only hold to their seats, the Democrats would control the Senate, and could defend the South's interests against any infringement by Lincoln. Gordon-Reed points out that while Johnson's belief in an indissoluble Union was sincere, he had alienated Southern leaders, including Davis, who would soon be the president of the Confederate States of America, formed by the seceding states. If the Tennessean had backed the Confederacy, he would have had small influence in its government.
Johnson returned home when his state took up the issue of secession. His successor as governor, Isham G. Harris, and the legislature organized a referendum on whether to have a constitutional convention to authorize secession; when that failed, they put the question of leaving the Union to a popular vote. Despite threats on Johnson's life, and actual assaults, he campaigned against both questions, sometimes speaking with a gun on the lectern before him. Although Johnson's eastern region of Tennessee was largely against secession, the second referendum passed, and in June 1861, Tennessee joined the Confederacy. Believing he would be killed if he stayed, Johnson fled through the Cumberland Gap, where his party was in fact shot at. He left his wife and family in Greeneville.
As the only member from a seceded state to remain in the Senate and the most prominent Southern Unionist, Johnson had Lincoln's ear in the early months of the war. With most of Tennessee in Confederate hands, Johnson spent congressional recesses in Kentucky and Ohio, trying in vain to convince any Union commander who would listen to conduct an operation into East Tennessee.
Johnson's first tenure in the Senate came to a conclusion in March 1862 when Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee. Much of the central and western portions of that seceded state had been recovered. Although some argued that civil government should simply resume once the Confederates were defeated in an area, Lincoln chose to use his power as commander in chief to appoint military governors over Union-controlled Southern regions. The Senate quickly confirmed Johnson's nomination along with the rank of brigadier general. In response, the Confederates confiscated his land and his slaves, and turned his home into a military hospital. Later in 1862, after his departure from the Senate and in the absence of most Southern legislators, the Homestead Bill was finally enacted. Along with legislation for land-grant colleges and for the transcontinental railroad, the Homestead Bill has been credited with opening the American West to settlement.
As military governor, Johnson sought to eliminate rebel influence in the state. He demanded loyalty oaths from public officials, and shut down all newspapers owned by Confederate sympathizers. Much of eastern Tennessee remained in Confederate hands, and the ebb and flow of war during 1862 sometimes brought Confederate control again close to Nashville. However, the Confederates allowed his wife and family to pass through the lines to join him. Johnson undertook the defense of Nashville as well as he could, though the city was continually harassed by cavalry raids led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Relief from Union regulars did not come until General William S. Rosecrans defeated the Confederates at Murfreesboro in early 1863. Much of eastern Tennessee was captured later that year.
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, declaring freedom for all slaves in Confederate-held areas, he exempted Tennessee at Johnson's request. The proclamation increased the debate over what should become of the slaves after the war, as not all Unionists supported abolition. Johnson finally decided that slavery had to end. He wrote, "If the institution of slavery ... seeks to overthrow it [the Government], then the Government has a clear right to destroy it." He reluctantly supported efforts to enlist former slaves into the Union Army, feeling that African Americans should perform menial tasks to release white Americans to do the fighting. Nevertheless, he succeeded in recruiting 20,000 black soldiers to serve the Union.
In 1860, Lincoln's running mate had been Maine Senator Hannibal Hamlin. Vice President Hamlin had served competently, was in good health, and was willing to run again. Nevertheless, Johnson emerged as running mate for Lincoln's reelection bid in 1864.
Lincoln considered several War Democrats for the ticket in 1864, and sent an agent to sound out General Benjamin Butler as a possible running mate. In May 1864, the President dispatched General Daniel Sickles to Nashville on a fact-finding mission. Although Sickles denied he was there either to investigate or interview the military governor, Johnson biographer Hans L. Trefousse believes Sickles's trip was connected to Johnson's subsequent nomination for vice president. According to historian Albert Castel in his account of Johnson's presidency, Lincoln was impressed by Johnson's administration of Tennessee. Gordon-Reed points out that while the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket might have been considered geographically balanced in 1860, "having Johnson, the "southern" War Democrat, on the ticket sent the right message about the folly of secession and the continuing capacity for union within the country." Another factor was the desire of Secretary of State William Seward to frustrate the vice-presidential candidacy of his fellow New Yorker, former senator Daniel S. Dickinson, a War Democrat, as Seward would probably have had to yield his place if another New Yorker became vice president. Johnson, once he was told by reporters the likely purpose of Sickles' visit, was active on his own behalf, giving speeches and having his political friends work behind the scenes to boost his candidacy.
To sound a theme of unity, Lincoln in 1864 ran under the banner of the National Union Party, rather than the Republicans. At the party's convention in Baltimore in June, Lincoln was easily nominated, although there had been some talk of replacing him with a Cabinet officer or one of the more successful generals. After the convention backed Lincoln, former Secretary of War Simon Cameron offered a resolution to nominate Hamlin, but it was defeated. Johnson was nominated for vice president by C.M. Allen of Indiana with an Iowa delegate as seconder. On the first ballot, Johnson led with 200 votes to 150 for Hamlin and 108 for Dickinson. On the second ballot, Kentucky switched to vote for Johnson, beginning a stampede. Johnson was named on the second ballot with 491 votes to Hamlin's 17 and eight for Dickinson; the nomination was made unanimous. Lincoln expressed pleasure at the result, "Andy Johnson, I think, is a good man." When word reached Nashville, a crowd assembled and the military governor obliged with a speech contending his selection as a Southerner meant that the rebel states had not actually left the Union.
Although it was unusual at the time for a national candidate to actively campaign, Johnson gave a number of speeches in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. He also sought to boost his chances in Tennessee while reestablishing civil government by making the loyalty oath even more restrictive, in that voters would now have to swear they opposed making a settlement with the Confederacy. The Democratic candidate for president, George McClellan, hoped to avoid additional bloodshed by negotiation, and so the stricter loyalty oath effectively disenfranchised his supporters. Lincoln declined to override Johnson, and their ticket took the state by 25,000 votes. Congress refused to count Tennessee's electoral votes, but Lincoln and Johnson did not need them, having won in most states that had voted, and easily secured the election.
Now Vice President-elect, Johnson was anxious to complete the work of reestablishing civilian government in Tennessee, although the timetable for the election of a new governor did not allow it to take place until after Inauguration Day, March 4. He hoped to remain in Nashville to complete his task, but was told by Lincoln's advisers that he could not stay, but would be sworn in with Lincoln. In these months, Union troops finished the retaking of eastern Tennessee, including Greeneville. Just before his departure, the voters of Tennessee ratified a new constitution, abolishing slavery, on February 22, 1865. One of Johnson's final acts as military governor was to certify the results.
Johnson traveled to Washington to be sworn in, although according to Gordon-Reed, "in light of what happened on March 4, 1865, it might have been better if Johnson had stayed in Nashville." He may have been ill; Castel cited typhoid fever, though Gordon-Reed notes that there is no independent evidence for that diagnosis. On the evening of March 3, Johnson attended a party in his honor; he drank heavily. Hung over the following morning at the Capitol, he asked Vice President Hamlin for some whiskey. Hamlin produced a bottle, and Johnson took two stiff drinks, stating "I need all the strength for the occasion I can have." In the Senate Chamber, Johnson delivered a rambling address as Lincoln, the Congress, and dignitaries looked on. Almost incoherent at times, he finally meandered to a halt, whereupon Hamlin hastily swore him in as vice president. Lincoln, who had watched sadly during the debacle, then went to his own swearing-in outside the Capitol, and delivered his acclaimed Second Inaugural Address.
In the weeks after the inauguration, Johnson only presided over the Senate briefly, and hid from public ridicule at the Maryland home of a friend, Francis Preston Blair. When he did return to Washington, it was with the intent of leaving for Tennessee to reestablish his family in Greeneville. Instead, he remained after word came that General Ulysses S. Grant had captured the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, presaging the end of the war. Lincoln stated, in response to criticism of Johnson's behavior, that "I have known Andy Johnson for many years; he made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared; Andy ain't a drunkard."
On the afternoon of April 14, 1865, Lincoln and Johnson met for the first time since the inauguration. Trefousse states that Johnson wanted to "induce Lincoln not to be too lenient with traitors"; Gordon-Reed agrees.
That night, President Lincoln was shot and mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. The shooting of the President was part of a conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward the same night. Seward barely survived his wounds, while Johnson escaped attack as his would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, got drunk instead of killing the vice president. Leonard J. Farwell, a fellow boarder at the Kirkwood House, awoke Johnson with news of Lincoln's shooting at Ford's Theatre. Johnson rushed to the President's deathbed, where he remained a short time, on his return promising, "They shall suffer for this. They shall suffer for this." Lincoln died at 7:22 am the next morning; Johnson's swearing-in occurred between 10 and 11 am with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding in the presence of most of the Cabinet. Johnson's demeanor was described by the newspapers as "solemn and dignified". Some Cabinet members had last seen Johnson, apparently drunk, at the inauguration. At noon, Johnson conducted his first Cabinet meeting in the Treasury Secretary's office, and asked all members to remain in their positions.
The events of the assassination resulted in speculation, then and subsequently, concerning Johnson and what the conspirators might have intended for him. In the vain hope of having his life spared after his capture, Atzerodt spoke much about the conspiracy, but did not say anything to indicate that the plotted assassination of Johnson was merely a ruse. Conspiracy theorists point to the fact that on the day of the assassination, Booth came to the Kirkwood House and left one of his cards with Johnson's private secretary, William A. Browning. The message on it was: "Don't wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth."
Johnson presided with dignity over Lincoln's funeral ceremonies in Washington, before his predecessor's body was sent home to Springfield, Illinois, for interment. Shortly after Lincoln's death, Union General William T. Sherman reported he had, without consulting Washington, reached an armistice agreement with Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston for the surrender of Confederate forces in North Carolina in exchange for the existing state government remaining in power, with private property rights (slaves) to be respected. This did not even grant freedom to those in slavery. This was not acceptable to Johnson or the Cabinet, who sent word for Sherman to secure the surrender without making political deals, which he did. Further, Johnson placed a $100,000 bounty (equivalent to $ in ) on Confederate President Davis, then a fugitive, which gave Johnson the reputation of a man who would be tough on the South. More controversially, he permitted the execution of Mary Surratt for her part in Lincoln's assassination. Surratt was executed with three others, including Atzerodt, on July 7, 1865.
Upon taking office, Johnson faced the question of what to do with the Confederacy. President Lincoln had authorized loyalist governments in Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee as the Union came to control large parts of those states and advocated a ten percent plan that would allow elections after ten percent of the voters in any state took an oath of future loyalty to the Union. Congress considered this too lenient; its own plan, requiring a majority of voters to take the loyalty oath, passed both houses in 1864, but Lincoln pocket vetoed it.
Johnson had three goals in Reconstruction. He sought a speedy restoration of the states, on the grounds that they had never truly left the Union, and thus should again be recognized once loyal citizens formed a government. To Johnson, African-American suffrage was a delay and a distraction; it had always been a state responsibility to decide who should vote. Second, political power in the Southern states should pass from the planter class to his beloved "plebeians". Johnson feared that the freedmen, many of whom were still economically bound to their former masters, might vote at their direction. Johnson's third priority was election in his own right in 1868, a feat no one who had succeeded a deceased president had managed to accomplish, attempting to secure a Democratic anti-Congressional Reconstruction coalition in the South.
The Republicans had formed a number of factions. The Radical Republicans sought voting and other civil rights for African Americans. They believed that the freedmen could be induced to vote Republican in gratitude for emancipation, and that black votes could keep the Republicans in power and Southern Democrats, including former rebels, out of influence. They believed that top Confederates should be punished. The Moderate Republicans sought to keep the Democrats out of power at a national level, and prevent former rebels from resuming power. They were not as enthusiastic about the idea of African-American suffrage as their Radical colleagues, either because of their own local political concerns, or because they believed that the freedman would be likely to cast his vote badly. Northern Democrats favored the unconditional restoration of the Southern states. They did not support African-American suffrage, which might threaten Democratic control in the South.
Johnson was initially left to devise a Reconstruction policy without legislative intervention, as Congress was not due to meet again until December 1865. Radical Republicans told the President that the Southern states were economically in a state of chaos and urged him to use his leverage to insist on rights for freedmen as a condition of restoration to the Union. But Johnson, with the support of other officials including Seward, insisted that the franchise was a state, not a federal matter. The Cabinet was divided on the issue.
Johnson's first Reconstruction actions were two proclamations, with the unanimous backing of his Cabinet, on May 29. One recognized the Virginia government led by provisional Governor Francis Pierpont. The second provided amnesty for all ex-rebels except those holding property valued at $20,000 or more; it also appointed a temporary governor for North Carolina and authorized elections. Neither of these proclamations included provisions regarding black suffrage or freedmen's rights. The President ordered constitutional conventions in other former rebel states.
As Southern states began the process of forming governments, Johnson's policies received considerable public support in the North, which he took as unconditional backing for quick reinstatement of the South. While he received such support from the white South, he underestimated the determination of Northerners to ensure that the war had not been fought for nothing. It was important, in Northern public opinion, that the South acknowledge its defeat, that slavery be ended, and that the lot of African Americans be improved. Voting rights were less important—after all, only a handful of Northern states (mostly in New England) gave African-American men the right to vote on the same basis as whites, and in late 1865, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota voted down African-American suffrage proposals by large margins. Northern public opinion tolerated Johnson's inaction on black suffrage as an experiment, to be allowed if it quickened Southern acceptance of defeat. Instead, white Southerners felt emboldened. A number of Southern states passed Black Codes, binding African-American laborers to farms on annual contracts they could not quit, and allowing law enforcement at whim to arrest them for vagrancy and rent out their labor. Most Southerners elected to Congress were former Confederates, with the most prominent being Georgia Senator-designate and former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens. Congress assembled in early December 1865; Johnson's conciliatory annual message to them was well received. Nevertheless, Congress refused to seat the Southern legislators and established a committee to recommend appropriate Reconstruction legislation.
Northerners were outraged at the idea of unrepentant Confederate leaders, such as Stephens, rejoining the federal government at a time when emotional wounds from the war remained raw. They saw the Black Codes placing African Americans in a position barely above slavery. Republicans also feared that restoration of the Southern states would return the Democrats to power. In addition, according to David O. Stewart in his book on Johnson's impeachment, "the violence and poverty that oppressed the South would galvanize the opposition to Johnson".
Congress was reluctant to confront the President, and initially only sought to fine-tune Johnson's policies towards the South. According to Trefousse, "If there was a time when Johnson could have come to an agreement with the moderates of the Republican Party, it was the period following the return of Congress". The President was unhappy about the provocative actions of the Southern states, and about the continued control by the antebellum elite there, but made no statement publicly, believing that Southerners had a right to act as they did, even if it was unwise to do so. By late January 1866, he was convinced that winning a showdown with the Radical Republicans was necessary to his political plans – both for the success of Reconstruction and for reelection in 1868. He would have preferred that the conflict arise over the legislative efforts to enfranchise African Americans in the District of Columbia, a proposal that had been defeated overwhelmingly in an all-white referendum. A bill to accomplish this passed the House of Representatives, but to Johnson's disappointment, stalled in the Senate before he could veto it.
Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, leader of the Moderate Republicans and Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was anxious to reach an understanding with the President. He ushered through Congress a bill extending the Freedmen's Bureau beyond its scheduled abolition in 1867, and the first Civil Rights Bill, to grant citizenship to the freedmen. Trumbull met several times with Johnson and was convinced the President would sign the measures (Johnson rarely contradicted visitors, often fooling those who met with him into thinking he was in accord). In fact, the President opposed both bills as infringements on state sovereignty. Additionally, both of Trumbull's bills were unpopular among white Southerners, whom Johnson hoped to include in his new party. Johnson vetoed the Freedman's Bureau bill on February 18, 1866, to the delight of white Southerners and the puzzled anger of Republican legislators. He considered himself vindicated when a move to override his veto failed in the Senate the following day. Johnson believed that the Radicals would now be isolated and defeated and that the moderate Republicans would form behind him; he did not understand that Moderates also wanted to see African Americans treated fairly.
On February 22, 1866, Washington's Birthday, Johnson gave an impromptu speech to supporters who had marched to the White House and called for an address in honor of the first president. In his hour-long speech, he instead referred to himself over 200 times. More damagingly, he also spoke of "men ... still opposed to the Union" to whom he could not extend the hand of friendship he gave to the South. When called upon by the crowd to say who they were, Johnson named Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, and abolitionist Wendell Phillips, and accused them of plotting his assassination. Republicans viewed the address as a declaration of war, while one Democratic ally estimated Johnson's speech cost the party 200,000 votes in the 1866 congressional midterm elections.
Although strongly urged by moderates to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Johnson broke decisively with them by vetoing it on March 27. In his veto message, he objected to the measure because it conferred citizenship on the freedmen at a time when 11 out of 36 states were unrepresented in the Congress, and that it discriminated in favor of African Americans and against whites. Within three weeks, Congress had overridden his veto, the first time that had been done on a major bill in American history. The veto, often seen as a key mistake of Johnson's presidency, convinced moderates there was no hope of working with him. Historian Eric Foner, in his volume on Reconstruction, views it as "the most disastrous miscalculation of his political career". According to Stewart, the veto was "for many his defining blunder, setting a tone of perpetual confrontation with Congress that prevailed for the rest of his presidency".
Congress also proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to the states. Written by Trumbull and others, it was sent for ratification by state legislatures in a process in which the president plays no part, though Johnson opposed it. The amendment was designed to put the key provisions of the Civil Rights Act into the Constitution, but also went further. The amendment extended citizenship to every person born in the United States (except Indians on reservations), penalized states that did not give the vote to freedmen, and most importantly, created new federal civil rights that could be protected by federal courts. It also guaranteed that the federal debt would be paid and forbade repayment of Confederate war debts. Further, it disqualified many former Confederates from office, although the disability could be removed — by Congress, not the president. Both houses passed the Freedmen's Bureau Act a second time, and again the President vetoed it; this time, the veto was overridden. By the summer of 1866, when Congress finally adjourned, Johnson's method of restoring states to the Union by executive fiat, without safeguards for the freedmen, was in deep trouble. His home state of Tennessee ratified the Fourteenth Amendment despite the President's opposition. When Tennessee did so, Congress immediately seated its proposed delegation, embarrassing Johnson.
Efforts to compromise failed, and a political war ensued between the united Republicans on one side, and on the other, Johnson and his Northern and Southern allies in the Democratic Party. He called a convention of the National Union Party. Republicans had returned to using their previous identifier; Johnson intended to use the discarded name to unite his supporters and gain election to a full term, in 1868. The battleground was the election of 1866; Southern states were not allowed to vote. Johnson campaigned vigorously, undertaking a public speaking tour, known as the "Swing Around the Circle". The trip, including speeches in Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Columbus, proved politically disastrous, with the President making controversial comparisons between himself and Christ, and engaging in arguments with hecklers. These exchanges were attacked as beneath the dignity of the presidency. The Republicans won by a landslide, increasing their two-thirds majority in Congress, and made plans to control Reconstruction. Johnson blamed the Democrats for giving only lukewarm support to the National Union movement.
Even with the Republican victory in November 1866, Johnson considered himself in a strong position. The Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified by none of the Southern or border states except Tennessee, and had been rejected in Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland. As the amendment required ratification by three-quarters of the states to become part of the Constitution, he believed the deadlock would be broken in his favor, leading to his election in 1868. Once it reconvened in December 1866, an energized Congress began passing legislation, often over a presidential veto; this included the District of Columbia voting bill. Congress admitted Nebraska to the Union over a veto, and the Republicans gained two senators and a state that promptly ratified the amendment. Johnson's veto of a bill for statehood for Colorado Territory was sustained; enough senators agreed that a district with a population of 30,000 was not yet worthy of statehood to win the day.
In January 1867, Congressman Stevens introduced legislation to dissolve the Southern state governments and reconstitute them into five military districts, under martial law. The states would begin again by holding constitutional conventions. African Americans could vote for or become delegates; former Confederates could not. In the legislative process, Congress added to the bill that restoration to the Union would follow the state's ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and completion of the process of adding it to the Constitution. Johnson and the Southerners attempted a compromise, whereby the South would agree to a modified version of the amendment without the disqualification of former Confederates, and for limited black suffrage. The Republicans insisted on the full language of the amendment, and the deal fell through. Although Johnson could have pocket vetoed the First Reconstruction Act as it was presented to him less than ten days before the end of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, he chose to veto it directly on March 2, 1867; Congress overruled him the same day. Also on March 2, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act over the President's veto, in response to statements during the Swing Around the Circle that he planned to fire Cabinet secretaries who did not agree with him. This bill, requiring Senate approval for the firing of Cabinet members during the tenure of the president who appointed them and for one month afterwards, was immediately controversial, with some senators doubting that it was constitutional or that its terms applied to Johnson, whose key Cabinet officers were Lincoln holdovers.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was an able and hard-working man, but difficult to deal with. Johnson both admired and was exasperated by his War Secretary, who, in combination with General of the Army Grant, worked to undermine the president's Southern policy from within his own administration. Johnson considered firing Stanton, but respected him for his wartime service as secretary. Stanton, for his part, feared allowing Johnson to appoint his successor and refused to resign, despite his public disagreements with his president.
The new Congress met for a few weeks in March 1867, then adjourned, leaving the House Committee on the Judiciary behind, charged with reporting back to the full House whether there were grounds for Johnson to be impeached. This committee duly met, examined the President's bank accounts, and summoned members of the Cabinet to testify. When a federal court released former Confederate president Davis on bail on May 13 (he had been captured shortly after the war), the committee investigated whether the President had impeded the prosecution. It learned that Johnson was eager to have Davis tried. A bipartisan majority of the committee voted down impeachment charges; the committee adjourned on June 3.
Later in June, Johnson and Stanton battled over the question of whether the military officers placed in command of the South could override the civil authorities. The President had Attorney General Henry Stanbery issue an opinion backing his position that they could not. Johnson sought to pin down Stanton either as for, and thus endorsing Johnson's position, or against, showing himself to be opposed to his president and the rest of the Cabinet. Stanton evaded the point in meetings and written communications. When Congress reconvened in July, it passed a Reconstruction Act against Johnson's position, waited for his veto, overruled it, and went home. In addition to clarifying the powers of the generals, the legislation also deprived the President of control over the Army in the South. With Congress in recess until November, Johnson decided to fire Stanton and relieve one of the military commanders, General Philip Sheridan, who had dismissed the governor of Texas and installed a replacement with little popular support. Johnson was initially deterred by a strong objection from Grant, but on August 5, the President demanded Stanton's resignation; the secretary refused to quit with Congress out of session. Johnson then suspended him pending the next meeting of Congress as permitted under the Tenure of Office Act; Grant agreed to serve as temporary replacement while continuing to lead the Army.
Grant, under protest, followed Johnson's order transferring Sheridan and another of the district commanders, Daniel Sickles, who had angered Johnson by firmly following Congress's plan. The President also issued a proclamation pardoning most Confederates, exempting those who held office under the Confederacy, or who had served in federal office before the war but had breached their oaths. Although Republicans expressed anger with his actions, the 1867 elections generally went Democratic. No seats in Congress were directly elected in the polling, but the Democrats took control of the Ohio General Assembly, allowing them to defeat for reelection one of Johnson's strongest opponents, Senator Benjamin Wade. Voters in Ohio, Connecticut, and Minnesota turned down propositions to grant African Americans the vote.
The adverse results momentarily put a stop to Republican calls to impeach Johnson, who was elated by the elections. Nevertheless, once Congress met in November, the Judiciary Committee reversed itself and passed a resolution of impeachment against Johnson. After much debate about whether anything the President had done was a high crime or misdemeanor, the standard under the Constitution, the resolution was defeated by the House of Representatives on December 7, 1867, by a vote of 57 in favor to 108 opposed.
Johnson notified Congress of Stanton's suspension and Grant's interim appointment. In January 1868, the Senate disapproved of his action, and reinstated Stanton, contending the President had violated the Tenure of Office Act. Grant stepped aside over Johnson's objection, causing a complete break between them. Johnson then dismissed Stanton and appointed Lorenzo Thomas to replace him. Stanton refused to leave his office, and on February 24, 1868, the House impeached the President for intentionally violating the Tenure of Office Act, by a vote of 128 to 47. The House subsequently adopted eleven articles of impeachment, for the most part alleging that he had violated the Tenure of Office Act, and had questioned the legitimacy of Congress.
On March 5, 1868, the impeachment trial began in the Senate and lasted almost three months; Congressmen George S. Boutwell, Benjamin Butler and Thaddeus Stevens acted as managers for the House, or prosecutors, and William M. Evarts, Benjamin R. Curtis and former Attorney General Stanbery were Johnson's counsel; Chief Justice Chase served as presiding judge.
The defense relied on the provision of the Tenure of Office Act that made it applicable only to appointees of the current administration. Since Lincoln had appointed Stanton, the defense maintained Johnson had not violated the act, and also argued that the President had the right to test the constitutionality of an act of Congress. Johnson's counsel insisted that he make no appearance at the trial, nor publicly comment about the proceedings, and except for a pair of interviews in April, he complied.
Johnson maneuvered to gain an acquittal; for example, he pledged to Iowa Senator James W. Grimes that he would not interfere with Congress's Reconstruction efforts. Grimes reported to a group of Moderates, many of whom voted for acquittal, that he believed the President would keep his word. Johnson also promised to install the respected John Schofield as War Secretary. Kansas Senator Edmund G. Ross received assurances that the new, Radical-influenced constitutions ratified in South Carolina and Arkansas would be transmitted to the Congress without delay, an action which would give him and other senators political cover to vote for acquittal.
One reason senators were reluctant to remove the President was that his successor would have been Ohio Senator Wade, the president "pro tempore" of the Senate. Wade, a lame duck who left office in early 1869, was a Radical who supported such measures as women's suffrage, placing him beyond the pale politically in much of the nation. Additionally, a President Wade was seen as an obstacle to Grant's ambitions.
With the dealmaking, Johnson was confident of the result in advance of the verdict, and in the days leading up to the ballot, newspapers reported that Stevens and his Radicals had given up. On May 16, the Senate voted on the 11th article of impeachment, accusing Johnson of firing Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office of Act once the Senate had overturned his suspension. Thirty-five senators voted "guilty" and 19 "not guilty", thus falling short by a single vote of the two-thirds majority required for conviction under the Constitution. Seven Republicans—Senators Grimes, Ross, Trumbull, William Pitt Fessenden, Joseph S. Fowler, John B. Henderson, and Peter G. Van Winkle—voted to acquit the President. With Stevens bitterly disappointed at the result, the Senate then adjourned for the Republican National Convention; Grant was nominated for president. The Senate returned on May 26 and voted on the second and third articles, with identical 35–19 results. Faced with those results, Johnson's opponents gave up and dismissed proceedings. Stanton "relinquished" his office on May 26, and the Senate subsequently confirmed Schofield. When Johnson renominated Stanbery to return to his position as Attorney General after his service as a defense manager, the Senate refused to confirm him.
Allegations were made at the time and again later that bribery dictated the outcome of the trial. Even when it was in progress, Representative Butler began an investigation, held contentious hearings, and issued a report, unendorsed by any other congressman. Butler focused on a New York–based "Astor House Group", supposedly led by political boss and editor Thurlow Weed. This organization was said to have raised large sums of money from whiskey interests through Cincinnati lawyer Charles Woolley to bribe senators to acquit Johnson. Butler went so far as to imprison Woolley in the Capitol building when he refused to answer questions, but failed to prove bribery.
Soon after taking office as president, Johnson reached an accord with Secretary of State William H. Seward that there would be no change in foreign policy. In practice, this meant that Seward would continue to run things as he had under Lincoln. Seward and Lincoln had been rivals for the nomination in 1860; the victor hoped that Seward would succeed him as president in 1869. At the time of Johnson's accession, the French had intervened in Mexico, sending troops there. While many politicians had indulged in saber rattling over the Mexican matter, Seward preferred quiet diplomacy, warning the French through diplomatic channels that their presence in Mexico was not acceptable. Although the President preferred a more aggressive approach, Seward persuaded him to follow his lead. In April 1866, the French government informed Seward that its troops would be brought home in stages, to conclude by November 1867.
Seward was an expansionist, and sought opportunities to gain territory for the United States. By 1867, the Russian government saw its North American colony (today Alaska) as a financial liability, and feared losing control as American settlement reached there. It instructed its minister in Washington, Baron Eduard de Stoeckl, to negotiate a sale. De Stoeckl did so deftly, getting Seward to raise his offer from $5 million (coincidentally, the minimum that Russia had instructed de Stoeckl to accept) to $7 million, and then getting $200,000 added by raising various objections. This sum of $7.2 million is equivalent to $ in present-day terms. On March 30, 1867, de Stoeckl and Seward signed the treaty, working quickly as the Senate was about to adjourn. Johnson and Seward took the signed document to the President's Room in the Capitol, only to be told there was no time to deal with the matter before adjournment. The President summoned the Senate into session to meet on April 1; that body approved the treaty, 37–2. Emboldened by his success in Alaska, Seward sought acquisitions elsewhere. His only success was staking an American claim to uninhabited Wake Island in the Pacific, which would be officially claimed by the U.S. in 1898. He came close with the Danish West Indies as Denmark agreed to sell and the local population approved the transfer in a plebiscite, but the Senate never voted on the treaty and it expired.
Another treaty that fared badly was the Johnson-Clarendon convention, negotiated in settlement of the "Alabama" Claims, for damages to American shipping from British-built Confederate raiders. Negotiated by the United States Minister to Britain, former Maryland senator Reverdy Johnson, in late 1868, it was ignored by the Senate during the remainder of the President's term. The treaty was rejected after he left office, and the Grant administration later negotiated considerably better terms from Britain.
Johnson appointed nine Article III federal judges during his presidency, all to United States district courts; he did not appoint a justice to serve on the Supreme Court. In April 1866, he nominated Henry Stanbery to fill the vacancy left with the death of John Catron, but Congress eliminated the seat to prevent the appointment, and to ensure that he did not get to make any appointments eliminated the next vacancy as well, providing that the court would shrink by one justice when one next departed from office. Johnson appointed his Greeneville crony, Samuel Milligan, to the United States Court of Claims, where he served from 1868 until his death in 1874.
In June 1866, Johnson signed the Southern Homestead Act into law, believing that the legislation would assist poor whites. Around 28,000 land claims were successfully patented, although few former slaves benefitted from the law, fraud was rampant, and much of the best land was off-limits, reserved for grants to veterans or railroads. In June 1868, Johnson signed an eight-hour law passed by Congress that established an eight-hour workday for laborers and mechanics employed by the Federal Government. Although Johnson told members of a Workingmen's party delegation in Baltimore that he could not directly commit himself to an eight-hour day, he nevertheless told the same delegation that he greatly favoured the "shortest number of hours consistent with the interests of all". According to Richard F. Selcer, however, the good intentions behind the law were "immediately frustrated" as wages were cut by 20%.
Johnson sought nomination by the 1868 Democratic National Convention in New York in July 1868. He remained very popular among Southern whites, and boosted that popularity by issuing, just before the convention, a pardon ending the possibility of criminal proceedings against any Confederate not already indicted, meaning that only Davis and a few others still might face trial. On the first ballot, Johnson was second to former Ohio representative George H. Pendleton, who had been his Democratic opponent for vice president in 1864. Johnson's support was mostly from the South, and fell away as the ballots passed. On the 22nd ballot, former New York governor Horatio Seymour was nominated, and the President received only four votes, all from Tennessee.
The conflict with Congress continued. Johnson sent Congress proposals for amendments to limit the president to a single six-year term and make the president and the Senate directly elected, and for term limits for judges. Congress took no action on them. When the President was slow to officially report ratifications of the Fourteenth Amendment by the new Southern legislatures, Congress passed a bill, again over his veto, requiring him to do so within ten days of receipt. He still delayed as much as he could, but was required, in July 1868, to report the ratifications making the amendment part of the Constitution.
Seymour's operatives sought Johnson's support, but he long remained silent on the presidential campaign. It was not until October, with the vote already having taken place in some states, that he mentioned Seymour at all, and he never endorsed him. Nevertheless, Johnson regretted Grant's victory, in part because of their animus from the Stanton affair. In his annual message to Congress in December, Johnson urged the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act and told legislators that had they admitted their Southern colleagues in 1865, all would have been well. He celebrated his 60th birthday in late December with a party for several hundred children, though not including those of President-elect Grant, who did not allow his to go.
On Christmas Day 1868, Johnson issued a final amnesty, this one covering everyone, including Davis. He also issued, in his final months in office, pardons for crimes, including one for Dr. Samuel Mudd, controversially convicted of involvement in the Lincoln assassination (he had set Booth's broken leg) and imprisoned in on Florida's Dry Tortugas.
On March 3, the President hosted a large public reception at the White House on his final full day in office. Grant had made it known that he was unwilling to ride in the same carriage as Johnson, as was customary, and Johnson refused to go to the inauguration at all. Despite an effort by Seward to prompt a change of mind, he spent the morning of March 4 finishing last-minute business, and then shortly after noon rode from the White House to the home of a friend.
After leaving the presidency, Johnson remained for some weeks in Washington, then returned to Greeneville for the first time in eight years. He was honored with large public celebrations along the way, especially in Tennessee, where cities hostile to him during the war hung out welcome banners. He had arranged to purchase a large farm near Greeneville to live on after his presidency.
Some expected Johnson to run for Governor of Tennessee or for the Senate again, while others thought that he would become a railroad executive. Johnson found Greeneville boring, and his private life was embittered by the suicide of his son Robert in 1869. Seeking vindication for himself, and revenge against his political enemies, he launched a Senate bid soon after returning home. Tennessee had gone Republican, but court rulings restoring the vote to some whites and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan kept down the African-American vote, leading to a Democratic victory in the legislative elections in August 1869. Johnson was seen as a likely victor in the Senate election, although hated by Radical Republicans, and also by some Democrats because of his wartime activities. Although he was at one point within a single vote of victory in the legislature's balloting, the Republicans eventually elected Henry Cooper over Johnson, 54–51. In 1872, there was a special election for an ; Johnson initially sought the Democratic nomination, but when he saw that it would go to former Confederate general Benjamin F. Cheatham, decided to run as an independent. The former president was defeated, finishing third, but the split in the Democratic Party defeated Cheatham in favor of an old Johnson Unionist ally, Horace Maynard.
In 1873, Johnson contracted cholera during an epidemic but recovered; that year he lost about $73,000, when the First National Bank of Washington went under, though he was eventually repaid much of the sum. He began looking towards the next Senate election, to take place in the legislature in early 1875. Johnson began to woo the farmers' Grange movement; with his Jeffersonian leanings, he easily gained their support. He spoke throughout the state in his final campaign tour. Few African Americans outside the large towns were now able to vote as Reconstruction faded in Tennessee, setting a pattern that would be repeated in the other Southern states; the white domination would last almost a century. In the Tennessee legislative elections in August, the Democrats elected 92 legislators to the Republicans' eight, and Johnson went to Nashville for the legislative session. When the balloting for the Senate seat began on January 20, 1875, he led with 30 votes, but did not have the required majority as three former Confederate generals, one former colonel, and a former Democratic congressman split the vote with him. Johnson's opponents tried to agree on a single candidate who might gain majority support and defeat him, but failed, and he was elected on January 26 on the 54th ballot, with a margin of a single vote. Nashville erupted in rejoicing; remarked Johnson, "Thank God for the vindication."
Johnson's comeback garnered national attention, with the "St. Louis Republican" calling it, "the most magnificent personal triumph which the history of American politics can show". At his swearing-in in the Senate on March 5, 1875, he was greeted with flowers and sworn in with his predecessor as vice president, Hamlin, by that office's current incumbent, Henry Wilson, who as senator had voted for his ousting. Many Republicans ignored Senator Johnson, though some, such as Ohio's John Sherman (who had voted for conviction), shook his hand. Johnson remains the only former president to serve in the Senate. He spoke only once in the short session, on March 22 lambasting President Grant for his use of federal troops in support of Louisiana's Reconstruction government. The former president asked, "How far off is military despotism?" and concluded his speech, "may God bless this people and God save the Constitution."
Johnson returned home after the special session concluded. In late July 1875, convinced some of his opponents were defaming him in the Ohio gubernatorial race, he decided to travel there to give speeches. He began the trip on July 28, and broke the journey at his daughter Mary's farm near Elizabethton, where his daughter Martha was also staying. That evening he suffered a stroke, but refused medical treatment until the next day, when he did not improve and two doctors were sent for from Elizabethton. He seemed to respond to their ministrations, but suffered another stroke on the evening of July 30, and died early the following morning at the age of 66. President Grant had the "painful duty" of announcing the death of the only surviving past president. Northern newspapers, in their obituaries, tended to focus on Johnson's loyalty during the war, while Southern ones paid tribute to his actions as president. Johnson's funeral was held on August 3 in Greeneville. He was buried with his body wrapped in an American flag and a copy of the U.S. Constitution placed under his head, according to his wishes. The burial ground was dedicated as the Andrew Johnson National Cemetery in 1906, and with his home and tailor's shop, is part of the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site.
According to Castel, "historians [of Johnson's presidency] have tended to concentrate to the exclusion of practically everything else upon his role in that titanic event [Reconstruction]". Through the remainder of the 19th century, there were few historical evaluations of Johnson and his presidency. Memoirs from Northerners who had dealt with him, such as former vice president Henry Wilson and Maine Senator James G. Blaine, depicted him as an obstinate boor who tried to favor the South in Reconstruction, but who was frustrated by Congress. According to historian Howard K. Beale in his journal article about the historiography of Reconstruction, "Men of the postwar decades were more concerned with justifying their own position than they were with painstaking search for truth. Thus [Alabama congressman and historian] Hilary Herbert and his corroborators presented a Southern indictment of Northern policies, and Henry Wilson's history was a brief for the North."
The turn of the 20th century saw the first significant historical evaluations of Johnson. Leading the wave was Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James Ford Rhodes, who wrote of the former president:
Rhodes ascribed Johnson's faults to his personal weaknesses, and blamed him for the problems of the postbellum South. Other early 20th-century historians, such as John Burgess, Woodrow Wilson (who later became president himself) and William Dunning, all Southerners, concurred with Rhodes, believing Johnson flawed and politically inept, but concluding that he had tried to carry out Lincoln's plans for the South in good faith. Author and journalist Jay Tolson suggests that Wilson "depict[ed Reconstruction] as a vindictive program that hurt even repentant southerners while benefiting northern opportunists, the so-called Carpetbaggers, and cynical white southerners, or Scalawags, who exploited alliances with blacks for political gain".
Even as Rhodes and his school wrote, another group of historians was setting out on the full rehabilitation of Johnson, using for the first time primary sources such as his papers, provided by his daughter Martha before her death in 1901, and the diaries of Johnson's Navy Secretary, Gideon Welles, first published in 1911. The resulting volumes, such as David Miller DeWitt's "The Impeachment and Trial of President Andrew Johnson" (1903), presented him far more favorably than they did those who had sought to oust him. In James Schouler's 1913 "History of the Reconstruction Period", the author accused Rhodes of being "quite unfair to Johnson", though agreeing that the former president had created many of his own problems through inept political moves. These works had an effect; although historians continued to view Johnson as having deep flaws which sabotaged his presidency, they saw his Reconstruction policies as fundamentally correct.
Castel writes:
Beale wondered in 1940, "is it not time that we studied the history of Reconstruction without first assuming, at least subconsciously, that carpetbaggers and Southern white Republicans were wicked, that Negroes were illiterate incompetents, and that the whole white South owes a debt of gratitude to the restorers of 'white supremacy'?" Despite these doubts, the favorable view of Johnson survived for a time. In 1942, Van Heflin portrayed the former president as a fighter for democracy in the Hollywood film "Tennessee Johnson". In 1948, a poll of his colleagues by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger deemed Johnson among the average presidents; in 1956, one by Clinton L. Rossiter named him as one of the near-great Chief Executives. Foner notes that at the time of these surveys, "the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War was regarded as a time of corruption and misgovernment caused by granting black men the right to vote".
Earlier historians, including Beale, believed that money drove events, and had seen Reconstruction as an economic struggle. They also accepted, for the most part, that reconciliation between North and South should have been the top priority of Reconstruction. In the 1950s, historians began to focus on the African-American experience as central to Reconstruction. They rejected completely any claim of black inferiority, which had marked many earlier historical works, and saw the developing civil rights movement as a second Reconstruction; some writers stated they hoped their work on the postbellum era would advance the cause of civil rights. These authors sympathized with the Radical Republicans for their desire to help the African American, and saw Johnson as callous towards the freedman. In a number of works from 1956 onwards by such historians as Fawn Brodie, the former president was depicted as a successful saboteur of efforts to better the freedman's lot. These volumes included major biographies of Stevens and Stanton. Reconstruction was increasingly seen as a noble effort to integrate the freed slaves into society.
In the early 21st century, Johnson is among those commonly mentioned as the worst presidents in U.S. history. According to historian Glenn W. Lafantasie, who believes Buchanan the worst president, "Johnson is a particular favorite for the bottom of the pile because of his impeachment ... his complete mishandling of Reconstruction policy ... his bristling personality, and his enormous sense of self-importance." Tolson suggests that "Johnson is now scorned for having resisted Radical Republican policies aimed at securing the rights and well-being of the newly emancipated African-Americans". Gordon-Reed notes that Johnson, along with his contemporaries Pierce and Buchanan, are generally listed among the five worst presidents, but states, "there have never been more difficult times in the life of this nation. The problems these men had to confront were enormous. It would have taken a succession of Lincolns to do them justice."
Trefousse considers Johnson's legacy to be "the maintenance of white supremacy. His boost to Southern conservatives by undermining Reconstruction was his legacy to the nation, one that would trouble the country for generations to come." Gordon-Reed states of Johnson: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1624 |
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of the Soviet Gulag labour camp system.
After serving in the Soviet Army during World War II, he was sentenced to spend eight years in a labour camp and then internal exile for criticizing Josef Stalin in a private letter. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, the novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1962). Although the reforms brought by Nikita Khrushchev freed him from exile in 1956, the publication of "Cancer Ward" (1968), "August 1914" (1971), and "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973) beyond the Soviet Union angered authorities, and Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship in 1974. He was flown to West Germany, and in 1976 he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored in 1990, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His "The Gulag Archipelago" was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies.
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RSFSR (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of "August 1914", and in the later "Red Wheel" novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel "August 1914"; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, at this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel "Love the Revolution!", chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In "The Gulag Archipelago", Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were "we" any better?'"
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew "baal ha-bayit" for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organisation to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours". On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a "sharashka" (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book "The First Circle", published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek district of South Kazakhstan region of Kazakhstan (Kok-terek rural district). His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel "Cancer Ward" and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand". It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically-minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of "The Gulag Archipelago" ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem "The Trail" (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972.
The following year Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Solzhenitsyn's adopted son Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the "Novy Mir" magazine, with the manuscript of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing "Cancer Ward", he was simultaneously writing "The Gulag Archipelago". During Khrushchev's tenure, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. Most Soviet readers realized this, but after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel "Cancer Ward" legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of "The First Circle". Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work upon the most well-known of all his writings, "The Gulag Archipelago". The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, something which had come close to second nature, but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of "The Gulag Archipelago" were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Estonia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education in a Lubyanka Prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
"The Gulag Archipelago" was composed from 1958 to 1967. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system. The book drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts, and the practice of internal exile. According to Gulag historian Anne Applebaum, "The Gulag Archipelago"'s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century. "The Gulag Archipelago" has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although "The Gulag Archipelago" was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in "Pravda" on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of "The Gulag Archipelago". US military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir "Invisible Allies" (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem "Prussian Nights"), keeping KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that everyone in his surrounding was a KGB agent and deceiving him in all possible ways. Among other things, the writer constantly received envelopes with photographs of car accidents, brain surgery and other frightening illustrations. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others and surrounded his property with a barbed wire fence. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, "The Red Wheel". By 1992, four "knots" (parts) had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well-received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England. He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Janis Sapiets.
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as "Rebuilding Russia", and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, a literary memoir on his years in the West ("The Grain Between the Millstones"), among many other writings. Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became US citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Yermolai works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Regarding atheism, Solzhenitsyn declared:
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago". In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn called for "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically created a Marxist–Leninist police state after the October Revolution. In a 13 November 1985, review of Solzhenitsyn's novel "August 1914" in "The New York Times", Jewish American historian Richard Pipes is quoted: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews".
In his 1998 book "Russia in Collapse", Solzhenitsyn excoriated the Russian extreme right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite.
In 2001 Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations ("Two Hundred Years Together" 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. Similarities between "Two Hundred Years Together" and an anti-Semitic essay titled ""Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia"", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, has led to inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself claimed that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him, and then manipulated, forty years ago. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
In some of his later political writings, such as "Rebuilding Russia" (1990) and "Russia in Collapse" (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism), urged local self-government to a free Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with "Der Spiegel", Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian', against which I spoke so often in the 1970s, has not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000 Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008 Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West. In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, suffered from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War. He criticized the country's music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy. He said that the West erred in measuring other civilizations by its own model. While faulting Soviet society for denying fair legal treatment of people, he also faulted the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visual because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with "Der Spiegel" he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet totalitarian regime, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not practice any real censorship in the style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of those in the Soviet Union. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, or Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Party during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. However, he commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s.
According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of an atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in "Komsomolskaya Pravda" Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
According to Daniel J. Mahoney, "if one opens almost any page of Solzhenitsyn's 1994 essay ""The Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century" one finds Solzhenitsyn attacking the cruelties and injustice of serfdom, faulting Tsarist authorities for their blindness about the need for political liberty in Russia, and for their wasting of the nation's strength in unnecessary and counterproductive foreign adventures. Moreover, he attacks Pan-Slavism, the idea that Russia had a mission to unite Slavic peoples and to come to the defense of the Orthodox wherever they were under threat, as a 'wretched idea'."
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Following this, he stated that "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!" Solzhenitsyn opined on 2 April 2008 in "Izvestia" that the 1930s famine in the Ukraine was no different from the Russian famine of 1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements. He claimed that the "provocatory shriek about a 'genocide' was started in the minds of Ukrainian chauvinists decades later, who are also viciously opposed to 'Moskals.'" The writer cautioned that the genocidal claim has its chances to be accepted by the West due to the general Western ignorance of Russian and Ukrainian history.
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language site dedicated to him.
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia (Renaissance song)" by British Progressive Rock group Renaissance (band).
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film "Cloud Atlas", where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there. Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, "Besedy s Solzhenitsynym" ("The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn"). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel "Rossiya K" broadcast the French television documentary "L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag" ("The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago") made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title "Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag"" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of "The Gulag Archipelago". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1625 |
Aberdeen
Aberdeen (; , ; ; ) is a city in northeast Scotland. It is Scotland's third most populous city, one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas and the United Kingdom's 39th most populous built-up area, with an official population estimate of 196,670 for the city of Aberdeen and for the local council area.
During the mid-18th to mid-20th centuries, Aberdeen's buildings incorporated locally quarried grey granite, which can sparkle like silver because of its high mica content. Since the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1970s, Aberdeen has been known as the off-shore oil capital of Europe.
The area around Aberdeen has been settled for at least 8,000 years, when prehistoric villages lay around the mouths of the rivers Dee and Don. The city has a long, sandy coastline and a marine climate, the latter resulting in chilly summers and mild winters.
Aberdeen received Royal burgh status from David I of Scotland (1124–1153), transforming the city economically. The city has two universities, the University of Aberdeen, founded in 1495, and Robert Gordon University, which was awarded university status in 1992, making Aberdeen the educational centre of north-east Scotland. The traditional industries of fishing, paper-making, shipbuilding, and textiles have been overtaken by the oil industry and Aberdeen's seaport. Aberdeen Heliport is one of the busiest commercial heliports in the world and the seaport is the largest in the north-east of Scotland.
Aberdeen used to host the Aberdeen International Youth Festival, a major international event which attracted up to 1000 of the most talented young performing arts companies but the council ended funding in 2017 and the festival was wound up in 2018. In 2015, Mercer named Aberdeen the 57th most liveable city in the world, as well as the fourth most liveable city in Britain. In 2012, HSBC named Aberdeen as a leading business hub and one of eight 'super cities' spearheading the UK's economy, marking it as the only city in Scotland to receive this accolade. In 2018, Aberdeen was found to be the best city in the UK to start a business in a study released by card payment firm Paymentsense.
The Aberdeen area has seen human settlement for at least 8,000 years. The city began as two separate burghs: Old Aberdeen at the mouth of the river Don; and New Aberdeen, a fishing and trading settlement, where the Denburn waterway entered the river Dee estuary. The earliest charter was granted by William the Lion in 1179 and confirmed the corporate rights granted by David I.
In 1319, the Great Charter of Robert the Bruce transformed Aberdeen into a property-owning and financially independent community. Granted with it was the nearby Forest of Stocket, whose income formed the basis for the city's Common Good Fund which still benefits Aberdonians.
During the Wars of Scottish Independence, Aberdeen was under English rule, so Robert the Bruce laid siege to Aberdeen Castle before destroying it in 1308, followed executing the English garrison. The city was burned by Edward III of England in 1336, but was rebuilt and extended. The city was strongly fortified to prevent attacks by neighbouring lords, but the gates were removed by 1770.
During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms of 1644 to 1647 the city was plundered by both sides. In 1644, it was taken and ransacked by Royalist troops after the Battle of Aberdeen and two years later it was stormed by a Royalist force under the command of the Marquis of Huntly. In 1647 an outbreak of bubonic plague killed a quarter of the population. In the 18th century, a new Town Hall was built and the first social services appeared with the Infirmary at Woolmanhill in 1742 and the Lunatic Asylum in 1779. The council began major road improvements at the end of the 18th century with the main thoroughfares of George Street, King Street and Union Street all completed at the beginning of the 19th century.
The expensive infrastructure works led to the city becoming bankrupt in 1817 during the Post-Napoleonic depression, an economic downturn immediately after the Napoleonic Wars; but the city's prosperity later recovered. The increasing economic importance of Aberdeen and the development of the shipbuilding and fishing industries led to the construction of the present harbour including Victoria Dock and the South Breakwater, and the extension of the North Pier. Gas street lighting arrived in 1824 and an enhanced water supply appeared in 1830 when water was pumped from the Dee to a reservoir in Union Place. An underground sewer system replaced open sewers in 1865. The city was incorporated in 1891. Although Old Aberdeen has a separate history and still holds its ancient charter, it is no longer officially independent. It is an integral part of the city, as is Woodside and the Royal Burgh of Torry to the south of the River Dee.
Over the course of the Second World War Aberdeen was attacked 32 times by the German Luftwaffe. One of the most devastating attacks was on Wednesday 21 April 1943 when 29 Luftwaffe Dornier 217s flying from Stavanger, Norway attacked the city between the hours of 22:17 and 23:04. A total of 98 civilians and 27 servicemen were killed, along with 9,668 houses damaged, after a mixture of 127 Incendiary, High Explosive and Cluster bombs were dropped on the city in one night. It was also the last German raid on a Scottish city during the war.
Aberdeen was in Pictish territory and became Gaelic-speaking at some time in the medieval period. Old Aberdeen is the approximate location of "Aberdon", the first settlement of Aberdeen; this literally means "the mouth of the Don". The Celtic word means "river mouth", as in modern Welsh (Aberystwyth, Aberdare, Aberbeeg etc.). The Scottish Gaelic name is (variation: ; presumably being a loan from the earlier Pictish; the Gaelic term is ), and in Latin, the Romans referred to the river as . Mediaeval (or Ecclesiastical) Latin has it as .
Aberdeen is locally governed by Aberdeen City Council, which comprises forty-five councillors who represent the city's wards and is headed by the Lord Provost. The current Lord Provost is Barney Crockett. From May 2003 until May 2007 the council was run by a Liberal Democrat and Conservative Party coalition. Following the May 2007 local elections, the Liberal Democrats formed a new coalition with the Scottish National Party. After a later SNP by-election gain from the Conservatives, this coalition held 28 of the 43 seats. Following the election of 4 May 2017, the council was controlled by a coalition of Scottish Labour, Scottish Conservatives and independent councillors; the Labour councillors were subsequently suspended by Scottish Labour Party leader, Kezia Dugdale.
Aberdeen is represented in the Parliament of the United Kingdom by three constituencies: Aberdeen North and Aberdeen South which are wholly within the Aberdeen City council area, and Gordon, which includes a large area of the Aberdeenshire Council area.
In the Scottish Parliament, the city is represented by three constituencies with different boundaries: Aberdeen Central and Aberdeen Donside are wholly within the Aberdeen City council area. Aberdeen South and North Kincardine includes the North Kincardine ward of Aberdeenshire Council. A further seven MSPs are elected as part of the North East Scotland electoral region. In the European Parliament the city was represented by six MEPs as part of the all-inclusive Scotland constituency.
The arms and banner of the city show three silver towers on red. This motif dates from at least the time of Robert the Bruce and represents the buildings that stood on the three hills of medieval Aberdeen: Aberdeen Castle on Castle Hill (today's Castlegate); the city gate on Port Hill; and a church on St Catherine's Hill (now levelled).
"Bon Accord" is the motto of the city and is French for "Good Agreement". Legend tells that its use dates from a password used by Robert the Bruce during the 14th-century Wars of Scottish Independence, when he and his men laid siege to the English-held Aberdeen Castle before destroying it in 1308. It is still widely present in the city, throughout street names, business names and the city's Bon Accord shopping mall.
The shield in the coat of arms is supported by two leopards. A local magazine is called the "Leopard" and, when Union Bridge was widened in the 20th century, small statues of the creature in a sitting position were cast and placed on top of the railing posts (known locally as Kelly's Cats). The city's toast is "Happy to meet, sorry to part, happy to meet again"; this has been commonly misinterpreted as the translation of Bon Accord.
Being sited between two river mouths, the city has little natural exposure of bedrock. This leaves local geologists in a slight quandary: despite the high concentration of geoscientists in the area (courtesy of the oil industry), there is only a vague understanding of what underlies the city. To the south side of the city, coastal cliffs expose high-grade metamorphic rocks of the Grampian Group; to the southwest and west are extensive granites intruded into similar high-grade schists; to the north the metamorphics are intruded by gabbroic complexes instead.
The small amount of geophysics done, and occasional building-related exposures, combined with small exposures in the banks of the River Don, suggest that it is actually sited on an inlier of Devonian "Old Red" sandstones and silts. The outskirts of the city spread beyond the (inferred) limits of the outlier onto the surrounding metamorphic/ igneous complexes formed during the Dalradian period (approximately 480–600 million years ago) with sporadic areas of igneous Diorite granites to be found, such as that at the Rubislaw quarry which was used to build much of the Victorian parts of the city.
On the coast, Aberdeen has a long sand beach between the two rivers, the Dee and the Don, which turns into high sand dunes north of the Don stretching as far as Fraserburgh; to the south of the Dee are steep rocky cliff faces with only minor pebble and shingle beaches in deep inlets. A number of granite outcrops along the south coast have been quarried in the past, making for spectacular scenery and good rock-climbing.
The city extends to , and includes the former burghs of Old Aberdeen, New Aberdeen, Woodside and the Royal Burgh of Torry to the south of River Dee. In this gave the city a population density of . The city is built on many hills, with the original beginnings of the city growing from Castle Hill, St. Catherine's Hill and Windmill Hill.
Aberdeen features an oceanic climate (Köppen "Cfb"). Aberdeen has far milder winter temperatures than one might expect for its northern location, although statistically it is the coldest city in the UK. During the winter, especially throughout December, the length of the day is very short, averaging 6 hours and 41 minutes between sunrise and sunset at winter solstice. As winter progresses, the length of the day grows fairly quickly, to 8 hours and 20 minutes by the end of January. Around summer solstice, the days will be around 18 hours long, having 17 hours and 55 minutes between sunrise and sunset. During this time of the year marginal nautical twilight lasts the entire night. Temperatures at this time of year hover around during the day in most of the urban area, though nearer directly on the coast, and around in the westernmost suburbs, illustrating the cooling effect of the North Sea during summer. In addition, from June onward skies are more overcast than in April/May, as reflected in a lower percentage of possible sunshine (the percentage of daylight hours that are sunny). These factors render summer to be temperate and cool for the latitude, both by European standards and also compared to far inland climates on other continents, with those patterns being reversed during the mild and moderate winters.
Two weather stations collect climate data for the area, Aberdeen/Dyce Airport, and Craibstone. Both are about to the north west of the city centre, and given that they are in close proximity to each other, exhibit very similar climatic regimes. Dyce tends to have marginally warmer daytime temperatures year round owing to its slightly lower elevation, though it is more susceptible to harsh frosts. The coldest temperature to occur in recent years was during December 2010, while the following winter, Dyce set a new February high temperature station record on 28 February 2012 of ., and a new March high temperature record of on 25 March 2012.
The average temperature of the sea ranges from in March to in August.
The latest population estimate (mid 2012) for the urban area of Aberdeen is 196,670. For the wider settlement of Aberdeen including Cove Bay and Dyce the latest population estimate (mid 2012) is 209,460. For the local council area of Aberdeen City the latest estimate (mid ) is
In 1396 the population was about 3,000. By 1801 it had become 26,992; (1901) 153,503; (1941) 182,467.
The 2011 census showed that there are fewer young people in Aberdeen, with 16.4% under 16, opposed to the national average of 19.2%. According to the 2011 census Aberdeen is 91.9% white, ethnically, 24.7% were born outside Scotland, higher than the national average of 16%. Of this population 7.6% were born in other parts of the UK. 8.2% of Aberdonians stated to be from an ethnic minority (non-white) in the 2011 census, with 9,519 (4.3%) being Asian, with 3,385 (1.5%) coming from India and 2,187 (1.0%) being Chinese. The city has around 5,610 (2.6%) residents of African or Caribbean origin, which is a higher percentage than both Glasgow and Edinburgh.
In the household, there were 97,013 individual dwellings recorded in the city of which 61% were privately owned, 9% privately rented and 23% rented from the council. The most popular type of dwellings are apartments which comprise 49% of residences followed by semi-detached at just below 22%.
The median income of a household in the city is £16,813 (the mean income is £20,292) (2005) which places approximately 18% households in the city below the poverty line (defined as 60% of the mean income). Conversely, an Aberdeen postcode has the second highest number of millionaires of any postcode in the UK.
Christianity is the main religion practised in the city. Aberdeen's largest denominations are the Church of Scotland (through the Presbytery of Aberdeen) and the Roman Catholic Church, both with numerous churches across the city, with the Scottish Episcopal Church having the third-largest number. The most recent census in 2001 showed that Aberdeen has the highest proportion of non-religious residents of any city in Scotland, with nearly 43% of citizens claiming to have no religion and several former churches in the city have been converted into bars and restaurants. In the Middle Ages, the Kirk of St Nicholas was the only burgh kirk and one of Scotland's largest parish churches. Like a number of other Scottish kirks, it was subdivided after the Reformation, in this case into the East and West churches. At this time, the city also was home to houses of the Carmelites (Whitefriars) and Franciscans (Greyfriars), the latter of which surviving in modified form as the chapel of Marischal College as late as the early 20th century.
St Machar's Cathedral was built twenty years after David I (1124–1153) transferred the pre-Reformation Diocese from Mortlach in Banffshire to Old Aberdeen in 1137. With the exception of the episcopate of William Elphinstone (1484–1511), building progressed slowly. Gavin Dunbar, who followed him in 1518, completed the structure by adding the two western spires and the southern transept. It is now a congregation of the Church of Scotland. Aberdeen has two other cathedrals: St. Mary's Cathedral is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Gothic style, erected in 1859. In addition, St. Andrew's Cathedral serves the Scottish Episcopal Church. It was constructed in 1817 as Archibald Simpson's first commission and contains a memorial to the consecration of the first bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, which took place nearby. In 1804, St Peter's Church, the first permanent Roman Catholic church in the city after the Reformation was built.
Numerous other Protestant denominations have a presence in Aberdeen. The Salvation Army citadel on the Castlegate dominates the view of east end of Union Street. In addition, there is a Unitarian church, established in 1833 and located in Skene Terrace. Christadelphians have been present in Aberdeen since at least 1844. Over the years, they have rented space to meet at a number of locations and currently meet in the Inchgarth Community Centre in Garthdee. There is also a Quaker meetinghouse on Crown street, the only purpose built Quaker House in Scotland that is still in use today. In addition, there are a number of Baptist congregations in the city, and Evangelical congregations have been appearing in significant numbers since the late 2000s. The city also has two meetinghouses of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).
There is also a mosque in Old Aberdeen which serves the Islamic community in the city, and an Orthodox Jewish Synagogue established in 1945. There is also a Thai Buddhist temple located in the Hazelhead area of the city. There are no formal Hindu buildings, although the University of Aberdeen has a small Bahá'í society and there is a fortnightly Hindu religious gathering in the 1st and 3rd Sunday afternoons at Queens Cross Parish church hall.
Traditionally, Aberdeen was home to fishing, textile mills, shipbuilding and paper making. These industries have been largely replaced. High technology developments in the electronics design and development industry, research in agriculture and fishing and the oil industry, which has been largely responsible for Aberdeen's economic boom in the last three decades, are now major parts of Aberdeen's economy.
Until the 1970s, most of Aberdeen's leading industries dated from the 18th century; mainly these were textiles, foundry work, shipbuilding and paper-making, the oldest industry in the city, with paper having been first made there in 1694. Paper-making has reduced in importance since the closures of Donside Paper Mill in 2001 and the Davidson Mill in 2005 leaving the Stoneywood Paper Mill with a workforce of approximately 500. Textile production ended in 2004 when Richards of Aberdeen closed.
Grey granite was quarried at Rubislaw quarry for more than 300 years, and used for paving setts, kerb and building stones, and monumental and other ornamental pieces. Aberdeen granite was used to build the terraces of the Houses of Parliament and Waterloo Bridge in London. Quarrying finally ceased in 1971. The current owners have begun pumping 40 years of rain water from the quarry with the aim of developing a heritage centre on the site.
Fishing was once the predominant industry, but was surpassed by deep-sea fisheries, which derived a great impetus from improved technologies throughout the 20th century. Catches have fallen because of overfishing and the use of the harbour by oil support vessels, and so although still an important fishing port it is now eclipsed by the more northerly ports of Peterhead and Fraserburgh. The Fisheries Research Services are headquartered in Aberdeen, and there is a marine research lab in Torry.
Aberdeen is well regarded for the agricultural and soil research carried out at The James Hutton Institute (formerly the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute), which has close links to the city's two universities. The Rowett Research Institute is a world-renowned research centre for studies into food and nutrition located in Aberdeen. It has produced three Nobel laureates and there is a high concentration of life scientists working in the city.
As oil reserves in the North Sea decrease there is an effort to rebrand Aberdeen as "Energy Capital of Europe" rather than "Oil Capital of Europe", and there is interest in the development of new energy sources; and technology transfer from oil into renewable energy and other industries is under way. The "Energetica" initiative led by Scottish Enterprise has been designed to accelerate this process. As of 2013, Aberdeen remained a major world centre for undersea petroleum technology.
Aberdeen had been a major maritime centre throughout the 19th century, when a group of local entrepreneurs launched the first steam-powered trawler. The steam trawling industry expanded and by 1933 Aberdeen was Scotland's top fishing port, employing nearly 3,000 men with 300 vessels sailing from its harbour. By the time oil was coming on stream, much of the trawling fleet had relocated to Peterhead. Although Aberdeen still brings in substantial catches, the tugs, safety vessels and supply ships which pack the harbour far outnumber the trawlers.
Geologists had speculated about the existence of oil and gas in the North Sea since the middle of the 20th century, but tapping its deep and inhospitable waters was another story. With the Middle Eastern oil sheiks becoming more aware of the political and economic power of their oil reserves and government threats of rationing, the industry began to consider the North Sea as a viable source of oil. Exploration commenced in the 1960s and the first major find in the British sector was in November 1970 in the Forties field, east of Aberdeen.
By late 1975, after years of intense construction the necessary infrastructure was in place. In Aberdeen, at BP's (British Petroleum) headquarters, the Queen pressed the button that would set the whole thing moving. Oil flowed from the rig directly to the refinery at far-away Grangemouth. While many ports have suffered decline, Aberdeen remains busy because of the oil trade and the influx of people connected with the industry, a subsequent rise in property prices have brought prosperity to the area.
The industry supports about 47,000 jobs locally, and known reserves ensure that oil will continue to flow well into the 21st century. As a major port in the UK, Aberdeen receives many ships calling at the port. Seafarers' welfare organisation, Apostleship of the Sea has a port chaplain in Aberdeen to offer practical and pastoral support to them.
In 2011, the Centre for Cities named Aberdeen as the best placed city for growth in Britain, as the country looked to emerge from the recent economic downturn. With energy still providing the backbone of the local economy, recent years have seen very large new investment in the North Sea owing to rising oil prices and favourable government tax incentives. This has led to several oil majors and independents building new global offices in the city.
Aberdeen City and Shire's Gross Domestic Product is estimated at over £11.4 billion, accounting for over 17% of the overall Scottish GDP. Five of Scotland's top ten businesses are based in Aberdeen with a collective turnover of £14 billion, yielding a profit in excess of £2.4 billion. Alongside this 29 of Scotland's top 100 businesses are located in Aberdeen with an employment rate of 77.9%, making it the 2nd highest UK city for employment.
Figures released in 2016 ranked Aberdeen as having the second highest amount of patents processed per person in the UK.
The traditional shopping streets are Union Street and George Street, now complemented by shopping centres, notably the Bon Accord Centre and the Trinity Shopping Centre. A £190 million retail development, Union Square, reached completion in late September/early October 2009. Major retail parks away from the city centre include the Berryden Retail Park, the Kittybrewster Retail Park and the Beach Boulevard Retail Park.
In March 2004, Aberdeen was awarded Fairtrade City status by the Fairtrade Foundation. Along with Dundee, it shares the distinction of being the first city in Scotland to receive this accolade.
Aberdeen's architecture is known for its principal use during the Victorian era of granite, which has led to its local nickname of the "Granite City" or more romantically the less commonly used name the "Silver City", since the Mica in the stone sparkles in the sun. The hard grey stone is one of the most durable materials available and helps to explain why the city's buildings look brand-new when they have been newly cleaned and the cement has been pointed. Unlike other Scottish cities where sandstone has been used, the buildings are not weathering and need very little structural maintenance on their masonry. The buildings can however become noticeably darker as a result of pollution and grime accumulated over the years. There has however been great success in cleaning the buildings which can result in their façade being restored back to much how they looked originally.
Amongst the notable buildings in the city's main street, Union Street, are the Town and County Bank, the Music Hall, the Trinity Hall of the incorporated trades (originating between 1398 and 1527, although completely rebuilt in the 1860s), now a shopping mall; the former office of the Northern Assurance Company, and the National Bank of Scotland. In Castle Street, a continuation eastwards of Union Street, is the new Aberdeen Town House, a very prominent landmark in Aberdeen, built between 1868 and 1873 to a design by Peddie and Kinnear.
Alexander Marshall Mackenzie's extension to Marischal College on Broad Street, opened by King Edward VII in 1906, created the second largest granite building in the world (after the Escorial, Madrid).
In addition to the many fine landmark buildings, Aberdeen has many prominent public statues, three of the most notable being William Wallace at the junction between Union Terrace and Rosemount Viaduct, Robert Burns on Union Terrace above Union Terrace Gardens, and Robert the Bruce holding aloft the charter he issued to the city in 1319 on Broad Street, outside Marischal College.
Aberdeen has long been famous for its 45 parks and gardens, and citywide floral displays which include two million roses, eleven million daffodils and three million crocuses. The city has won the Royal Horticultural Society's Britain in Bloom 'Best City' award ten times, the overall Scotland in Bloom competition twenty times and the large city category every year since 1968. However, despite recent spurious reports, Aberdeen has never been banned from the Britain in Bloom competition. The city won the 2006 Scotland in Bloom "Best City" award along with the International Cities in Bloom award. The suburb of Dyce also won the Small Towns award.
Duthie Park opened in 1899 on the north bank of the River Dee. It was named after and given to the city by Miss Elizabeth Crombie Duthie of Ruthrieston in 1881. It has extensive gardens, a rose hill, boating pond, bandstand, and play area as well as Europe's second largest enclosed gardens the David Welch Winter Gardens. Hazlehead Park, is large and forested, located on the outskirts of the city, it is popular with walkers in the forests, sports enthusiasts, naturalists and picnickers. There are football pitches, two golf courses, a pitch and putt course and a horse riding school.
Aberdeen's success in the Britain in Bloom competitions is often attributed to Johnston Gardens, a small park of one hectare in the west end of the city containing many different flowers and plants which have been renowned for their beauty. In 2002, the garden was named the best garden in the British Islands. Seaton Park, formerly the grounds of a private house, is on the edge of the grounds of St Machar's Cathedral. The Cathedral Walk is maintained in a formal style with a great variety of plants providing a popular display. The park includes several other areas with contrasting styles to this. Union Terrace Gardens opened in 1879 and is situated in the centre of the city. It covers in the centre of Aberdeen bordered on three sides by Union Street, Union Terrace and Rosemount Viaduct. The park forms a natural amphitheatre located in the Denburn Valley and is an oasis of peace and calm in the city centre. A recent proposal to build a three-storey concrete and steel superstructure in place of the gardens, part of which will provide a commercial concourse, has proved highly controversial.
Situated next to each other, Victoria Park and Westburn Park cover between them. Victoria Park opened in 1871. There is a conservatory used as a seating area and a fountain made of fourteen different granites, presented to the people by the granite polishers and master builders of Aberdeen. Opposite to the north is Westburn Park opened in 1901. With large grass pitches it is widely used for field sports. There is large tennis centre with indoor and outdoor courts, a children's cycle track, play area and a grass boules lawn.
Aberdeen has hosted several theatres throughout its history, some of which have subsequently been converted or destroyed. The most
famous include:
The main concert hall is the Music Hall on Union Street, built in 1822.
Aberdeen Airport (ABZ), at Dyce in the north of the city, serves domestic and international destinations including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Ireland and Scandinavian countries. The heliport which serves the oil industry and rescue services is one of the world's busiest commercial heliports.
Aberdeen railway station is on the main UK rail network and Abellio ScotRail has frequent direct trains to major cities Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness. London North Eastern Railway and the Caledonian Sleeper operate direct trains to London. In 2007 additions were made and a new ticket office was built in the building. The UK's longest direct rail journey runs from Aberdeen to Penzance. It is operated by CrossCountry, leaving Aberdeen at 08:20 and taking 13 hours and 23 minutes. Today, all railway services to the south run via Dundee. The faster main line from Aberdeen to Perth via Forfar and Strathmore closed in 1967 as a result of the Beeching cuts, and the faster main line from Perth to Edinburgh via Glenfarg also subsequently closed in 1970.
Until 2007, a 1950s-style concrete bus station at Guild Street served out-of-the-city locations; it has since transferred to a new and well-presented bus station just 100 metres to the east off Market Street as part of the Union Square development.
There are six major roads in and out of the city. The A90 is the main arterial route into the city from the north and south, linking Aberdeen to Edinburgh, Dundee, Brechin and Perth in the south and Ellon, Peterhead and Fraserburgh in the north. The A96 links Elgin and Inverness and the north west. The A93 is the main route to the west, heading towards Royal Deeside and the Cairngorms. After Braemar, it turns south, providing an alternative tourist route to Perth. The A944 also heads west, through Westhill and on to Alford. The A92 was the original southerly road to Aberdeen prior to the building of the A90, and is now used as a tourist route, connecting the towns of Montrose and Arbroath and on the east coast. The A947 exits the city at Dyce and goes on to Newmachar, Oldmeldrum and Turriff finally ending at Banff and Macduff.
After first being mooted some 60 years ago and being held up for the past five years by a number of legal challenges, Aberdeen's long-awaited Western Peripheral Route was given the go-ahead after campaigners lost their appeal to the UK Supreme Court in October 2012. The route was earmarked to be completed in 2018 and was hoped to significantly reduce traffic congestion in and around the city. Aberdeen Harbour is important as the largest in the north of Scotland and serves the ferry route to Orkney and Shetland. Established in 1136, the harbour has been referred to as the oldest business in Britain.
FirstGroup operates the city buses under the name First Aberdeen, as the successor of Grampian Regional Transport (GRT) and Aberdeen Corporation Tramways. Aberdeen is the global headquarters of FirstGroup plc, having grown from the GRT Group. First is still based at the former Aberdeen Tramways depot on King Street, which has now been redeveloped into a new Global Headquarters and Aberdeen bus depot. Stagecoach East Scotland also run buses in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, under the Stagecoach Bluebird brand. Megabus run buses from the bus station to places north and south of the city.
National Express operate express coach services to London twice daily. The 590 service, operated by Bruce's Coaches of Salsburgh operates in the morning and runs through the day, calling at Dundee, Perth, Glasgow, Hamilton, Carlisle, Milton Keynes, Golders Green and Victoria Coach Station, whilst the 592 (operated by Parks of Hamilton) leaves in the evening and travels overnight, calling at Dundee, Glasgow, Hamilton, Carlisle, Heathrow Airport and Victoria Coach Station. In addition, there are Megabus services to London and Edinburgh and Scottish Citylink services to Glasgow, operated by Stagecoach East Scotland and Parks of Hamilton using the Citylink gold and blue livery.
Aberdeen is connected to the UK National Cycle Network, and has a track to the south connecting to cities such as Dundee and Edinburgh and one to the north that forks about from the city into two different tracks heading to Inverness and Fraserburgh respectively. Two popular footpaths along old railway tracks are the Deeside Way to Banchory (which will eventually connect to Ballater) and the Formartine and Buchan Way to Ellon, both used by a mixture of cyclists, walkers and occasionally horses. Four park-and-ride sites serve the city: Stonehaven and Ellon (approx out from the city centre) and Kingswells and Bridge of Don (approx out).
The Dee Estuary, Aberdeen's harbour, has continually been improved. Starting out as a fishing port, moving onto steam trawlers, the oil industry, it is now a major port of departure for the Baltic and Scandinavia. Major exports include fertiliser, granite, and chemicals.
Aberdeen has two universities, the ancient "University of Aberdeen", and "Robert Gordon University", a modern university often referred to as RGU. Aberdeen's student rate of 11.5% is higher than the national average of 7%.
The University of Aberdeen began as King's College, Aberdeen, which was founded in 1495 by William Elphinstone (1431–1514), Bishop of Aberdeen and Chancellor of Scotland. Marischal College, a separate institution, was founded in "New" Aberdeen by George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal of Scotland in 1593. These institutions were merged by order of Parliament in 1860 to form the University of Aberdeen. The university is the fifth oldest in the English-speaking world and offers degrees in a full range of disciplines. Its main campus is in Old Aberdeen in the north of the city and it currently has approximately 14,000 students. The university's debating society is the oldest in Scotland, founded in 1848 as the King's College Debating Society. Today, Aberdeen is consistently ranked among the top 200 universities in the world and is ranked within the top 30 universities in the United Kingdom. Aberdeen was also named the 2019 Scottish University of the Year by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide.
Robert Gordon's College (originally Robert Gordon's Hospital) was founded in 1750 by the merchant Robert Gordon, grandson of the map maker Robert Gordon of Straloch, and was further endowed in 1816 by Alexander Simpson of Collyhill. Originally devoted to the instruction and maintenance of the sons of poor burgesses of guild and trade in the city, it was reorganised in 1881 as a day and night school for secondary and technical education. In 1903, the vocational education component of the college was designated a Central Institution and was renamed as the Robert Gordon Institute of Technology in 1965. In 1992, university status was awarded and it became Robert Gordon University. The university has expanded and developed significantly in recent years, and was named Best Modern University in the UK for 2012 by "The Sunday Times". It was previously "The Sunday Times" Scottish University of the Year for 2011, primarily because of its record on graduate employment. The citation for the 2011 award read: "With a graduate unemployment rate that is lower than the most famous universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, plus a flourishing reputation for research, high student satisfaction rates and ambitious plans for its picturesque campus, the Robert Gordon University is The Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year".
RGU had two campuses: one in the city centre at Schoolhill/St. Andrew Street and a larger suburban campus at Garthdee and currently has approximately 15,500 students. As of 2013, the Garthdee campus was expanded to include all schools, with the Schoolhill/St. Andrew Street campus being sold to Robert Gordon's College, and the building now functions as the school's Science and Technology Centre. The closure of the Schoolhill site includes the removal of the Student Union building, giving Aberdeen the dubious distinction of having two universities but no student bar.
Aberdeen is also home to two artistic schools: Gray's School of Art, founded in 1886, which is one of the oldest established colleges of art in the UK. Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment, was one of the first architectural schools to have its training courses recognised by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Both are now part of Robert Gordon University and are based at its Garthdee campus. North East Scotland College has several campuses in the city and offers a wide variety of part-time and full-time courses leading to several different qualifications in science. The Scottish Agricultural College is based just outside Aberdeen, on the Craibstone Estate. This is situated beside the roundabout for Aberdeen Airport on the A96. The college provides three services—Learning, Research and Consultancy. The college features many land based courses such as Agriculture, Countryside Management, Sustainable Environmental Management and Rural Business Management. There are a variety of courses from diplomas through to master's degrees. The Marine Laboratory Aberdeen, which specialises in fisheries, Macaulay Land Use Research Institute (soil science), and the Rowett Research Institute (animal nutrition) are some other higher education institutions.
The Aberdeen College of Performing Arts also provides full-time Drama and Musical Theatre training at Further Education level.
There are currently 12 secondary schools and 54 primary schools which are run by the city council. The most notable are Aberdeen Grammar School (founded in 1257), Harlaw Academy, Cults Academy, and Oldmachar Academy which were all rated in the top 50 Scottish secondary schools league tables published by "The Times" in 2005. Harlaw Academy was taken down from the list after a short time but is still a popular school.
There are a number of private schools in Aberdeen: Robert Gordon's College, Albyn School for Girls (co-educational as of 2005), St Margaret's School for Girls, the Hamilton School (closed by the Child Care Inspectorate in early 2014), the Total French School (for French oil industry families), the International School of Aberdeen and a Waldorf/Steiner School.
Primary schools in Aberdeen include Airyhall Primary School, Albyn School, Ashley Road Primary School, Balgownie Primary School, Broomhill Primary School, Cornhill Primary School (the city's largest), Culter Primary School, Cults Primary School, Danestone Primary School, Fernielea Primary school, Ferryhill Primary School, Gilcomstoun Primary School, Glashieburn Primary School, Greenbrae School, Hamilton School, Kaimhill Primary School, Kingsford Primary School, Kittybrewster Primary School, Middleton Park Primary School, Mile-End School, Muirfield Primary School, Robert Gordon's College, Skene Square Primary School, St. Joseph's Primary School and St Margaret's School for Girls.
The city has a wide range of cultural activities, amenities and museums. The city is regularly visited by Scotland's National Arts Companies. The Aberdeen Art Gallery houses a collection of Impressionist, Victorian, Scottish and 20th-century British paintings as well as collections of silver and glass. It also includes The Alexander Macdonald Bequest, a collection of late 19th-century works donated by the museum's first benefactor and a constantly changing collection of contemporary work and regular visiting exhibitions.
The Aberdeen Maritime Museum, located in Shiprow, tells the story of Aberdeen's links with the sea from the days of sail and clipper ships to the latest oil and gas exploration technology. It includes an model of the Murchison oil production platform and a 19th-century assembly taken from Rattray Head lighthouse
Provost Ross' House is the second oldest dwelling house in the city. It was built in 1593 and became the residence of Provost John Ross of Arnage in 1702. The house retains some original medieval features, including a kitchen, fireplaces and beam-and-board ceilings. The Gordon Highlanders Museum tells the story of one of Scotland's best known regiments.
Marischal Museum holds the principal collections of the University of Aberdeen, comprising some 80,000 items in the areas of fine art, Scottish history and archaeology, and European, Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology. The permanent displays and reference collections are augmented by regular temporary exhibitions. It closed to the public in 2008 for renovations; its reopening date has yet to be confirmed. The King's Museum acts as the main museum of the university in the meantime.
Aberdeen is home to a number of events and festivals including the Aberdeen International Youth Festival (the world's largest arts festival for young performers), Aberdeen Jazz Festival, Aberdeen Alternative Festival, "Rootin' Aboot" (a folk and roots music event), "Triptych", the University of Aberdeen's literature festival "Word" and DanceLive, Scotland's only Festival of contemporary dance, which is produced by the city's Citymoves dance organisation.
The Aberdeen Student Show, performed annually without interruption since 1921, under the auspices of the Aberdeen Students' Charities Campaign, is the longest-running of its kind in the United Kingdom. It is written, produced and performed by students and graduates of Aberdeen's universities and higher education institutions. Since 1929—other than on a handful of occasions—it has been staged at His Majesty's Theatre. The Student Show traditionally combines comedy and music, inspired by the North-East's Doric dialect and humour.
National festivals which visited Aberdeen in 2012 included the British Science Festival in September, hosted by the University of Aberdeen but with events also taking place at Robert Gordon University and at other venues across the city. In February 2012 the University of Aberdeen also hosted the Inter Varsity Folk Dance Festival, the longest running folk festival in the United Kingdom.
Aberdeen's music scene includes a variety of live music venues including pubs, clubs, and church choirs. The bars of Belmont Street are particularly known for featuring live music. Ceilidhs are also common in the city's halls. Popular music venues include the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre (AECC), Aberdeen Music Hall, along with smaller venues such as The Tunnels, The Moorings, Drummonds, Downstairs, The Lemon Tree and The Garage. Notable Aberdonian musicians include Annie Lennox, Emeli Sandé, cult band Pallas and contemporary composer John McLeod. There are many local bands including Grader, Sleepless, Hayworth, Deceptions, Without Reason, Monroe and Deadfire A large proportion of Aberdeen's classical music scene is based around the ensembles of Aberdeen University's music department, notably the Symphony Orchestra, Marischal Chamber Orchestra, and the Concert Band.
Cultural cinema, educational work and local film events are provided by The Belmont Picturehouse on Belmont Street, Peacock Visual Arts and The Foyer. The only Doric speaking feature film was released in 2008 by Stirton Productions and Canny Films. "One Day Removals" is a black comedy/adult drama starring Patrick Wight and Scott Ironside and tells the tale of two unlucky removal men whose day goes from bad to worse. It was filmed on location in Aberdeenshire for a budget of £60,000.
The local dialect of Lowland Scots is often known as "Doric", and is spoken not just in the city, but across the north-east of Scotland. It differs somewhat from other Scots dialects most noticeable are the pronunciation "f" for what is normally written "wh" and "ee" for what in standard English would usually be written "oo" (Scots "ui"). Every year the annual Doric Festival takes place in Aberdeenshire to celebrate the history of the north-east's language. As with all Scots dialects in urban areas, it is not spoken as widely as it used to be in Aberdeen.
Aberdeen is home to Scotland's oldest newspaper the "Press and Journal", a local and regional newspaper first published in 1747. The "Press and Journal" and its sister paper the tabloid "Evening Express" are printed six days a week by Aberdeen Journals. There is one free newspaper, the "Aberdeen Citizen". BBC Scotland has a network studio production base in the city's Beechgrove area, and BBC Aberdeen produces "The Beechgrove Potting Shed" for radio while Tern Television produces "The Beechgrove Garden" television programme. The city is also home to STV North (formerly Grampian Television), which produces the regional news programmes such as "STV News at Six", as well as local commercials. The station, based at Craigshaw Business Park in Tullos, was based at larger studios in Queens Cross from September 1961 until June 2003.
There are three commercial radio stations operating in the city: Northsound Radio, which runs Northsound 1 and Northsound 2, and independent station Original 106. Other radio stations include NECR FM ("North-East Community Radio FM") DAB station, and shmu FM managed by "Station House Media Unit" which supports community members to run Aberdeen's first (and only) full-time community radio station, broadcasting on 99.8 MHz FM.
The Aberdeen region has given its name to a number of dishes, including the Aberdeen buttery (also known as "rowie") and Aberdeen Sausage. The Aberdeen buttery is more frequently seen and is sold at bakeries and supermarkets throughout the city. It is comparable to a croissant that is flat and round with a buttery, savoury taste and flaky texture. It is often toasted and served plain or with butter or jam.
In 2015, a study was published in The Scotsman which analysed the presence of branded fast food outlets in Scotland. Of the ten towns and cities analysed, Aberdeen was found to have the lowest per capita concentration, with just 0.12 stores per 1,000 inhabitants.
There are two Aberdeen-based football clubs in the SPFL, the senior branch of Scottish football. Aberdeen F.C. ( The Dons) play in the Scottish Premiership at Pittodrie Stadium. The club won the European Cup Winners Cup and the European Super Cup in 1983, the Scottish Premier League Championship four times (1955, 1980, 1984 and 1985), and the Scottish Cup seven times (1947, 1970, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1986 and 1990). Under the management of Alex Ferguson, Aberdeen was a major force in British football during the 1980s. As of the 2019–20 season, the club is managed by Derek McInnes. There are plans to build a new Aberdeen Stadium in the future. Under the management of McInnes the team won the 2014 Scottish League Cup and followed it up with a second place league finish for the first time for more than 20 years in the following season.
The other senior team is Cove Rangers of League Two, who play at Balmoral Stadium in the suburb of Cove Bay. Cove won the Highland Football League championship in 2001, 2008, 2009, 2013 and 2019, winning the League Two play-offs in 2019 and earning promotion. This means that the city of Aberdeen has two clubs in Scottish football's senior leagues for the first time in history.
There was also a historic senior team Bon Accord F.C. who no longer play. Local junior teams include Banks O' Dee F.C., Culter F.C., F.C. Stoneywood, Glentanar F.C., Sunnybank and Hermes F.C..
Aberdeen hosted Caledonia Reds a Scottish rugby team, before they merged with the Glasgow Warriors in 1998. The city is also home to the Scottish Premiership Division One rugby club Aberdeen GSFP RFC who play at Rubislaw Playing Fields, and Aberdeenshire RFC which was founded in 1875 and runs Junior, Senior Men's, Senior Ladies and Touch sections from the Woodside Sports Complex and also Aberdeen Wanderers RFC. Former Wanderers' player Jason White was captain of the Scotland national rugby union team.
Aberdeenshire Rugby Football Club is based in the North of the city at Woodside Sports Complex near the Great North Road on the banks of the river Don. They currently play in the Scottish League Championship B (East), the 3rd tier of club rugby.
In 2005 the President of the SRU said it was hoped eventually to establish a professional team in Aberdeen. In November 2008 the city hosted a rugby international at Pittodrie between Scotland and Canada, with Scotland winning 41–0. In November 2010 the city once again hosted a rugby international at Pittodrie between Scotland and Samoa, with Scotland winning 19–16.
Aberdeen Warriors rugby league team play in the Rugby League Conference Division One. The Warriors also run Under 15's and 17's teams. Aberdeen Grammar School won the Saltire Schools Cup in 2011.
The Royal Aberdeen Golf Club, founded in 1780 is the sixth oldest golf club in the world, and hosted the Senior British Open in 2005, and the amateur team event the Walker Cup in 2011. Royal Aberdeen also hosted the Scottish Open in 2014, won by Justin Rose. The club has a second course, and there are public golf courses at Auchmill, Balnagask, Hazlehead and King's Links. The 1999 winner of The Open Championship, Paul Lawrie, hails from the city.
There are new courses planned for the area, including world class facilities with major financial backing, the city and shire are set to become a hotbed for golf tourism. In Summer 2012, Donald Trump opened a new state of the art golf course at Menie, just north of the city, as the Trump International Golf Links, Scotland.
The "City of Aberdeen Swim Team" (COAST) was based in Northfield swimming pool, but since the opening of the Aberdeen Aquatics Centre in 2014, it is now based there, as it has a 50 m pool as opposed to the 25 m pool at Northfield. It has been in operation since 1996. The team comprises several smaller swimming clubs, and has enjoyed success throughout Scotland and in international competitions. Three of the team's swimmers qualified for the 2006 Commonwealth Games.
There are four boat clubs that row on the River Dee: Aberdeen Boat Club (ABC), Aberdeen Schools Rowing Association (ASRA), Aberdeen University Boat Club (AUBC) and Robert Gordon University Boat Club (RGUBC). There are regattas and head races annually, managed by the Committee of the Dee. There is also a boat race held every year between AUBC and RGUBC. The race is in mixed eights, and usually held in late February / early March.
Aberdeen boasts a large cricket community with 4 local leagues operating that comprise a total of 25 clubs fielding 36 teams. The city has two national league sides, Aberdeenshire and Stoneywood-Dyce. Local 'Grades' cricket has been played in Aberdeen since 1884. Aberdeenshire were the 2009 & 2014 Scottish National Premier League and Scottish Cup Champions, but now face relegation in the 2019 season
Aberdeen Lynx are an amateur ice hockey team who play in the Scottish National League and are based at the Linx Ice Arena. The arena has a seating capacity of 1,100. They were play-off champions in season 2015–2016. The club also field teams at the Under 20, Under 16, Under 14 and Under 12 age groups.
Aberdeen University Shinty Club (Scottish Gaelic:Club Camanachd Oilthigh Obar Dheathain) is the oldest constituted shinty club in the world, dating back to 1861. The team plays its home games at Balgownie in the Bridge of Don.
The city council operates public tennis courts in various parks including an indoor tennis centre at Westburn Park. The Beach Leisure Centre is home to a climbing wall, gymnasium and a swimming pool. There are numerous swimming pools dotted around the city notably the largest, the Bon-Accord Baths which closed down in 2006.
Aberdeen City council also have an outdoor education service which is now known as "adventure aberdeen", that provides abseiling, surfing, white water rafting, gorge walking, kayaking and open canoeing, mountaineering, sailing, mountain biking and rock climbing. They say they aim to "Inspire learning through adventure", and have many programs for children and adults.
In common with many other major towns and cities in the UK, Aberdeen has an active roller derby league, Granite City Roller Girls. The Aberdeen Roughnecks American football club are a new team which started in 2012. They are an adult contact team who currently train at Seaton Park. This is the first team which Aberdeen has enjoyed since the Granite City Oilers were wound up in the late 1990s. Aberdeen Oilers Floorball Club was founded in 2007. The club initially attracted a range of experienced Scandinavian and other European players who were studying in Aberdeen. Since their formation, Aberdeen Oilers have played in the British Floorball Northern League and went on to win the league in the 2008/09 season. The club played a major role in setting up a ladies league in Scotland. The Oilers' ladies team ended up second in the first ladies league season (2008/09).
The public health service in Scotland, NHS Scotland provides for the people of Aberdeen through the NHS Grampian health board. Aberdeen Royal Infirmary is the largest hospital in the city and one of the largest in Europe (the location of the city's A&E department), Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital, a paediatric hospital, Royal Cornhill Hospital for mental health, Aberdeen Maternity Hospital, an antenatal hospital, Woodend Hospital, which specialises in rehabilitation and long-term illnesses and conditions, and City Hospital and Woolmanhill Hospital, which host several out-patient clinics and offices.
Albyn Hospital is a private hospital located in the west end of the city.
Aberdeen City Council is responsible for city owned infrastructure which is paid for by a mixture of council tax and income from HM Treasury. Infrastructure and services run by the council include: clearing snow in winter, city wardens, maintaining parks, refuse collection, sewage, street cleaning and street lighting. Infrastructure in private hands includes electricity, gas and telecoms. Water supplies are provided by Scottish Water.
Aberdeen is twinned with Regensburg, Germany (1955), Clermont-Ferrand, France (1983), Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (1986), Stavanger, Norway (1990), Gomel, Belarus (1990) and Barranquilla, Colombia (2016).
Houston, Texas, is twinned with the former region of Grampian, of which Aberdeen is the largest settlement. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1627 |
Antipope
An antipope () is a person who, in opposition to the lawful pope, makes a significant attempt to occupy the position of Bishop of Rome and leader of the Catholic Church. At times between the 3rd and mid-15th centuries, antipopes were supported by important factions within the Church itself and by secular rulers.
Sometimes it was difficult to distinguish which of two claimants should be called pope and which antipope, as in the case of Pope Leo VIII and Pope Benedict V.
Persons who merely claim to be pope and have few followers, such as the modern sedevacantist antipopes, are not classified with the historical antipopes.
Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235) is commonly considered to be the earliest antipope, as he headed a separate group within the Church in Rome against Pope Callixtus I. Hippolytus was reconciled to Callixtus's second successor, Pope Pontian, and both he and Pontian are honoured as saints by the Catholic Church with a shared feast day on 13 August. Whether two or more persons have been confused in this account of Hippolytus and whether Hippolytus actually declared himself to be the Bishop of Rome, remains unclear, since no such claim by Hippolytus has been cited in the writings attributed to him.
Eusebius quotes from an unnamed earlier writer the story of Natalius, a 3rd-century priest who accepted the bishopric of the Adoptionists, a heretical group in Rome. Natalius soon repented and tearfully begged Pope Zephyrinus to receive him into communion.
Novatian (d. 258), another third-century figure, certainly claimed the See of Rome in opposition to Pope Cornelius, and if Natalius and Hippolytus were excluded because of the uncertainties concerning them, Novatian could then be said to be the first antipope.
The period in which antipopes were most numerous was during the struggles between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors of the 11th and 12th centuries. The emperors frequently imposed their own nominees to further their own causes. The popes, likewise, sometimes sponsored rival imperial claimants (anti-kings) in Germany to overcome a particular emperor.
The Western Schism—which began in 1378, when the French cardinals, claiming that the election of Pope Urban VI was invalid, elected antipope Clement VII as a rival to the Roman Pope—led eventually to two competing lines of antipopes: the Avignon line (Clement VII took up residence in Avignon, France), and the Pisan line. The Pisan line, which began in 1409, was named after the town of Pisa, Italy, where the (Pisan) council had elected antipope Alexander V as a third claimant. To end the schism, in May 1415, the Council of Constance deposed antipope John XXIII of the Pisan line. Pope Gregory XII of the Roman line resigned in July 1415. In 1417, the Council also formally deposed antipope Benedict XIII of Avignon, but he refused to resign. Afterwards, Pope Martin V was elected and was accepted everywhere except in the small and rapidly diminishing area that remained faithful to Benedict XIII. The scandal of the Western Schism created anti-papal sentiment and fed into the Protestant Reformation at the turn of the 16th century.
The following table gives the names of the antipopes included in the list of popes and antipopes in the "Annuario Pontificio", with the addition of the names of Natalius (in spite of doubts about his historicity) and Antipope Clement VIII (whose following was insignificant).
An asterisk marks those who were included in the conventional numbering of later Popes who took the same name. More commonly, the antipope is ignored in later papal regnal numbers; for example, there was an Antipope John XXIII, but the new Pope John elected in 1958 was also called John XXIII. For the additional confusion regarding Popes named John, see Pope John (numbering).
The list of popes and antipopes in the "Annuario Pontificio" attaches the following note to the name of Pope Leo VIII (963–965):
At this point, as again in the mid-11th century, we come across elections in which problems of harmonising historical criteria and those of theology and canon law make it impossible to decide clearly which side possessed the legitimacy whose factual existence guarantees the unbroken lawful succession of the successors of Saint Peter. The uncertainty that in some cases results has made it advisable to abandon the assignation of successive numbers in the list of the popes.
Thus, because of the obscurities about mid-11th-century canon law and the historical facts, the "Annuario Pontificio" lists Sylvester III as a pope, without thereby expressing a judgement on his legitimacy. The "Catholic Encyclopedia" places him in its "List of Popes", but with the annotation: "Considered by some to be an antipope". Other sources classify him as an antipope.
Those with asterisks (*) were counted in subsequent Papal numbering.
Many antipopes created cardinals, known as "quasi-cardinals", and a few created cardinal-nephews, known as "quasi-cardinal-nephews".
In modern times various people claim to be pope and, though they do not fit the technical definition of "antipope", are sometimes referred to as such. They are usually leaders of sedevacantist groups who view the See of Rome as vacant and elect someone to fill it. They are sometimes referred to as conclavists because of their claim, on the basis of an election by a "conclave" of perhaps half a dozen laypeople, as in the case of David Bawden ("Pope Michael I"), to have rendered the See no longer vacant. A significant number of these have taken the name "Peter II", owing to its special significance. From the point of view of the Catholic Church, they are schismatics, and as such are automatically excommunicated.
The Palmarian Catholic Church regards Pope Paul VI, whom they revere as a martyr, and his predecessors as true popes, but hold, on the grounds of claimed apparitions, that the Pope of Rome is excommunicated and that the position of the Holy See has, since 1978, been transferred to the See of El Palmar de Troya.
The following were elected by allegedly faithful Catholics, none of whom were cardinals:
As the Patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt, has historically also held the title of Pope, a person who, in opposition to someone who is generally accepted as a legitimate Pope of Alexandria, claims to hold that position may also be considered an Antipope. In 2006, the defrocked married Coptic lector Max Michel became an Antipope of Alexandria, calling himself Maximos I. His claim to the Alexandrine Papacy was dismissed by both the Coptic Orthodox Pope Shenouda III and Pope Theodore II of the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria. The Coptic Pope of Alexandria and the Greek Pope of Alexandria currently view one another, not as Antipopes, but rather as successors to differing lines of apostolic succession that formed as a result of christological disputes in the fifth century.
Another Coptic (Alexandrian) Antipope is known to have laid claim in the fourth century. His name was Gregory of Cappadocia.
Antipopes have appeared as fictional characters. These may be either in historical fiction, as fictional portraits of well-known historical antipopes or as purely imaginary antipopes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1633 |
Aquaculture
Aquaculture (less commonly spelled aquiculture), also known as aquafarming, is the farming of fish, crustaceans, molluscs, aquatic plants, algae, and other organisms. Aquaculture involves cultivating freshwater and saltwater populations under controlled conditions, and can be contrasted with commercial fishing, which is the harvesting of wild fish. Mariculture refers to aquaculture practiced in marine environments and in underwater habitats.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), aquaculture "is understood to mean the farming of aquatic organisms including fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants. Farming implies some form of intervention in the rearing process to enhance production, such as regular stocking, feeding, protection from predators, etc. Farming also implies individual or corporate ownership of the stock being cultivated." The reported output from global aquaculture operations in 2014 supplied over one half of the fish and shellfish that is directly consumed by humans; however, there are issues about the reliability of the reported figures. Further, in current aquaculture practice, products from several pounds of wild fish are used to produce one pound of a piscivorous fish like salmon.
Particular kinds of aquaculture include fish farming, shrimp farming, oyster farming, mariculture, algaculture (such as seaweed farming), and the cultivation of ornamental fish. Particular methods include aquaponics and integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, both of which integrate fish farming and aquatic plant farming.
The Gunditjmara, the local Aboriginal Australian people in south-western Victoria, Australia, may have raised short-finned eels as early as about 4,580 BCE (6,600 years BP). Evidence indicates they developed about of volcanic floodplains in the vicinity of Lake Condah into a complex of channels and dams, and used woven traps to capture eels, and preserve them to eat all year round. The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, a World Heritage Site, is thought to be one of the oldest aquaculture sites in the world.
Oral tradition in China tells of the culture of the common carp, "Cyprinus carpio", as long ago as 2000–2100 BCE (around 4,000 years BP), but the earliest significant evidence lies in the literature, in the earliest monograph on fish culture called "The Classic of Fish Culture", by Fan Lai, written around 475 BCE (c.2475 BP). Another ancient Chinese guide to aquaculture was by Yang Yu Jing, written around 460 BCE, showing that carp farming was becoming more sophisticated. The Jiahu site in China has circumstantial archeological evidence as possibly the oldest aquaculture locations, dating from 6200BCE (about 8,200 years BP), but this is speculative. When the waters subsided after river floods, some fish, mainly carp, were trapped in lakes. Early aquaculturists fed their brood using nymphs and silkworm faeces, and ate them.
Ancient Egyptians might have farmed fish (especially Gilt-head bream) from Lake Bardawil about 1,500 BCE (3,520 years BP), and they traded them with Canaan.
"Gim" cultivation is the oldest aquaculture in Korea. Early cultivation methods used bamboo or oak sticks, which were replaced by newer methods that utilized nets in the 19th century. Floating rafts have been used for mass production since the 1920s.
Japanese cultivated seaweed by providing bamboo poles and, later, nets and oyster shells to serve as anchoring surfaces for spores.
Romans bred fish in ponds and farmed oysters in coastal lagoons before 100 CE.
In central Europe, early Christian monasteries adopted Roman aquacultural practices. Aquaculture spread in Europe during the Middle Ages since away from the seacoasts and the big rivers, fish had to be salted so they did not rot. Improvements in transportation during the 19th century made fresh fish easily available and inexpensive, even in inland areas, making aquaculture less popular. The 15th-century fishponds of the Trebon Basin in the Czech Republic are maintained as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Hawaiians constructed oceanic fish ponds. A remarkable example is the "Menehune" fishpond dating from at least 1,000 years ago, at Alekoko. Legend says that it was constructed by the mythical Menehune dwarf people.
In the first half of the 18th century, German experimented with external fertilization of brown trouts and salmon. He wrote an article ""Von der künstlichen Erzeugung der Forellen und Lachse"" ("On the Artificial Production of Trout and Salmon") summarizing his findings, and is regarded as the founder of artificial fish rearing in Europe. By the latter decades of the 18th century, oyster farming had begun in estuaries along the Atlantic Coast of North America.
The word aquaculture appeared in an 1855 newspaper article in reference to the harvesting of ice. It also appeared in descriptions of the terrestrial agricultural practise of sub-irrigation in the late 19th century before becoming associated primarily with the cultivation of aquatic plant and animal species.
In 1859, Stephen Ainsworth of West Bloomfield, New York, began experiments with brook trout. By 1864, Seth Green had established a commercial fish-hatching operation at Caledonia Springs, near Rochester, New York. By 1866, with the involvement of Dr. W. W. Fletcher of Concord, Massachusetts, artificial fish hatcheries were under way in both Canada and the United States. When the Dildo Island fish hatchery opened in Newfoundland in 1889, it was the largest and most advanced in the world. The word aquaculture was used in descriptions of the hatcheries experiments with cod and lobster in 1890.
By the 1920s, the American Fish Culture Company of Carolina, Rhode Island, founded in the 1870s was one of the leading producers of trout. During the 1940s, they had perfected the method of manipulating the day and night cycle of fish so that they could be artificially spawned year around.
Californians harvested wild kelp and attempted to manage supply around 1900, later labeling it a wartime resource.
Harvest stagnation in wild fisheries and overexploitation of popular marine species, combined with a growing demand for high-quality protein, encouraged aquaculturists to domesticate other marine species. At the outset of modern aquaculture, many were optimistic that a "Blue Revolution" could take place in aquaculture, just as the Green Revolution of the 20th century had revolutionized agriculture. Although land animals had long been domesticated, most seafood species were still caught from the wild. Concerned about the impact of growing demand for seafood on the world's oceans, prominent ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau wrote in 1973: "With earth's burgeoning human populations to feed, we must turn to the sea with new understanding and new technology."
About 430 (97%) of the species cultured were domesticated during the 20th and 21st centuries, of which an estimated 106 came in the decade to 2007. Given the long-term importance of agriculture, to date, only 0.08% of known land plant species and 0.0002% of known land animal species have been domesticated, compared with 0.17% of known marine plant species and 0.13% of known marine animal species. Domestication typically involves about a decade of scientific research. Domesticating aquatic species involves fewer risks to humans than do land animals, which took a large toll in human lives. Most major human diseases originated in domesticated animals, including diseases such as smallpox and diphtheria, that like most infectious diseases, move to humans from animals. No human pathogens of comparable virulence have yet emerged from marine species.
Biological control methods to manage parasites are already being used, such as cleaner fish (e.g. lumpsuckers and wrasse) to control sea lice populations in salmon farming. Models are being used to help with spatial planning and siting of fish farms in order to minimize impact.
The decline in wild fish stocks has increased the demand for farmed fish. However, finding alternative sources of protein and oil for fish feed is necessary so the aquaculture industry can grow sustainably; otherwise, it represents a great risk for the over-exploitation of forage fish.
Another recent issue following the banning in 2008 of organotins by the International Maritime Organization is the need to find environmentally friendly, but still effective, compounds with antifouling effects.
Many new natural compounds are discovered every year, but producing them on a large enough scale for commercial purposes is almost impossible.
It is highly probable that future developments in this field will rely on microorganisms, but greater funding and further research is needed to overcome the lack of knowledge in this field.
Microalgae, also referred to as phytoplankton, microphytes, or planktonic algae, constitute the majority of cultivated algae. Macroalgae commonly known as seaweed also have many commercial and industrial uses, but due to their size and specific requirements, they are not easily cultivated on a large scale and are most often taken in the wild.
In 2016, aquaculture was the source of 96.5 percent by volume of the total 31.2 million tonnes of wild-collected and cultivated aquatic plants combined. Global production of farmed aquatic plants, overwhelmingly dominated by seaweeds, grew in output volume from 13.5 million tonnes in 1995 to just over 30 million tonnes in 2016.
The farming of fish is the most common form of aquaculture. It involves raising fish commercially in tanks, fish ponds, or ocean enclosures, usually for food. A facility that releases juvenile fish into the wild for recreational fishing or to supplement a species' natural numbers is generally referred to as a fish hatchery. Worldwide, the most important fish species used in fish farming are, in order, carp, salmon, tilapia, and catfish.
In the Mediterranean, young bluefin tuna are netted at sea and towed slowly towards the shore. They are then interned in offshore pens (sometimes made from floating HDPE pipe) where they are further grown for the market. In 2009, researchers in Australia managed for the first time to coax southern bluefin tuna to breed in landlocked tanks. Southern bluefin tuna are also caught in the wild and fattened in grow-out sea cages in southern Spencer Gulf, South Australia.
A similar process is used in the salmon-farming section of this industry; juveniles are taken from hatcheries and a variety of methods are used to aid them in their maturation. For example, as stated above, some of the most important fish species in the industry, salmon, can be grown using a cage system. This is done by having netted cages, preferably in open water that has a strong flow, and feeding the salmon a special food mixture that aids their growth. This process allows for year-round growth of the fish, thus a higher harvest during the correct seasons. An additional method, known sometimes as sea ranching, has also been used within the industry. Sea ranching involves raising fish in a hatchery for a brief time and then releasing them into marine waters for further development, whereupon the fish are recaptured when they have matured.
Commercial shrimp farming began in the 1970s, and production grew steeply thereafter. Global production reached more than 1.6 million tonnes in 2003, worth about US$9 billion. About 75% of farmed shrimp is produced in Asia, in particular in China and Thailand. The other 25% is produced mainly in Latin America, where Brazil is the largest producer. Thailand is the largest exporter.
Shrimp farming has changed from its traditional, small-scale form in Southeast Asia into a global industry. Technological advances have led to ever higher densities per unit area, and broodstock is shipped worldwide. Virtually all farmed shrimp are penaeids (i.e., shrimp of the family Penaeidae), and just two species of shrimp, the Pacific white shrimp and the giant tiger prawn, account for about 80% of all farmed shrimp. These industrial monocultures are very susceptible to disease, which has decimated shrimp populations across entire regions. Increasing ecological problems, repeated disease outbreaks, and pressure and criticism from both nongovernmental organizations and consumer countries led to changes in the industry in the late 1990s and generally stronger regulations. In 1999, governments, industry representatives, and environmental organizations initiated a program aimed at developing and promoting more sustainable farming practices through the Seafood Watch program.
Freshwater prawn farming shares many characteristics with, including many problems with, marine shrimp farming. Unique problems are introduced by the developmental lifecycle of the main species, the giant river prawn.
The global annual production of freshwater prawns (excluding crayfish and crabs) in 2007 was about 460,000 tonnes, exceeding 1.86 billion dollars. Additionally, China produced about 370,000 tonnes of Chinese river crab.
In addition astaciculture is the freshwater farming of crayfish (mostly in the US, Australia, and Europe).
Aquacultured shellfish include various oyster, mussel, and clam species. These bivalves are filter and/or deposit feeders, which rely on ambient primary production rather than inputs of fish or other feed. As such, shellfish aquaculture is generally perceived as benign or even beneficial.
Depending on the species and local conditions, bivalve molluscs are either grown on the beach, on longlines, or suspended from rafts and harvested by hand or by dredging. In May 2017 a Belgian consortium installed the first of two trial mussel farms on a wind farm in the North Sea.
Abalone farming began in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Japan and China. Since the mid-1990s, this industry has become increasingly successful. Overfishing and poaching have reduced wild populations to the extent that farmed abalone now supplies most abalone meat. Sustainably farmed molluscs can be certified by Seafood Watch and other organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). WWF initiated the "Aquaculture Dialogues" in 2004 to develop measurable and performance-based standards for responsibly farmed seafood. In 2009, WWF co-founded the Aquaculture Stewardship Council with the Dutch Sustainable Trade Initiative to manage the global standards and certification programs.
After trials in 2012, a commercial "sea ranch" was set up in Flinders Bay, Western Australia, to raise abalone. The ranch is based on an artificial reef made up of 5000 () separate concrete units called "abitats" (abalone habitats). The 900 kg abitats can host 400 abalone each. The reef is seeded with young abalone from an onshore hatchery. The abalone feed on seaweed that has grown naturally on the habitats, with the ecosystem enrichment of the bay also resulting in growing numbers of dhufish, pink snapper, wrasse, and Samson fish, among other species.
Brad Adams, from the company, has emphasised the similarity to wild abalone and the difference from shore-based aquaculture. "We're not aquaculture, we're ranching, because once they're in the water they look after themselves."
Other groups include aquatic reptiles, amphibians, and miscellaneous invertebrates, such as echinoderms and jellyfish. They are separately graphed at the top right of this section, since they do not contribute enough volume to show clearly on the main graph.
Commercially harvested echinoderms include sea cucumbers and sea urchins. In China, sea cucumbers are farmed in artificial ponds as large as .
Global fish production peaked at about 171 million tonnes in 2016, with aquaculture representing 47 percent of the total and 53 percent if non-food uses (including reduction to fishmeal and fish oil) are excluded. With capture fishery production relatively static since the late 1980s, aquaculture has been responsible for the continuing growth in the supply of fish for human consumption. Global aquaculture production (including aquatic plants) in 2016 was 110.2 million tonnes, with the first-sale value estimated at US$243.5 billion. The contribution of aquaculture to the global production of capture fisheries and aquaculture combined has risen continuously, reaching 46.8 percent in 2016, up from 25.7 percent in 2000. With 5.8 percent annual
growth rate during the period 2001–2016, aquaculture continues to grow faster than other major food production sectors, but it no longer has the high annual growth rates experienced in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 2012, the total world production of fisheries was 158 million tonnes, of which aquaculture contributed 66.6 million tonnes, about 42%. The growth rate of worldwide aquaculture has been sustained and rapid, averaging about 8% per year for over 30 years, while the take from wild fisheries has been essentially flat for the last decade. The aquaculture market reached $86 billion in 2009.
Aquaculture is an especially important economic activity in China. Between 1980 and 1997, the Chinese Bureau of Fisheries reports, aquaculture harvests grew at an annual rate of 16.7%, jumping from 1.9 million tonnes to nearly 23 million tonnes. In 2005, China accounted for 70% of world production. Aquaculture is also currently one of the fastest-growing areas of food production in the U.S.
About 90% of all U.S. shrimp consumption is farmed and imported. In recent years, salmon aquaculture has become a major export in southern Chile, especially in Puerto Montt, Chile's fastest-growing city.
A United Nations report titled "The State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture" released in May 2014 maintained fisheries and aquaculture support the livelihoods of some 60 million people in Asia and Africa.
FAO estimates that in 2016, overall, women accounted for nearly 14 percent of all people directly engaged in the fisheries and aquaculture primary sector.
Laws governing aquaculture practices vary greatly by country and are often not closely regulated or easily traceable. In the United States, land-based and nearshore aquaculture is regulated at the federal and state levels; however, no national laws govern offshore aquaculture in U.S. exclusive economic zone waters. In June 2011, the Department of Commerce and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released national aquaculture policies to address this issue and "to meet the growing demand for healthy seafood, to create jobs in coastal communities, and restore vital ecosystems." In 2011, Congresswoman Lois Capps introduced the "National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act of 2011" "to establish a regulatory system and research program for sustainable offshore aquaculture in the United States exclusive economic zone"; however, the bill was not enacted into law.
China overwhelmingly dominates the world in reported aquaculture output, reporting a total output which is double that of the rest of the world put together. However, there are some historical issues with the accuracy of China's returns.
In 2001, the fisheries scientists Reg Watson and Daniel Pauly expressed concerns in a letter to "Nature", that China was over reporting its catch from wild fisheries in the 1990s. They said that made it appear that the global catch since 1988 was increasing annually by 300,000 tonnes, whereas it was really shrinking annually by 350,000 tonnes. Watson and Pauly suggested this may be have been related to Chinese policies where state entities that monitored the economy were also tasked with increasing output. Also, until more recently, the promotion of Chinese officials was based on production increases from their own areas.
China disputed this claim. The official Xinhua News Agency quoted Yang Jian, director general of the Agriculture Ministry's Bureau of Fisheries, as saying that China's figures were "basically correct". However, the FAO accepted there were issues with the reliability of China's statistical returns, and for a period treated data from China, including the aquaculture data, apart from the rest of the world.
Mariculture refers to the cultivation of marine organisms in seawater, usually in sheltered coastal or offshore waters. The farming of marine fish is an example of mariculture, and so also is the farming of marine crustaceans (such as shrimp), mollusks (such as oysters), and seaweed. Channel catfish ("Ictalurus punctatus"), hard clams ("Mercenaria mercenaria") and Atlantic salmon ("Salmo salar") are prominent in the U.S. mariculture.
Mariculture may consist of raising the organisms on or in artificial enclosures such as in floating netted enclosures for salmon and on racks for oysters. In the case of enclosed salmon, they are fed by the operators; oysters on racks filter feed on naturally available food. Abalone have been farmed on an artificial reef consuming seaweed which grows naturally on the reef units.
Integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) is a practice in which the byproducts (wastes) from one species are recycled to become inputs (fertilizers, food) for another. Fed aquaculture (for example, fish, shrimp) is combined with inorganic extractive and organic extractive (for example, shellfish) aquaculture to create balanced systems for environmental sustainability (biomitigation), economic stability (product diversification and risk reduction) and social acceptability (better management practices).
"Multi-trophic" refers to the incorporation of species from different trophic or nutritional levels in the same system. This is one potential distinction from the age-old practice of aquatic polyculture, which could simply be the co-culture of different fish species from the same trophic level. In this case, these organisms may all share the same biological and chemical processes, with few synergistic benefits, which could potentially lead to significant shifts in the ecosystem. Some traditional polyculture systems may, in fact, incorporate a greater diversity of species, occupying several niches, as extensive cultures (low intensity, low management) within the same 2006"/> A working IMTA system can result in greater total production based on mutual benefits to the co-cultured species and improved ecosystem health, even if the production of individual species is lower than in a monoculture over a short-term period.
Sometimes the term "integrated aquaculture" is used to describe the integration of monocultures through water transfer. For all intents and purposes, however, the terms "IMTA" and "integrated aquaculture" differ only in their degree of descriptiveness. Aquaponics, fractionated aquaculture, integrated agriculture-aquaculture systems, integrated peri-urban-aquaculture systems, and integrated fisheries-aquaculture systems are other variations of the IMTA concept.
Various materials, including nylon, polyester, polypropylene, polyethylene, plastic-coated welded wire, rubber, patented rope products (Spectra, Thorn-D, Dyneema), galvanized steel and copper are used for netting in aquaculture fish enclosures around the world. All of these materials are selected for a variety of reasons, including design feasibility, material strength, cost, and corrosion resistance.
Recently, copper alloys have become important netting materials in aquaculture because they are antimicrobial (i.e., they destroy bacteria, viruses, fungi, algae, and other microbes) and they therefore prevent biofouling (i.e., the undesirable accumulation, adhesion, and growth of microorganisms, plants, algae, tubeworms, barnacles, mollusks, and other organisms). By inhibiting microbial growth, copper alloy aquaculture cages avoid costly net changes that are necessary with other materials. The resistance of organism growth on copper alloy nets also provides a cleaner and healthier environment for farmed fish to grow and thrive.
If performed without consideration for potential local environmental impacts, aquaculture in inland waters can result in more environmental damage than wild fisheries, though with less waste produced per kg on a global scale. Local concerns with aquaculture in inland waters may include waste handling, side-effects of antibiotics, competition between farmed and wild animals, and the potential introduction of invasive plant and animal species, or foreign pathogens, particularly if unprocessed fish are used to feed more marketable carnivorous fish. If non-local live feeds are used, aquaculture may introduce exotic plants or animals with disastrous effects. Improvements in methods resulting from advances in research and the availability of commercial feeds has reduced some of these concerns since their greater prevalence in the 1990s and 2000s .
Fish waste is organic and composed of nutrients necessary in all components of aquatic food webs. In-ocean aquaculture often produces much higher than normal fish waste concentrations. The waste collects on the ocean bottom, damaging or eliminating bottom-dwelling life. Waste can also decrease dissolved oxygen levels in the water column, putting further pressure on wild animals. An alternative model to food being added to the ecosystem, is the installation of artificial reef structures to increase the habitat niches available, without the need to add any more than ambient feed and nutrient. This has been used in the "ranching" of abalone in Western Australia.
Tilapia from aquaculture has been shown to contain more fat and a much higher ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 oils.
Some carnivorous and omnivorous farmed fish species are fed wild forage fish. Although carnivorous farmed fish represented only 13 percent of aquaculture production by weight in 2000, they represented 34 percent of aquaculture production by value.
Farming of carnivorous species like salmon and shrimp leads to a high demand for forage fish to match the nutrition they get in the wild. Fish do not actually produce omega-3 fatty acids, but instead accumulate them from either consuming microalgae that produce these fatty acids, as is the case with forage fish like herring and sardines, or, as is the case with fatty predatory fish, like salmon, by eating prey fish that have accumulated omega-3 fatty acids from microalgae. To satisfy this requirement, more than 50 percent of the world fish oil production is fed to farmed salmon.
Farmed salmon consume more wild fish than they generate as a final product, although the efficiency of production is improving. To produce one pound of farmed salmon, products from several pounds of wild fish are fed to them - this can be described as the "fish-in-fish-out" (FIFO) ratio. In 1995, salmon had a FIFO ratio of 7.5 (meaning 7.5 pounds of wild fish feed were required to produce 1 pound of salmon); by 2006 the ratio had fallen to 4.9. Additionally, a growing share of fish oil and fishmeal come from residues (byproducts of fish processing), rather than dedicated whole fish. In 2012, 34 percent of fish oil and 28 percent of fishmeal came from residues. However, fishmeal and oil from residues instead of whole fish have a different composition with more ash and less protein, which may limit its potential use for aquaculture.
As the salmon farming industry expands, it requires more wild forage fish for feed, at a time when seventy five percent of the worlds monitored fisheries are already near to or have exceeded their maximum sustainable yield. The industrial scale extraction of wild forage fish for salmon farming then impacts the survivability of the wild predator fish who rely on them for food. An important step in reducing the impact of aquaculture on wild fish is shifting carnivorous species to plant-based feeds. Salmon feeds, for example, have gone from containing only fishmeal and oil to containing 40 percent plant protein. The USDA has also experimented with using grain-based feeds for farmed trout. When properly formulated (and often mixed with fishmeal or oil), plant-based feeds can provide proper nutrition and similar growth rates in carnivorous farmed fish.
Another impact aquaculture production can have on wild fish is the risk of fish escaping from coastal pens, where they can interbreed with their wild counterparts, diluting wild genetic stocks. Escaped fish can become invasive, out-competing native species.
Aquaculture is becoming a significant threat to coastal ecosystems. About 20 percent of mangrove forests have been destroyed since 1980, partly due to shrimp farming. An extended cost–benefit analysis of the total economic value of shrimp aquaculture built on mangrove ecosystems found that the external costs were much higher than the external benefits. Over four decades, of Indonesian mangroves have been converted to shrimp farms. Most of these farms are abandoned within a decade because of the toxin build-up and nutrient loss.
Salmon farms are typically sited in pristine coastal ecosystems which they then pollute. A farm with 200,000 salmon discharges more fecal waste than a city of 60,000 people. This waste is discharged directly into the surrounding aquatic environment, untreated, often containing antibiotics and pesticides." There is also an accumulation of heavy metals on the benthos (seafloor) near the salmon farms, particularly copper and zinc.
In 2016, mass fish kill events impacted salmon farmers along Chile's coast and the wider ecology. Increases in aquaculture production and its associated effluent were considered to be possible contributing factors to fish and molluscan mortality.
Sea cage aquaculture is responsible for nutrient enrichment of the waters in which they are established. This results from fish wastes and uneaten feed inputs. Elements of most concern are nitrogen and phosphorus which can promote algal growth, including harmful algal blooms which can be toxic to fish. Flushing times, current speeds, distance from the shore and water depth are important considerations when locating sea cages in order to minimize the impacts of nutrient enrichment on coastal ecosystems.
The extent of the effects of pollution from sea-cage aquaculture varies depending on where the cages are located, which species are kept, how densely cages are stocked and what the fish are fed. Important species-specific variables include the species' food conversion ratio (FCR) and nitrogen retention. Studies prior to 2001 determined that the amount of nitrogen introduced as feed which is lost to the water column and seafloor as waste varies from 52 to 95%.
A type of salmon called the AquAdvantage salmon has been genetically modified for faster growth, although it has not been approved for commercial use, due to controversy. The altered salmon incorporates a growth hormone from a Chinook salmon that allows it to reach full size in 16–28 months, instead of the normal 36 months for Atlantic salmon, and while consuming 25 percent less feed. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviewed the AquAdvantage salmon in a draft environmental assessment and determined that it "would not have a significant impact (FONSI) on the U.S. environment."
While some forms of aquaculture can be devastating to ecosystems, such as shrimp farming in mangroves, other forms can be very beneficial. Shellfish aquaculture adds substantial filter feeding capacity to an environment which can significantly improve water quality. A single oyster can filter 15 gallons of water a day, removing microscopic algal cells. By removing these cells, shellfish are removing nitrogen and other nutrients from the system and either retaining it or releasing it as waste which sinks to the bottom. By harvesting these shellfish the nitrogen they retained is completely removed from the system. Raising and harvesting kelp and other macroalgae directly remove nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Repackaging these nutrients can relieve eutrophic, or nutrient-rich, conditions known for their low dissolved oxygen which can decimate species diversity and abundance of marine life. Removing algal cells from the water also increase light penetration, allowing plants such as eelgrass to reestablish themselves and further increase oxygen levels.
Aquaculture in an area can provide for crucial ecological functions for the inhabitants. Shellfish beds or cages can provide habitat structure. This structure can be used as shelter by invertebrates, small fish or crustaceans to potentially increase their abundance and maintain biodiversity. Increased shelter raises stocks of prey fish and small crustaceans by increasing recruitment opportunities in turn providing more prey for higher trophic levels. One study estimated that 10 square meters of oyster reef could enhance an ecosystem's biomass by 2.57 kg The shellfish acting as herbivores will also be preyed on. This moves energy directly from primary producers to higher trophic levels potentially skipping out on multiple energetically-costly trophic jumps which would increase biomass in the ecosystem.
Seaweed farming is a carbon negative crop, with a high potential for climate change mitigation . The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate recommends "further research attention" as a mitigation tactic.
As with the farming of terrestrial animals, social attitudes influence the need for humane practices and regulations in farmed marine animals. Under the guidelines advised by the Farm Animal Welfare Council good animal welfare means both fitness and a sense of well being in the animal's physical and mental state. This can be defined by the Five Freedoms:
However, the controversial issue in aquaculture is whether fish and farmed marine invertebrates are actually sentient, or have the perception and awareness to experience suffering. Although no evidence of this has been found in marine invertebrates, recent studies conclude that fish do have the necessary receptors (nociceptors) to sense noxious stimuli and so are likely to experience states of pain, fear and stress. Consequently, welfare in aquaculture is directed at vertebrates; finfish in particular.
Welfare in aquaculture can be impacted by a number of issues such as stocking densities, behavioural interactions, disease and parasitism. A major problem in determining the cause of impaired welfare is that these issues are often all interrelated and influence each other at different times.
Optimal stocking density is often defined by the carrying capacity of the stocked environment and the amount of individual space needed by the fish, which is very species specific. Although behavioural interactions such as shoaling may mean that high stocking densities are beneficial to some species, in many cultured species high stocking densities may be of concern. Crowding can constrain normal swimming behaviour, as well as increase aggressive and competitive behaviours such as cannibalism, feed competition, territoriality and dominance/subordination hierarchies. This potentially increases the risk of tissue damage due to abrasion from fish-to-fish contact or fish-to-cage contact. Fish can suffer reductions in food intake and food conversion efficiency. In addition, high stocking densities can result in water flow being insufficient, creating inadequate oxygen supply and waste product removal. Dissolved oxygen is essential for fish respiration and concentrations below critical levels can induce stress and even lead to asphyxiation. Ammonia, a nitrogen excretion product, is highly toxic to fish at accumulated levels, particularly when oxygen concentrations are low.
Many of these interactions and effects cause stress in the fish, which can be a major factor in facilitating fish disease. For many parasites, infestation depends on the host's degree of mobility, the density of the host population and vulnerability of the host's defence system. Sea lice are the primary parasitic problem for finfish in aquaculture, high numbers causing widespread skin erosion and haemorrhaging, gill congestion, and increased mucus production. There are also a number of prominent viral and bacterial pathogens that can have severe effects on internal organs and nervous systems.
The key to improving welfare of marine cultured organisms is to reduce stress to a minimum, as prolonged or repeated stress can cause a range of adverse effects. Attempts to minimise stress can occur throughout the culture process. During grow out it is important to keep stocking densities at appropriate levels specific to each species, as well as separating size classes and grading to reduce aggressive behavioural interactions. Keeping nets and cages clean can assist positive water flow to reduce the risk of water degradation.
Not surprisingly disease and parasitism can have a major effect on fish welfare and it is important for farmers not only to manage infected stock but also to apply disease prevention measures. However, prevention methods, such as vaccination, can also induce stress because of the extra handling and injection. Other methods include adding antibiotics to feed, adding chemicals into water for treatment baths and biological control, such as using cleaner wrasse to remove lice from farmed salmon.
Many steps are involved in transport, including capture, food deprivation to reduce faecal contamination of transport water, transfer to transport vehicle via nets or pumps, plus transport and transfer to the delivery location. During transport water needs to be maintained to a high quality, with regulated temperature, sufficient oxygen and minimal waste products. In some cases anaesthetics may be used in small doses to calm fish before transport.
Aquaculture is sometimes part of an environmental rehabilitation program or as an aid in conserving endangered species.
Global wild fisheries are in decline, with valuable habitat such as estuaries in critical condition. The aquaculture or farming of piscivorous fish, like salmon, does not help the problem because they need to eat products from other fish, such as fish meal and fish oil. Studies have shown that salmon farming has major negative impacts on wild salmon, as well as the forage fish that need to be caught to feed them. Fish that are higher on the food chain are less efficient sources of food energy.
Apart from fish and shrimp, some aquaculture undertakings, such as seaweed and filter-feeding bivalve mollusks like oysters, clams, mussels and scallops, are relatively benign and even environmentally restorative. Filter-feeders filter pollutants as well as nutrients from the water, improving water quality. Seaweeds extract nutrients such as inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus directly from the water, and filter-feeding mollusks can extract nutrients as they feed on particulates, such as phytoplankton and detritus.
Some profitable aquaculture cooperatives promote sustainable practices. New methods lessen the risk of biological and chemical pollution through minimizing fish stress, fallowing netpens, and applying Integrated Pest Management. Vaccines are being used more and more to reduce antibiotic use for disease control.
Onshore recirculating aquaculture systems, facilities using polyculture techniques, and properly sited facilities (for example, offshore areas with strong currents) are examples of ways to manage negative environmental effects.
Recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) recycle water by circulating it through filters to remove fish waste and food and then recirculating it back into the tanks. This saves water and the waste gathered can be used in compost or, in some cases, could even be treated and used on land. While RAS was developed with freshwater fish in mind, scientist associated with the Agricultural Research Service have found a way to rear saltwater fish using RAS in low-salinity waters. Although saltwater fish are raised in off-shore cages or caught with nets in water that typically has a salinity of 35 parts per thousand (ppt), scientists were able to produce healthy pompano, a saltwater fish, in tanks with a salinity of only 5 ppt. Commercializing low-salinity RAS are predicted to have positive environmental and economical effects. Unwanted nutrients from the fish food would not be added to the ocean and the risk of transmitting diseases between wild and farm-raised fish would greatly be reduced. The price of expensive saltwater fish, such as the pompano and combia used in the experiments, would be reduced. However, before any of this can be done researchers must study every aspect of the fish's lifecycle, including the amount of ammonia and nitrate the fish will tolerate in the water, what to feed the fish during each stage of its lifecycle, the stocking rate that will produce the healthiest fish, etc.
Some 16 countries now use geothermal energy for aquaculture, including China, Israel, and the United States. In California, for example, 15 fish farms produce tilapia, bass, and catfish with warm water from underground. This warmer water enables fish to grow all year round and mature more quickly. Collectively these California farms produce 4.5 million kilograms of fish each year.
Aquaculture by Country: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1634 |
Kolmogorov complexity
In algorithmic information theory (a subfield of computer science and mathematics), the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is the length of a shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produces the object as output. It is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object, and is also known as algorithmic complexity, Solomonoff–Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity, program-size complexity, descriptive complexity, or algorithmic entropy. It is named after Andrey Kolmogorov, who first published on the subject in 1963.
The notion of Kolmogorov complexity can be used to state and prove impossibility results akin to Cantor's diagonal argument, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and Turing's halting problem.
In particular, no program "P" computing a lower bound for each text's Kolmogorov complexity can return a value essentially larger than "P"'s own length (see section ); hence no single program can compute the exact Kolmogorov complexity for infinitely many texts.
Consider the following two strings of 32 lowercase letters and digits:
The first string has a short English-language description, namely "codice_3", which consists of 17 characters. The second one has no obvious simple description (using the same character set) other than writing down the string itself, i.e., "codice_4" which has 38 characters. Hence the operation of writing the first string can be said to have "less complexity" than writing the second.
More formally, the complexity of a string is the length of the shortest possible description of the string in some fixed universal description language (the sensitivity of complexity relative to the choice of description language is discussed below). It can be shown that the Kolmogorov complexity of any string cannot be more than a few bytes larger than the length of the string itself. Strings like the "abab" example above, whose Kolmogorov complexity is small relative to the string's size, are not considered to be complex.
The Kolmogorov complexity can be defined for any mathematical object, but for simplicity the scope of this article is restricted to strings. We must first specify a description language for strings. Such a description language can be based on any computer programming language, such as Lisp, Pascal, or Java. If P is a program which outputs a string "x", then P is a description of "x". The length of the description is just the length of P as a character string, multiplied by the number of bits in a character (e.g., 7 for ASCII).
We could, alternatively, choose an encoding for Turing machines, where an "encoding" is a function which associates to each Turing Machine M a bitstring . If M is a Turing Machine which, on input "w", outputs string "x", then the concatenated string "w" is a description of "x". For theoretical analysis, this approach is more suited for constructing detailed formal proofs and is generally preferred in the research literature. In this article, an informal approach is discussed.
Any string "s" has at least one description. For example, the second string above is output by the program:
whereas the first string is output by the (much shorter) pseudo-code:
If a description "d"("s") of a string "s" is of minimal length (i.e., using the fewest bits), it is called a minimal description of "s", and the length of "d"("s") (i.e. the number of bits in the minimal description) is the Kolmogorov complexity of "s", written "K"("s"). Symbolically,
The length of the shortest description will depend on the choice of description language; but the effect of changing languages is bounded (a result called the "invariance theorem").
There are some description languages which are optimal, in the following sense: given any description of an object in a description language, said description may be used in the optimal description language with a constant overhead. The constant depends only on the languages involved, not on the description of the object, nor the object being described.
Here is an example of an optimal description language. A description will have two parts:
In more technical terms, the first part of a description is a computer program, with the second part being the input to that computer program which produces the object as output.
The invariance theorem follows: Given any description language "L", the optimal description language is at least as efficient as "L", with some constant overhead.
Proof: Any description "D" in "L" can be converted into a description in the optimal language by first describing "L" as a computer program "P" (part 1), and then using the original description "D" as input to that program (part 2). The
total length of this new description "D′" is (approximately):
The length of "P" is a constant that doesn't depend on "D". So, there is at most a constant overhead, regardless of the object described. Therefore, the optimal language is universal up to this additive constant.
Theorem: If "K"1 and "K"2 are the complexity functions relative to Turing complete description languages "L"1 and "L"2, then there is a constant "c" – which depends only on the languages "L"1 and "L"2 chosen – such that
Proof: By symmetry, it suffices to prove that there is some constant "c" such that for all strings "s"
Now, suppose there is a program in the language "L"1 which acts as an interpreter for "L"2:
where "p" is a program in "L"2. The interpreter is characterized by the following property:
Thus, if P is a program in "L"2 which is a minimal description of "s", then codice_5(P) returns the string "s". The length of this description of "s" is the sum of
This proves the desired upper bound.
Algorithmic information theory is the area of computer science that studies Kolmogorov complexity and other complexity measures on strings (or other data structures).
The concept and theory of Kolmogorov Complexity is based on a crucial theorem first discovered by Ray Solomonoff, who published it in 1960, describing it in "A Preliminary Report on a General Theory of Inductive Inference" as part of his invention of algorithmic probability. He gave a more complete description in his 1964 publications, "A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference," Part 1 and Part 2 in "Information and Control".
Andrey Kolmogorov later independently published this theorem in "Problems Inform. Transmission" in 1965. Gregory Chaitin also presents this theorem in "J. ACM" – Chaitin's paper was submitted October 1966 and revised in December 1968, and cites both Solomonoff's and Kolmogorov's papers.
The theorem says that, among algorithms that decode strings from their descriptions (codes), there exists an optimal one. This algorithm, for all strings, allows codes as short as allowed by any other algorithm up to an additive constant that depends on the algorithms, but not on the strings themselves. Solomonoff used this algorithm and the code lengths it allows to define a "universal probability" of a string on which inductive inference of the subsequent digits of the string can be based. Kolmogorov used this theorem to define several functions of strings, including complexity, randomness, and information.
When Kolmogorov became aware of Solomonoff's work, he acknowledged Solomonoff's priority. For several years, Solomonoff's work was better known in the Soviet Union than in the Western World. The general consensus in the scientific community, however, was to associate this type of complexity with Kolmogorov, who was concerned with randomness of a sequence, while Algorithmic Probability became associated with Solomonoff, who focused on prediction using his invention of the universal prior probability distribution. The broader area encompassing descriptional complexity and probability is often called Kolmogorov complexity. The computer scientist Ming Li considers this an example of the Matthew effect: "…to everyone who has more will be given…"
There are several other variants of Kolmogorov complexity or algorithmic information. The most widely used one is based on self-delimiting programs, and is mainly due to Leonid Levin (1974).
An axiomatic approach to Kolmogorov complexity based on Blum axioms (Blum 1967) was introduced by Mark Burgin in the paper presented for publication by Andrey Kolmogorov.
In the following discussion, let "K"("s") be the complexity of the string "s".
It is not hard to see that the minimal description of a string cannot be too much larger than the string itself — the program codice_8 above that outputs "s" is a fixed amount larger than "s".
Theorem: There is a constant "c" such that
Theorem: There exist strings of arbitrarily large Kolmogorov complexity. Formally: for each "n" ∈ ℕ, there is a string "s" with "K"("s") ≥ "n".
Proof: Otherwise all of the infinitely many possible finite strings could be generated by the finitely many programs with a complexity below "n" bits.
Theorem: "K" is not a computable function. In other words, there is no program which takes a string "s" as input and produces the integer "K"("s") as output.
The following indirect proof uses a simple Pascal-like language to denote programs; for sake of proof simplicity assume its description (i.e. an interpreter) to have a length of bits.
Assume for contradiction there is a program
which takes as input a string "s" and returns "K"("s"); for sake of proof simplicity, assume the program's length to be bits.
Now, consider the following program of length bits:
Using codice_9 as a subroutine, the program tries every string, starting with the shortest, until it returns a string with Kolmogorov complexity at least bits, i.e. a string that cannot be produced by any program shorter than bits. However, the overall length of the above program that produced "s" is only bits, which is a contradiction. (If the code of codice_9 is shorter, the contradiction remains. If it is longer, the constant used in codice_13 can always be changed appropriately.)
The above proof uses a contradiction similar to that of the Berry paradox: "The smallest positive integer that cannot be defined in fewer than twenty English words". It is also possible to show the non-computability of "K" by reduction from the non-computability of the halting problem "H", since "K" and "H" are Turing-equivalent.
There is a corollary, humorously called the "full employment theorem" in the programming language community, stating that there is no perfect size-optimizing compiler.
At first glance it might seem trivial to write a program which can compute "K"("s") for any "s" (thus disproving the above theorem), such as the following:
This program iterates through all possible programs (by iterating through all possible strings and only considering those which are valid programs), starting with the shortest. Each program is executed to find the result produced by that program, comparing it to the input "s". If the result matches the length of the program is returned.
However this will not work because some of the programs "p" tested will not terminate, e.g. if they contain infinite loops. There is no way to avoid all of these programs by testing them in some way before executing them due to the non-computability of the halting problem.
The chain rule for Kolmogorov complexity states that
It states that the shortest program that reproduces "X" and "Y" is no more than a logarithmic term larger than a program to reproduce "X" and a program to reproduce "Y" given "X". Using this statement, one can define an analogue of mutual information for Kolmogorov complexity.
It is straightforward to compute upper bounds for "K"("s") – simply compress the string "s" with some method, implement the corresponding decompressor in the chosen language, concatenate the decompressor to the compressed string, and measure the length of the resulting string – concretely, the size of a self-extracting archive in the given language.
A string "s" is compressible by a number "c" if it has a description whose length does not exceed |"s"| − "c" bits. This is equivalent to saying that "K"("s") ≤ |"s"| − "c". Otherwise, "s" is incompressible by "c". A string incompressible by 1 is said to be simply "incompressible" – by the pigeonhole principle, which applies because every compressed string maps to only one uncompressed string, incompressible strings must exist, since there are 2"n" bit strings of length "n", but only 2"n" − 1 shorter strings, that is, strings of length less than "n", (i.e. with length 0, 1, ..., "n − 1).
For the same reason, most strings are complex in the sense that they cannot be significantly compressed – their "K"("s") is not much smaller than |"s"|, the length of "s" in bits. To make this precise, fix a value of "n". There are 2"n" bitstrings of length "n". The uniform probability distribution on the space of these bitstrings assigns exactly equal weight 2−"n" to each string of length "n".
Theorem: With the uniform probability distribution on the space of bitstrings of length "n", the probability that a string is incompressible by "c" is at least 1 − 2−"c"+1 + 2−"n".
To prove the theorem, note that the number of descriptions of length not exceeding "n" − "c" is given by the geometric series:
There remain at least
bitstrings of length "n" that are incompressible by "c". To determine the probability, divide by 2"n".
By the above theorem (), most strings are complex in the sense that they cannot be described in any significantly "compressed" way. However, it turns out that the fact that a specific string is complex cannot be formally proven, if the complexity of the string is above a certain threshold. The precise formalization is as follows. First, fix a particular axiomatic system S for the natural numbers. The axiomatic system has to be powerful enough so that, to certain assertions A about complexity of strings, one can associate a formula FA in S. This association must have the following property:
If FA is provable from the axioms of S, then the corresponding assertion A must be true. This "formalization" can be achieved based on a Gödel numbering.
Theorem: There exists a constant "L" (which only depends on S and on the choice of description language) such that there does not exist a string "s" for which the statement
can be proven within S.
Proof: The proof of this result is modeled on a self-referential construction used in Berry's paradox.
We can find an effective enumeration of all the formal proofs in S by some procedure
which takes as input "n" and outputs some proof. This function enumerates all proofs. Some of these are proofs for formulas we do not care about here, since every possible proof in the language of S is produced for some "n". Some of these are complexity formulas of the form "K"("s") ≥ "n" where "s" and "n" are constants in the language of S. There is a procedure
which determines whether the "n"th proof actually proves a complexity formula "K"("s") ≥ "L". The strings "s", and the integer "L" in turn, are computable by procedure:
Consider the following procedure:
Given an "n", this procedure tries every proof until it finds a string and a proof in the formal system S of the formula "K"("s") ≥ "L" for some "L" ≥ "n"; if no such proof exists, it loops forever.
Finally, consider the program consisting of all these procedure definitions, and a main call:
where the constant "n"0 will be determined later on. The overall program length can be expressed as "U"+log2("n"0), where "U" is some constant and log2("n"0) represents the length of the integer value "n"0, under the reasonable assumption that it is encoded in binary digits.
Now consider the function "f":[2,∞)→[1,∞), defined by "f"("x") = "x" − log2("x"). It is strictly increasing on its domain, and hence has an inverse "f"-1:[1,∞)→[2,∞).
Define "n"0 = "f"-1("U")+1.
Then no proof of the form ""K"("s")≥"L"" with "L"≥"n"0 can be obtained in S, as can be seen by an indirect argument:
If codice_16 could return a value ≥"n"0, then the loop inside codice_17 would eventually terminate, and that procedure would return a string "s" such that
This is a contradiction, Q.E.D.
As a consequence, the above program, with the chosen value of "n"0, must loop forever.
Similar ideas are used to prove the properties of Chaitin's constant.
The minimum message length principle of statistical and inductive inference and machine learning was developed by C.S. Wallace and D.M. Boulton in 1968. MML is Bayesian (i.e. it incorporates prior beliefs) and information-theoretic. It has the desirable properties of statistical invariance (i.e. the inference transforms with a re-parametrisation, such as from polar coordinates to Cartesian coordinates), statistical consistency (i.e. even for very hard problems, MML will converge to any underlying model) and efficiency (i.e. the MML model will converge to any true underlying model about as quickly as is possible). C.S. Wallace and D.L. Dowe (1999) showed a formal connection between MML and algorithmic information theory (or Kolmogorov complexity).
"Kolmogorov randomness" defines a string (usually of bits) as being random if and only if it is shorter than any computer program that can produce that string. To make this precise, a universal computer (or universal Turing machine) must be specified, so that "program" means a program for this universal machine. A random string in this sense is "incompressible" in that it is impossible to "compress" the string into a program whose length is shorter than the length of the string itself. A counting argument is used to show that, for any universal computer, there is at least one algorithmically random string of each length. Whether any particular string is random, however, depends on the specific universal computer that is chosen.
This definition can be extended to define a notion of randomness for "infinite" sequences from a finite alphabet. These algorithmically random sequences can be defined in three equivalent ways. One way uses an effective analogue of measure theory; another uses effective martingales. The third way defines an infinite sequence to be random if the prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity of its initial segments grows quickly enough — there must be a constant "c" such that the complexity of an initial segment of length "n" is always at least "n"−"c". This definition, unlike the definition of randomness for a finite string, is not affected by which universal machine is used to define prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity.
For dynamical systems, entropy rate and algorithmic complexity of the trajectories are related by a theorem of Brudno, that the equality K(x;T) = h(T) holds for almost all x.
It can be shown that for the output of Markov information sources, Kolmogorov complexity is related to the entropy of the information source. More precisely, the Kolmogorov complexity of the output of a Markov information source, normalized by the length of the output, converges almost surely (as the length of the output goes to infinity) to the entropy of the source.
The conditional Kolmogorov complexity of two strings formula_1 is, roughly speaking, defined as the Kolmogorov complexity of "x" given "y" as an auxiliary input to the procedure.
There is also a length-conditional complexity formula_2, which is the complexity of "x" given the length of "x" as known/input. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1635 |
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great (848/849 – 26 October 899) was King of Wessex from 871 to and King of the Anglo-Saxons from to 899. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex. His father died when he was young, and three of Alfred's brothers, Æthelbald, Æthelberht and Æthelred, reigned in turn before him.
After ascending the throne, Alfred spent several years fighting Viking invasions. He won a decisive victory in the Battle of Edington in 878 and made an agreement with the Vikings, creating what was known as the Danelaw in the North of England. Alfred also oversaw the conversion of Viking leader Guthrum to Christianity. He defended his kingdom against the Viking attempt at conquest, becoming the dominant ruler in England. Details of his life are described in a work by 9th-century Welsh scholar and bishop Asser.
Alfred had a reputation as a learned and merciful man of a gracious and level-headed nature who encouraged education, proposing that primary education be conducted in Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin and improving the legal system and military structure and his people's quality of life. He was given the epithet "the Great" during and after the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and, alongside the Danish Cnut the Great, remains the only king of England to be given such a name.
Alfred was a son of Æthelwulf King of Wessex and his wife, Osburh. According to his biographer, Asser, writing in 893, "In the year of our Lord's Incarnation 849 Alfred, King of the Anglo-Saxons", was born at the royal estate called Wantage, in the district known as Berkshire (which is so called from Berroc Wood, where the box tree grows very abundantly)." This date has been accepted by the editors of Asser's biography, Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, and by other historians such as David Dumville and Richard Huscroft. However, West Saxon genealogical lists state that Alfred was 23 when he became king in April 871, implying that he was born between April 847 and April 848. This dating is adopted in the biography of Alfred by Alfred Smyth, who regards Asser's biography as fraudulent, an allegation which is rejected by other historians. Richard Abels in his biography discusses both sources but does not decide between them and dates Alfred's birth as 847/49, while Patrick Wormald in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article dates it 848/9.
He was the youngest of six children. His eldest brother, Æthelstan, was old enough to be appointed sub-king of Kent in 839, almost ten years before Alfred was born. He died in the early 850s. Alfred's next three brothers were successively kings of Wessex. Æthelbald (858-860) and Æthelberht (860-865) were also much older than Alfred, but Æthelred (865-871) was only a year or two older. Alfred's only known sister, Æthelswith, married Burgred, king of the midland kingdom of Mercia, in 853. Most historians think that Osburh was the mother of all Æthelwulf's children, but some suggest that the older ones were born to an unrecorded first wife. Osburh was descended from the rulers of the Isle of Wight. She was described by Alfred's biographer, Asser, as "a most religious woman, noble by temperament and noble by birth". She died by 856, when Æthelwulf married Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, King of West Francia.
In 868, Alfred married Ealhswith, daughter of the Mercian nobleman, Æthelred Mucel, ealdorman of the Gaini, and his wife Eadburh, who was of royal Mercian descent. Their children were Æthelflæd, who married Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians; Edward the Elder, his successor as king; Æthelgifu, abbess of Shaftesbury; Ælfthryth, who married Baldwin, count of Flanders; and Æthelweard.
Alfred's grandfather, Ecgberht, became king of Wessex in 802, and in the view of the historian Richard Abels it must have seemed very unlikely to contemporaries that he would establish a lasting dynasty. For two hundred years, three families had fought for the West Saxon throne, and no son had followed his father as king. No ancestor of Ecgberht had been a king of Wessex since Ceawlin in the late sixth century, but he was believed to be a paternal descendant of Cerdic, the founder of the West Saxon dynasty. This made Ecgberht an ætheling – a prince eligible for the throne. But after Ecgberht's reign, descent from Cerdic was no longer sufficient to make a man an ætheling. When Ecgberht died in 839 he was succeeded by his son Æthelwulf; all subsequent West Saxon kings were descendants of Ecgberht and Ætheluwlf, and were also sons of kings.
At the beginning of the ninth century, England was almost wholly under the control of the Anglo-Saxons. Mercia dominated southern England, but its supremacy came to an end in 825 when it was decisively defeated by Ecgberht at the Battle of Ellendun. The two kingdoms became allies, which was important in the resistance to Viking attacks. In 853, King Burgred of Mercia requested West Saxon help to suppress a Welsh rebellion, and Æthelwulf led a West Saxon contingent in a successful joint campaign. In the same year Burgred married Æthelwulf's daughter, Æthelswith.
In 825, Ecgberht sent Æthelwulf to invade the Mercian sub-kingdom of Kent, and its sub-king, Baldred, was driven out shortly afterwards. By 830, Essex, Surrey and Sussex had also submitted to Ecgberht, and he had appointed Æthelwulf to rule the south-eastern territories as King of Kent. The Vikings ravaged the Isle of Sheppey in 835, and the following year they defeated Ecgberht at Carhampton in Somerset, but in 838 he was victorious over an alliance of Cornishmen and Vikings at the Battle of Hingston Down, reducing Cornwall to the status of a client kingdom. When Æthelwulf succeeded, he appointed his eldest son Æthelstan as sub-king of Kent. Ecgberht and Æthelwulf may not have intended a permanent union between Wessex and Kent as they both appointed sons as sub-kings and charters in Wessex were attested (witnessed) by West Saxon magnates, while Kentish charters were witnessed by the Kentish elite; both kings kept overall control and the sub-kings were not allowed to issue their own coinage.
Viking raids increased in the early 840s on both sides of the English Channel, and in 843 Æthelwulf was defeated at Carhampton. In 850 Æthelstan defeated a Danish fleet off Sandwich in the first recorded naval battle in English history. In 851 Æthelwulf and his second son, Æthelbald, defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Aclea and, according to the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", "there made the greatest slaughter of a heathen raiding-army that we have heard tell of up to this present day, and there took the victory". Æthelwulf died in 858 and was succeeded by his oldest surviving son, Æthelbald, as king of Wessex and by his next oldest son, Æthelberht, as king of Kent. Æthelbald only survived his father by two years and Æthelberht then for the first time united Wessex and Kent into a single kingdom.
According to Asser, in his childhood Alfred won a beautifully decorated book of English poetry, offered as a prize by his mother to the first of her sons able to memorise it. He must have had it read to him as his mother died when he was about six and he did not learn to read until he was twelve. In 853 Alfred is reported by the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" to have been sent to Rome where he was confirmed by Pope Leo IV, who "anointed him as king". Victorian writers later interpreted this as an anticipatory coronation in preparation for his eventual succession to the throne of Wessex. This is unlikely; his succession could not have been foreseen at the time as Alfred had three living elder brothers. A letter of Leo IV shows that Alfred was made a "consul" and a misinterpretation of this investiture, deliberate or accidental, could explain later confusion. It may also be based upon the fact that Alfred later accompanied his father on a pilgrimage to Rome where he spent some time at the court of Charles the Bald, King of the Franks, around 854–855. On their return from Rome in 856 Æthelwulf was deposed by his son Æthelbald. With civil war looming the magnates of the realm met in council to hammer out a compromise. Æthelbald would retain the western shires (i.e. historical Wessex), and Æthelwulf would rule in the east. After King Æthelwulf died in 858, Wessex was ruled by three of Alfred's brothers in succession: Æthelbald, Æthelberht and Æthelred.
Alfred is not mentioned during the short reigns of his older brothers Æthelbald and Æthelberht. The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" describes the Great Heathen Army of Danes landing in East Anglia with the intent of conquering the four kingdoms which constituted Anglo-Saxon England in 865. Alfred's public life began in 865 at age 16 with the accession of his third brother, 18-year-old Æthelred. During this period, Bishop Asser gave Alfred the unique title of "secundarius", which may indicate a position similar to the Celtic tanist, a recognised successor closely associated with the reigning monarch. This arrangement may have been sanctioned by Alfred's father or by the Witan to guard against the danger of a disputed succession should Æthelred fall in battle. It was a well known tradition among other Germanic peoples - such as the Swedes and Franks to whom the Anglo-Saxons were closely related - to crown a successor as royal prince and military commander.
In 868, Alfred was recorded as fighting beside Æthelred in a failed attempt to keep the Great Heathen Army led by Ivar the Boneless out of the adjoining Kingdom of Mercia. The Danes arrived in his homeland at the end of 870 and nine engagements were fought in the following year, with mixed results; the places and dates of two of these battles have not been recorded. A successful skirmish at the Battle of Englefield in Berkshire on 31 December 870 was followed by a severe defeat at the siege and the Battle of Reading by Ivar's brother Halfdan Ragnarsson on 5 January 871. Four days later, the Anglo-Saxons won a brilliant victory at the Battle of Ashdown on the Berkshire Downs, possibly near Compton or Aldworth. Alfred is particularly credited with the success of this last battle. The Saxons were defeated at the Battle of Basing on 22 January. They were defeated again on 22 March at the Battle of Merton (perhaps Marden in Wiltshire or Martin in Dorset). Æthelred died shortly afterwards in April.
In April 871 King Æthelred died and Alfred acceded to the throne of Wessex and the burden of its defence, even though Æthelred left two under-age sons, Æthelhelm and Æthelwold. This was in accordance with the agreement that Æthelred and Alfred had made earlier that year in an assembly at an unidentified place called Swinbeorg. The brothers had agreed that whichever of them outlived the other would inherit the personal property that King Æthelwulf had left jointly to his sons in his will. The deceased's sons would receive only whatever property and riches their father had settled upon them and whatever additional lands their uncle had acquired. The unstated premise was that the surviving brother would be king. Given the Danish invasion and the youth of his nephews, Alfred's accession probably went uncontested.
While he was busy with the burial ceremonies for his brother, the Danes defeated the Saxon army in his absence at an unnamed spot and then again in his presence at Wilton in May. The defeat at Wilton smashed any remaining hope that Alfred could drive the invaders from his kingdom. Alfred was forced instead to make peace with them, according to sources that do not tell what the terms of the peace were. Bishop Asser claimed that the pagans agreed to vacate the realm and made good their promise.
The Viking army withdrew from Reading in the autumn of 871 to take up winter quarters in Mercian London. Although not mentioned by Asser or by the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", Alfred probably paid the Vikings cash to leave, much as the Mercians were to do in the following year. Hoards dating to the Viking occupation of London in 871/2 have been excavated at Croydon, Gravesend and Waterloo Bridge. These finds hint at the cost involved in making peace with the Vikings. For the next five years the Danes occupied other parts of England.
In 876 under their three leaders, Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend, the Danes slipped past the Saxon army and attacked and occupied Wareham in Dorset. Alfred blockaded them but was unable to take Wareham by assault. He negotiated a peace which involved an exchange of hostages and oaths, which the Danes swore on a "holy ring" associated with the worship of Thor. The Danes broke their word and after killing all the hostages, slipped away under cover of night to Exeter in Devon.
Alfred blockaded the Viking ships in Devon and with a relief fleet having been scattered by a storm, the Danes were forced to submit. The Danes withdrew to Mercia. In January 878 the Danes made a sudden attack on Chippenham, a royal stronghold in which Alfred had been staying over Christmas "and most of the people they killed, except the King Alfred, and he with a little band made his way by wood and swamp, and after Easter he made a fort at Athelney in the marshes of Somerset, and from that fort kept fighting against the foe". From his fort at Athelney, an island in the marshes near North Petherton, Alfred was able to mount a resistance campaign, rallying the local militias from Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. 878 was the nadir of the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. With all the other kingdoms having fallen to the Vikings, Wessex alone was still resisting.
A legend tells how when Alfred first fled to the Somerset Levels, he was given shelter by a peasant woman who, unaware of his identity, left him to watch some wheaten cakes she had left cooking on the fire. Preoccupied with the problems of his kingdom Alfred accidentally let the cakes burn and was roundly scolded by the woman upon her return. There is no contemporary evidence for the legend, although it is possible that there was an early oral tradition. The first time that it was actually written down was about one hundred years after Alfred's death.
In the seventh week after Easter (4–10 May 878), around Whitsuntide, Alfred rode to Egbert's Stone east of Selwood where he was met by "all the people of Somerset and of Wiltshire and of that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea (that is, west of Southampton Water), and they rejoiced to see him". Alfred's emergence from his marshland stronghold was part of a carefully planned offensive that entailed raising the fyrds of three shires. This meant not only that the king had retained the loyalty of ealdormen, royal reeves and king's thegns, who were charged with levying and leading these forces, but that they had maintained their positions of authority in these localities well enough to answer his summons to war. Alfred's actions also suggest a system of scouts and messengers.
Alfred won a decisive victory in the ensuing Battle of Edington which may have been fought near Westbury, Wiltshire. He then pursued the Danes to their stronghold at Chippenham and starved them into submission. One of the terms of the surrender was that Guthrum convert to Christianity. Three weeks later the Danish king and 29 of his chief men were baptised at Alfred's court at Aller, near Athelney, with Alfred receiving Guthrum as his spiritual son.
According to Asser,
While at Wedmore Alfred and Guthrum negotiated what some historians have called the Treaty of Wedmore, but it was to be some years after the cessation of hostilities that a formal treaty was signed. Under the terms of the so-called Treaty of Wedmore the converted Guthrum was required to leave Wessex and return to East Anglia. Consequently, in 879 the Viking army left Chippenham and made its way to Cirencester. The formal Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, preserved in Old English in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Manuscript 383), and in a Latin compilation known as "Quadripartitus", was negotiated later, perhaps in 879 or 880, when King Ceolwulf II of Mercia was deposed.
That treaty divided up the kingdom of Mercia. By its terms the boundary between Alfred's and Guthrum's kingdoms was to run up the River Thames to the River Lea, follow the Lea to its source (near Luton), from there extend in a straight line to Bedford, and from Bedford follow the River Ouse to Watling Street.
In other words, Alfred succeeded to Ceolwulf's kingdom consisting of western Mercia, and Guthrum incorporated the eastern part of Mercia into an enlarged kingdom of East Anglia (henceforward known as the Danelaw). By terms of the treaty, moreover, Alfred was to have control over the Mercian city of London and its mints—at least for the time being. In 825 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the peoples of Essex, Sussex, Kent and Surrey had surrendered to Egbert, Alfred's grandfather. From then until the arrival of the Great Heathen Army Essex had formed part of Wessex. After the foundation of Danelaw, it seems that some of Essex would have been ceded to the Danes, but how much is not clear.
With the signing of the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, an event most commonly held to have taken place around 880 when Guthrum's people began settling East Anglia, Guthrum was neutralised as a threat. The Viking army, which had stayed at Fulham during the winter of 878–879, sailed for Ghent and was active on the continent from 879–892.
There were local raids on the coast of Wessex throughout the 880s. In 882 Alfred fought a small sea battle against four Danish ships. Two of the ships were destroyed and the others surrendered. This was one of only four sea battles recorded in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", three of which involved Alfred. Similar small skirmishes with independent Viking raiders would have occurred for much of the period, as they had for decades.
In 883 Pope Marinus exempted the Saxon quarter in Rome from taxation, probably in return for Alfred's promise to send alms annually to Rome, which may be the origin of the medieval tax called Peter's Pence. The Pope sent gifts to Alfred, including what was reputed to be a piece of the True Cross.
After the signing of the treaty with Guthrum, Alfred was spared any large-scale conflicts for some time. Despite this relative peace the king was still forced to deal with a number of Danish raids and incursions. Among these was a raid in Kent, an allied kingdom in South East England, during the year 885, which was quite possibly the largest raid since the battles with Guthrum. Asser's account of the raid places the Danish raiders at the Saxon city of Rochester where they built a temporary fortress in order to besiege the city. In response to this incursion Alfred led an Anglo-Saxon force against the Danes who, instead of engaging the army of Wessex, fled to their beached ships and sailed to another part of Britain. The retreating Danish force supposedly left Britain the following summer.
Not long after the failed Danish raid in Kent, Alfred dispatched his fleet to East Anglia. The purpose of this expedition is debated, though Asser claims that it was for the sake of plunder. After travelling up the River Stour the fleet was met by Danish vessels that numbered 13 or 16 (sources vary on the number) and a battle ensued. The Anglo-Saxon fleet emerged victorious and, as Huntingdon accounts, "laden with spoils". The victorious fleet was then caught unawares when attempting to leave the River Stour and was attacked by a Danish force at the mouth of the river. The Danish fleet defeated Alfred's fleet, which may have been weakened in the previous engagement.
A year later, in 886, Alfred reoccupied the city of London and set out to make it habitable again. Alfred entrusted the city to the care of his son-in-law Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia. The restoration of London progressed through the latter half of the 880s and is believed to have revolved around a new street plan; added fortifications in addition to the existing Roman walls; and, some believe, the construction of matching fortifications on the south bank of the River Thames.
This is also the period in which almost all chroniclers agree that the Saxon people of pre-unification England submitted to Alfred. In 888, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Æthelred, also died. One year later Guthrum, or Athelstan by his baptismal name, Alfred's former enemy and king of East Anglia, died and was buried in Hadleigh, Suffolk. Guthrum's death changed the political landscape for Alfred. The resulting power vacuum stirred up other power-hungry warlords eager to take his place in the following years. The quiet years of Alfred's life were coming to a close.
After another lull, in the autumn of 892 or 893, the Danes attacked again. Finding their position in mainland Europe precarious, they crossed to England in 330 ships in two divisions. They entrenched themselves, the larger body, at Appledore, Kent and the lesser under Hastein, at Milton, also in Kent. The invaders brought their wives and children with them indicating a meaningful attempt at conquest and colonisation. Alfred, in 893 or 894, took up a position from which he could observe both forces.
While he was in talks with Hastein, the Danes at Appledore broke out and struck north-westwards. They were overtaken by Alfred's eldest son, Edward and were defeated in a general engagement at Farnham in Surrey. They took refuge on an island at Thorney, on the River Colne between Buckinghamshire and Middlesex, where they were blockaded and forced to give hostages and promise to leave Wessex. They then went to Essex and after suffering another defeat at Benfleet, joined with Hastein's force at Shoebury.
Alfred had been on his way to relieve his son at Thorney when he heard that the Northumbrian and East Anglian Danes were besieging Exeter and an unnamed stronghold on the North Devon shore. Alfred at once hurried westward and raised the Siege of Exeter. The fate of the other place is not recorded.
The force under Hastein set out to march up the Thames Valley, possibly with the idea of assisting their friends in the west. They were met by a large force under the three great ealdormen of Mercia, Wiltshire and Somerset and forced to head off to the north-west, being finally overtaken and blockaded at Buttington. (Some identify this with Buttington Tump at the mouth of the River Wye, others with Buttington near Welshpool.) An attempt to break through the English lines failed. Those who escaped retreated to Shoebury. After collecting reinforcements, they made a sudden dash across England and occupied the ruined Roman walls of Chester. The English did not attempt a winter blockade but contented themselves with destroying all the supplies in the district.
Early in 894 or 895 lack of food obliged the Danes to retire once more to Essex. At the end of the year the Danes drew their ships up the River Thames and the River Lea and fortified themselves north of London. A frontal attack on the Danish lines failed but later in the year, Alfred saw a means of obstructing the river to prevent the egress of the Danish ships. The Danes realised that they were outmanoeuvred, struck off north-westwards and wintered at Cwatbridge near Bridgnorth. The next year, 896 (or 897), they gave up the struggle. Some retired to Northumbria, some to East Anglia. Those who had no connections in England returned to the continent.
The Germanic tribes who invaded Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries relied upon the unarmoured infantry supplied by their tribal levy, or fyrd, and it was upon this system that the military power of the several kingdoms of early Anglo-Saxon England depended. The fyrd was a local militia in the Anglo-Saxon shire in which all freemen had to serve; those who refused military service were subject to fines or loss of their land. According to the law code of King Ine of Wessex, issued in about 694,
Wessex's history of failures preceding his success in 878 emphasised to Alfred that the traditional system of battle he had inherited played to the Danes' advantage. While both the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes attacked settlements to seize wealth and other resources, they employed very different strategies. In their raids the Anglo-Saxons traditionally preferred to attack head-on by assembling their forces in a shield wall, advancing against their target and overcoming the oncoming wall marshalled against them in defence.
In contrast the Danes preferred to choose easy targets, mapping cautious forays designed to avoid risking all their accumulated plunder with high-stake attacks for more. Alfred determined their strategy was to launch smaller-scaled attacks from a secure and reinforced defensible base to which they could retreat should their raiders meet strong resistance.
These bases were prepared in advance, often by capturing an estate and augmenting its defences with surrounding ditches, ramparts and palisades. Once inside the fortification, Alfred realised, the Danes enjoyed the advantage, better situated to outlast their opponents or crush them with a counter-attack as the provisions and stamina of the besieging forces waned.
The means by which the Anglo-Saxons marshalled forces to defend against marauders also left them vulnerable to the Vikings. It was the responsibility of the shire fyrd to deal with local raids. The king could call up the national militia to defend the kingdom but, in the case of the Viking hit-and-run raids, problems with communication, and raising supplies meant that the national militia could not be mustered quickly enough. It was only after the raids were underway that a call went out to landowners to gather their men for battle. Large regions could be devastated before the fyrd could assemble and arrive. And although the landowners were obliged to the king to supply these men when called, during the attacks in 878 many of them opportunistically abandoned their king and collaborated with Guthrum.
With these lessons in mind Alfred capitalised on the relatively peaceful years immediately following his victory at Edington by focusing on an ambitious restructuring of his kingdom's military defences. On a trip to Rome Alfred had stayed with Charles the Bald and it is possible that he may have studied how the Carolingian kings had dealt with the Viking problem. Learning from their experiences he was able to put together a system of taxation and defence for his own kingdom. Also there had been a system of fortifications in pre-Viking Mercia that may have been an influence. So when the Viking raids resumed in 892 Alfred was better prepared to confront them with a standing, mobile field army, a network of garrisons, and a small fleet of ships navigating the rivers and estuaries.
Tenants in Anglo-Saxon England had a threefold obligation based on their landholding: the so-called "common burdens" of military service, fortress work, and bridge repair. This threefold obligation has traditionally been called "trinoda necessitas" or "trimoda necessitas". The Old English name for the fine due for neglecting military service was .
To maintain the burhs, and to reorganise the fyrd as a standing army, Alfred expanded the tax and conscription system based on the productivity of a tenant's landholding. The "hide" was the basic unit of the system on which the tenant's public obligations were assessed. A "hide" is thought to represent the amount of land required to support one family. The "hide" would differ in size according to the value and resources of the land, and the landowner would have to provide service based on how many "hides" he owned.
At the centre of Alfred's reformed military defence system was a network of "burhs", distributed at strategic points throughout the kingdom. There were thirty-three burhs, spaced approximately apart, enabling the military to confront attacks anywhere in the kingdom within a day.
Alfred's burhs (of which twenty-two developed into boroughs) ranged from former Roman towns, such as Winchester, where the stone walls were repaired and ditches added, to massive earthen walls surrounded by wide ditches, probably reinforced with wooden revetments and palisades, such as at Burpham in West Sussex. The size of the burhs ranged from tiny outposts such as Pilton in Devon, to large fortifications in established towns, the largest being at Winchester.
A contemporary document now known as the "Burghal Hidage" provides an insight into how the system worked. It lists the "hidage" for each of the fortified towns contained in the document. For example, Wallingford had a hidage of 2,400, which meant that the landowners there were responsible for supplying and feeding 2,400 men, the number sufficient for maintaining of wall. A total of 27,071 soldiers were needed, approximately one in four of all the free men in Wessex. Many of the burhs were twin towns that straddled a river and were connected by a fortified bridge, like those built by Charles the Bald a generation before. The double-burh blocked passage on the river, forcing Viking ships to navigate under a garrisoned bridge lined with men armed with stones, spears, or arrows. Other burhs were sited near fortified royal villas, allowing the king better control over his strongholds.
The burhs were connected by a road system maintained for army use (known as "herepaths"). These roads would allow an army to be quickly assembled, sometimes from more than one burh, to confront the Viking invader. This network posed significant obstacles to Viking invaders, especially those laden with booty. The system threatened Viking routes and communications making it far more dangerous for them. The Vikings lacked the equipment for a siege against a burh and a developed doctrine of siegecraft, having tailored their methods of fighting to rapid strikes and unimpeded retreats to well-defended fortifications. The only means left to them was to starve the burh into submission but this gave the king time to send his mobile field army or garrisons from neighbouring burhs along the army roads. In such cases the Vikings were extremely vulnerable to pursuit by the king's joint military forces. Alfred's burh system posed such a formidable challenge against Viking attack that when the Vikings returned in 892 and stormed a half-made, poorly garrisoned fortress up the Lympne estuary in Kent, the Anglo-Saxons were able to limit their penetration to the outer frontiers of Wessex and Mercia.
Alfred's burghal system was revolutionary in its strategic conception and potentially expensive in its execution. His contemporary biographer Asser wrote that many nobles balked at the new demands placed upon them even though they were for "the common needs of the kingdom".
Alfred also tried his hand at naval design. In 896 he ordered the construction of a small fleet, perhaps a dozen or so longships that, at 60 oars, were twice the size of Viking warships. This was not, as the Victorians asserted, the birth of the English Navy. Wessex had possessed a royal fleet before this. King Athelstan of Kent and Ealdorman Ealhhere had defeated a Viking fleet in 851 capturing nine ships, and Alfred himself had conducted naval actions in 882.
Nevertheless, 897 clearly marked an important development in the naval power of Wessex. The author of the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" related that Alfred's ships were larger, swifter, steadier and rode higher in the water than either Danish or Frisian ships. It is probable that, under the classical tutelage of Asser, Alfred utilised the design of Greek and Roman warships, with high sides, designed for fighting rather than for navigation.
Alfred had seapower in mind—if he could intercept raiding fleets before they landed, he could spare his kingdom from being ravaged. Alfred's ships may have been superior in conception. In practice they proved to be too large to manoeuvre well in the close waters of estuaries and rivers, the only places in which a naval battle could occur.
The warships of the time were not designed to be ship killers but rather troop carriers. It has been suggested that, like sea battles in late Viking age Scandinavia, these battles may have entailed a ship coming alongside an enemy vessel, lashing the two ships together and then boarding the enemy craft. The result was effectively a land battle involving hand-to-hand fighting on board the two lashed vessels.
In the one recorded naval engagement in 896 Alfred's new fleet of nine ships intercepted six Viking ships at the mouth of an unidentified river in the south of England. The Danes had beached half their ships and gone inland. Alfred's ships immediately moved to block their escape. The three Viking ships afloat attempted to break through the English lines. Only one made it; Alfred's ships intercepted the other two. Lashing the Viking boats to their own, the English crew boarded and proceeded to kill the Vikings. One ship escaped, because Alfred's heavy ships became grounded when the tide went out. A land battle ensued between the crews. The Danes were heavily outnumbered, but as the tide rose they returned to their boats which, with shallower drafts, were freed first. The English watched as the Vikings rowed past them. But they had suffered so many casualties (120 dead against 62 Frisians and English) that they had difficulty putting out to sea. All were too damaged to row around Sussex and two were driven against the Sussex coast (possibly at Selsey Bill). The shipwrecked crew were brought before Alfred at Winchester and hanged.
In the late 880s or early 890s, Alfred issued a long "domboc" or law code consisting of his own laws, followed by a code issued by his late seventh-century predecessor King Ine of Wessex. Together these laws are arranged into 120 chapters. In his introduction Alfred explains that he gathered together the laws he found in many "synod-books" and "ordered to be written many of the ones that our forefathers observed—those that pleased me; and many of the ones that did not please me, I rejected with the advice of my councillors, and commanded them to be observed in a different way".
Alfred singled out in particular the laws that he "found in the days of Ine, my kinsman, or Offa, king of the Mercians, or King Æthelberht of Kent who first among the English people received baptism". He appended, rather than integrated, the laws of Ine into his code and although he included, as had Æthelbert, a scale of payments in compensation for injuries to various body parts, the two injury tariffs are not aligned. Offa is not known to have issued a law code, leading historian Patrick Wormald to speculate that Alfred had in mind the legatine capitulary of 786 that was presented to Offa by two papal legates.
About a fifth of the law code is taken up by Alfred's introduction which includes translations into English of the Ten Commandments, a few chapters from the Book of Exodus, and the Apostolic Letter from the Acts of the Apostles (15:23–29). The Introduction may best be understood as Alfred's meditation upon the meaning of Christian law. It traces the continuity between God's gift of law to Moses to Alfred's own issuance of law to the West Saxon people. By doing so, it linked the holy past to the historical present and represented Alfred's law-giving as a type of divine legislation.
Similarly Alfred divided his code into 120 chapters because 120 was the age at which Moses died and, in the number-symbolism of early medieval biblical exegetes, 120 stood for law. The link between Mosaic law and Alfred's code is the Apostolic Letter which explained that Christ "had come not to shatter or annul the commandments but to fulfill them; and he taught mercy and meekness" (Intro, 49.1). The mercy that Christ infused into Mosaic law underlies the injury tariffs that figure so prominently in barbarian law codes since Christian synods "established, through that mercy which Christ taught, that for almost every misdeed at the first offence secular lords might with their permission receive without sin the monetary compensation which they then fixed".
The only crime that could not be compensated with a payment of money was treachery to a lord, "since Almighty God adjudged none for those who despised Him, nor did Christ, the Son of God, adjudge any for the one who betrayed Him to death; and He commanded everyone to love his lord as Himself". Alfred's transformation of Christ's commandment, from "Love your neighbour as yourself" (Matt. 22:39–40) to love your secular lord as you would love the Lord Christ himself, underscores the importance that Alfred placed upon lordship which he understood as a sacred bond instituted by God for the governance of man.
When one turns from the "domboc"'s introduction to the laws themselves, it is difficult to uncover any logical arrangement. The impression is of a hodgepodge of miscellaneous laws. The law code, as it has been preserved, is singularly unsuitable for use in lawsuits. In fact, several of Alfred's laws contradicted the laws of Ine that form an integral part of the code. Patrick Wormald's explanation is that Alfred's law code should be understood not as a legal manual but as an ideological manifesto of kingship "designed more for symbolic impact than for practical direction". In practical terms the most important law in the code may well have been the very first: "We enjoin, what is most necessary, that each man keep carefully his oath and his pledge" which expresses a fundamental tenet of Anglo-Saxon law.
Alfred devoted considerable attention and thought to judicial matters. Asser underscores his concern for judicial fairness. Alfred, according to Asser, insisted upon reviewing contested judgments made by his ealdormen and reeves and "would carefully look into nearly all the judgements which were passed [issued] in his absence anywhere in the realm to see whether they were just or unjust". A charter from the reign of his son Edward the Elder depicts Alfred as hearing one such appeal in his chamber while washing his hands.
Asser represents Alfred as a Solomonic judge, painstaking in his own judicial investigations and critical of royal officials who rendered unjust or unwise judgments. Although Asser never mentions Alfred's law code he does say that Alfred insisted that his judges be literate so that they could apply themselves "to the pursuit of wisdom". The failure to comply with this royal order was to be punished by loss of office.
The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", commissioned at the time of Alfred, was probably written to promote unification of England, whereas Asser's "The Life of King Alfred" promoted Alfred's achievements and personal qualities. It was possible that the document was designed this way so that it could be disseminated in Wales, as Alfred had recently acquired overlordship of that country.
Asser speaks grandiosely of Alfred's relations with foreign powers but little definite information is available. His interest in foreign countries is shown by the insertions which he made in his translation of Orosius. He corresponded with Elias III, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and embassies to Rome conveying the English alms to the pope were fairly frequent. Around 890, Wulfstan of Hedeby undertook a journey from Hedeby on Jutland along the Baltic Sea to the Prussian trading town of Truso. Alfred personally collected details of this trip.
Alfred's relations with the Celtic princes in the western half of Great Britain are clearer. Comparatively early in his reign, according to Asser, the southern Welsh princes, owing to the pressure on them from North Wales and Mercia, commended themselves to Alfred. Later in his reign, the North Welsh followed their example and the latter cooperated with the English in the campaign of 893 (or 894). That Alfred sent alms to Irish and Continental monasteries may be taken on Asser's authority. The visit of three pilgrim "Scots" ("i.e.", Irish) to Alfred in 891 is undoubtedly authentic. The story that he himself in his childhood was sent to Ireland to be healed by Saint Modwenna may show Alfred's interest in that island.
In the 880s, at the same time that he was "cajoling and threatening" his nobles to build and man the burhs, Alfred, perhaps inspired by the example of Charlemagne almost a century before, undertook an equally ambitious effort to revive learning. During this time period the Viking raids were often seen as a divine punishment and Alfred may have wished to revive religious awe in order to appease God's wrath.
This revival entailed the recruitment of clerical scholars from Mercia, Wales and abroad to enhance the tenor of the court and of the episcopacy; the establishment of a court school to educate his own children, the sons of his nobles, and intellectually promising boys of lesser birth; an attempt to require literacy in those who held offices of authority; a series of translations into the vernacular of Latin works the king deemed "most necessary for all men to know"; the compilation of a chronicle detailing the rise of Alfred's kingdom and house, with a genealogy that stretched back to Adam, thus giving the West Saxon kings a biblical ancestry.
Very little is known of the church under Alfred. The Danish attacks had been particularly damaging to the monasteries. Although Alfred founded monasteries at Athelney and Shaftesbury, these were the first new monastic houses in Wessex since the beginning of the eighth century. According to Asser, Alfred enticed foreign monks to England for his monastery at Athelney as there was little interest for the locals to take up the monastic life.
Alfred undertook no systematic reform of ecclesiastical institutions or religious practices in Wessex. For him the key to the kingdom's spiritual revival was to appoint pious, learned, and trustworthy bishops and abbots. As king he saw himself as responsible for both the temporal and spiritual welfare of his subjects. Secular and spiritual authority were not distinct categories for Alfred.
He was equally comfortable distributing his translation of Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care" to his bishops so that they might better train and supervise priests and using those same bishops as royal officials and judges. Nor did his piety prevent him from expropriating strategically sited church lands, especially estates along the border with the Danelaw, and transferring them to royal thegns and officials who could better defend them against Viking attacks.
The Danish raids had a devastating effect on learning in England. Alfred lamented in the preface to his translation of Gregory's "Pastoral Care" that "learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English or even translate a single letter from Latin into English: and I suppose that there were not many beyond the Humber either". Alfred undoubtedly exaggerated, for dramatic effect, the abysmal state of learning in England during his youth. That Latin learning had not been obliterated is evidenced by the presence in his court of learned Mercian and West Saxon clerics such as Plegmund, Wæferth, and Wulfsige.
Manuscript production in England dropped off precipitously around the 860s when the Viking invasions began in earnest, not to be revived until the end of the century. Numerous Anglo-Saxon manuscripts burnt up along with the churches that housed them. A solemn diploma from Christ Church, Canterbury, dated 873, is so poorly constructed and written that historian Nicholas Brooks posited a scribe who was either so blind he could not read what he wrote, or who knew little or no Latin. "It is clear", Brooks concludes, "that the metropolitan church [of Canterbury] must have been quite unable to provide any effective training in the scriptures or in Christian worship".
Following the example of Charlemagne, Alfred established a court school for the education of his own children, those of the nobility, and "a good many of lesser birth". There they studied books in both English and Latin and "devoted themselves to writing, to such an extent ... they were seen to be devoted and intelligent students of the liberal arts". He recruited scholars from the Continent and from Britain to aid in the revival of Christian learning in Wessex and to provide the king personal instruction. Grimbald and John the Saxon came from Francia; Plegmund (whom Alfred appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 890), Bishop Werferth of Worcester, Æthelstan, and the royal chaplains Werwulf, from Mercia; and Asser, from St David's in southwestern Wales.
Alfred's educational ambitions seem to have extended beyond the establishment of a court school. Believing that without Christian wisdom there can be neither prosperity nor success in war, Alfred aimed "to set to learning (as long as they are not useful for some other employment) all the free-born young men now in England who have the means to apply themselves to it". Conscious of the decay of Latin literacy in his realm Alfred proposed that primary education be taught in English, with those wishing to advance to holy orders to continue their studies in Latin.
There were few "books of wisdom" written in English. Alfred sought to remedy this through an ambitious court-centred programme of translating into English the books he deemed "most necessary for all men to know". It is unknown when Alfred launched this programme but it may have been during the 880s when Wessex was enjoying a respite from Viking attacks. Alfred was, until recently, often considered to have been the author of many of the translations but this is now considered doubtful in almost all cases. Scholars more often refer to translations as "Alfredian" indicating that they probably had something to do with his patronage but are unlikely to be his own work.
Apart from the lost "Handboc" or "Encheiridio", which seems to have been a commonplace book kept by the king, the earliest work to be translated was the "Dialogues" of Gregory the Great, a book greatly popular in the Middle Ages. The translation was undertaken at Alfred's command by Werferth, Bishop of Worcester, with the king merely furnishing a preface. Remarkably, Alfred – undoubtedly with the advice and aid of his court scholars – translated four works himself: Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care", Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy", St. Augustine's "Soliloquies" and the first fifty psalms of the Psalter.
One might add to this list the translation, in Alfred's law code, of excerpts from the Vulgate Book of Exodus. The Old English versions of Orosius's "Histories against the Pagans" and Bede's "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" are no longer accepted by scholars as Alfred's own translations because of lexical and stylistic differences. Nonetheless the consensus remains that they were part of the Alfredian programme of translation. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge suggest this also for Bald's "Leechbook" and the anonymous "Old English Martyrology".
The preface of Alfred's translation of Pope Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care" explained why he thought it necessary to translate works such as this from Latin into English. Although he described his method as translating "sometimes word for word, sometimes sense for sense", the translation actually keeps very close to the original although, through his choice of language, he blurred throughout the distinction between spiritual and secular authority. Alfred meant the translation to be used, and circulated it to all his bishops. Interest in Alfred's translation of "Pastoral Care" was so enduring that copies were still being made in the 11th century.
Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" was the most popular philosophical handbook of the Middle Ages. Unlike the translation of the "Pastoral Care" the Alfredian text deals very freely with the original and, though the late Dr. G. Schepss showed that many of the additions to the text are to be traced not to the translator himself but to the glosses and commentaries which he used, still there is much in the work which is distinctive to the translation and has been taken to reflect philosophies of kingship in Alfred's milieu. It is in the Boethius that the oft-quoted sentence occurs: "To speak briefly: I desired to live worthily as long as I lived, and after my life to leave to them that should come after, my memory in good works." The book has come down to us in two manuscripts only. In one of these the writing is prose, in the other a combination of prose and alliterating verse. The latter manuscript was severely damaged in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The last of the Alfredian works is one which bears the name "Blostman" ('Blooms') or "Anthology". The first half is based mainly on the "Soliloquies" of St Augustine of Hippo, the remainder is drawn from various sources. The material has traditionally been thought to contain much that is Alfred's own and highly characteristic of him. The last words of it may be quoted; they form a fitting epitaph for the noblest of English kings. "Therefore, he seems to me a very foolish man, and truly wretched, who will not increase his understanding while he is in the world, and ever wish and long to reach that endless life where all shall be made clear." Alfred appears as a character in the twelfth- or thirteenth-century poem "The Owl and the Nightingale" where his wisdom and skill with proverbs is praised. "The Proverbs of Alfred", a thirteenth-century work, contains sayings that are not likely to have originated with Alfred but attest to his posthumous medieval reputation for wisdom.
The Alfred jewel, discovered in Somerset in 1693, has long been associated with King Alfred because of its Old English inscription AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN ('Alfred ordered me to be made'). The jewel is about long, made of filigreed gold, enclosing a highly polished piece of quartz crystal beneath which is set in a cloisonné enamel plaque with an enamelled image of a man holding floriate sceptres, perhaps personifying Sight or the Wisdom of God.
It was at one time attached to a thin rod or stick based on the hollow socket at its base. The jewel certainly dates from Alfred's reign. Although its function is unknown it has been often suggested that the jewel was one of the "æstels"—pointers for reading—that Alfred ordered sent to every bishopric accompanying a copy of his translation of the "Pastoral Care". Each "æstel" was worth the princely sum of 50 mancuses which fits in well with the quality workmanship and expensive materials of the Alfred jewel.
Historian Richard Abels sees Alfred's educational and military reforms as complementary. Restoring religion and learning in Wessex, Abels contends, was to Alfred's mind as essential to the defence of his realm as the building of the burhs. As Alfred observed in the preface to his English translation of Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care", kings who fail to obey their divine duty to promote learning can expect earthly punishments to befall their people. The pursuit of wisdom, he assured his readers of the Boethius, was the surest path to power: "Study wisdom, then, and, when you have learned it, condemn it not, for I tell you that by its means you may without fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it".
The portrayal of the West-Saxon resistance to the Vikings by Asser and the chronicler as a Christian holy war was more than mere rhetoric or propaganda. It reflected Alfred's own belief in a doctrine of divine rewards and punishments rooted in a vision of a hierarchical Christian world order in which God is the Lord to whom kings owe obedience and through whom they derive their authority over their followers. The need to persuade his nobles to undertake work for the 'common good' led Alfred and his court scholars to strengthen and deepen the conception of Christian kingship that he had inherited by building upon the legacy of earlier kings such as Offa as well as clerical writers such as Bede, Alcuin and the other luminaries of the Carolingian renaissance. This was not a cynical use of religion to manipulate his subjects into obedience but an intrinsic element in Alfred's worldview. He believed, as did other kings in ninth-century England and Francia, that God had entrusted him with the spiritual as well as physical welfare of his people. If the Christian faith fell into ruin in his kingdom, if the clergy were too ignorant to understand the Latin words they butchered in their offices and liturgies, if the ancient monasteries and collegiate churches lay deserted out of indifference, he was answerable before God, as Josiah had been. Alfred's ultimate responsibility was the pastoral care of his people.
Asser wrote of Alfred in his "Life of King Alfred",
It is also written by Asser that Alfred did not learn to read until he was twelve years old or later, which is described as "shameful negligence" of his parents and tutors. Alfred was an excellent listener and had an incredible memory and he retained poetry and psalms very well. A story is told by Asser about how his mother held up a book of Saxon poetry to him and his brothers, and said; "I shall give this book to whichever one of you can learn it the fastest." After excitedly asking, "Will you really give this book to the one of us who can understand it the soonest and recite it to you?" Alfred then took it to his teacher, learned it, and recited it back to his mother.
Alfred is also noted as carrying around a small book, probably a medieval version of a small pocket notebook, which contained psalms and many prayers that he often collected. Asser writes: these "he collected in a single book, as I have seen for myself; amid all the affairs of the present life he took it around with him everywhere for the sake of prayer, and was inseparable from it." An excellent hunter in every branch of the sport, Alfred is remembered as an enthusiastic huntsman against whom nobody's skills could compare.
Although he was the youngest of his brothers, he was probably the most open-minded. He was an early advocate for education. His desire for learning could have come from his early love of English poetry and inability to read or physically record it until later in life. Asser writes that Alfred "could not satisfy his craving for what he desired the most, namely the liberal arts; for, as he used to say, there were no good scholars in the entire kingdom of the West Saxons at that time".
In 868, Alfred married Ealhswith, daughter of a Mercian nobleman, Æthelred Mucel, Ealdorman of the Gaini. The Gaini were probably one of the tribal groups of the Mercians. Ealhswith's mother, Eadburh, was a member of the Mercian royal family.
They had five or six children together including: Edward the Elder who succeeded his father as king; Æthelflæd who became lady of the Mercians; and Ælfthryth who married Baldwin II, Count of Flanders. His mother was Osburga, daughter of Oslac of the Isle of Wight, Chief Butler of England. Asser, in his "Vita Ælfredi" asserts that this shows his lineage from the Jutes of the Isle of Wight. This is unlikely as Bede tells us that they were all slaughtered by the Saxons under Cædwalla.
Osferth was described as a relative in King Alfred's will and he attested charters in a high position until 934. A charter of King Edward's reign described him as the king's brother – mistakenly according to Keynes and Lapidge, and in the view of Janet Nelson he probably was an illegitimate son of King Alfred.
Alfred died on 26 October 899 at the age of 50 or 51. How he died is unknown, although he suffered throughout his life with a painful and unpleasant illness. His biographer Asser gave a detailed description of Alfred's symptoms and this has allowed modern doctors to provide a possible diagnosis. It is thought that he had either Crohn's disease or haemorrhoids. His grandson King Eadred seems to have suffered from a similar illness.
Alfred was buried temporarily in the Old Minster in Winchester. Four years after his death, he was moved to the New Minster (perhaps built especially to receive his body). The New Minster moved to Hyde in 1110 a little north of the city, and the monks were transferred to Hyde Abbey along with Alfred's body and those of his wife and children, which were presumably interred before the high altar. The abbey was dissolved in 1539 during the reign of Henry VIII and the church was demolished, leaving the graves intact.
The royal graves and many others were rediscovered by chance in 1788 when a prison was being constructed by convicts on the site. Prisoners dug across the width of the altar area in order to dispose of rubble left at the dissolution. Coffins were stripped of lead, and bones were scattered and lost. The prison was demolished between 1846 and 1850. Further excavations were inconclusive in 1866 and 1897. In 1866, amateur antiquarian John Mellor claimed to have recovered a number of bones from the site which he said were those of Alfred. These came into the possession of the vicar of nearby St Bartholomew's Church who reburied them in an unmarked grave in the church graveyard.
Excavations conducted by the Winchester Museums Service of the Hyde Abbey site in 1999 located a second pit dug in front of where the high altar would have been located, which was identified as probably dating to Mellor's 1866 excavation. The 1999 archeological excavation uncovered the foundations of the abbey buildings and some bones, suggested at the time to be those of Alfred; they proved instead to belong to an elderly woman. In March 2013, the Diocese of Winchester exhumed the bones from the unmarked grave at St Bartholomew's and placed them in secure storage. The diocese made no claim that they were the bones of Alfred, but intended to secure them for later analysis, and from the attentions of people whose interest may have been sparked by the recent identification of the remains of King Richard III. The bones were radiocarbon-dated but the results showed that they were from the 1300s and therefore not of Alfred. In January 2014, a fragment of pelvis that had been unearthed in the 1999 excavation of the Hyde site, and had subsequently lain in a Winchester museum store room, was radiocarbon-dated to the correct period. It has been suggested that this bone may belong to either Alfred or his son Edward, but this remains unproven.
Alfred is venerated as a saint by some Christian traditions. Though Henry VI of England attempted unsuccessfully to have him canonized by Pope Eugene IV in 1441, he was venerated sometimes in the Catholic Church; however the current "Roman Martyrology" does not mention him. The Anglican Communion venerates him as a Christian hero, with a feast day or commemoration on 26 October, and he may often be found depicted in stained glass in Church of England parish churches.
Alfred commissioned Bishop Asser to write his biography, which inevitably emphasised Alfred's positive aspects. Later medieval historians such as Geoffrey of Monmouth also reinforced Alfred's favourable image. By the time of the Reformation, Alfred was seen as a pious Christian ruler who promoted the use of English rather than Latin, and so the translations that he commissioned were viewed as untainted by the later Roman Catholic influences of the Normans. Consequently, it was writers of the sixteenth century who gave Alfred his epithet as "the Great", not any of Alfred's contemporaries. The epithet was retained by succeeding generations who admired Alfred's patriotism, success against barbarism, promotion of education, and establishment of the rule of law.
A number of educational establishments are named in Alfred's honour:
The Royal Navy has named one ship and two shore establishments HMS "King Alfred", and one of the first ships of the US Navy was named USS "Alfred" in his honour. In 2002, Alfred was ranked number 14 in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.
One of the first items visible when entering the campus of Alfred University is a bronze statue of the king, created in 1990 by William Underhill. It features the king as a young man, holding a shield in his left hand and an open book in his right.
A prominent statue of King Alfred the Great stands in the middle of Pewsey. It was unveiled in June 1913 to commemorate the coronation of King George V.
A statue of Alfred the Great, situated in the Wantage market place, was sculpted by Count Gleichen, a relative of Queen Victoria, and unveiled on 14 July 1877 by the Prince and Princess of Wales. The statue was vandalised on New Year's Eve 2007, losing part of its right arm and axe. After the arm and axe were replaced the statue was again vandalised on Christmas Eve 2008, losing its axe.
A bronze statue of Alfred the Great stands at the eastern end of The Broadway, close to the site of Winchester's medieval East Gate. The statue was designed by Hamo Thornycroft, cast in bronze by Singer & Sons of Frome and erected in 1899 to mark one thousand years since Alfred's death. The statue is placed on a pedestal consisting of two immense blocks of grey Cornish granite.
A marble statue of Alfred the Great stands on the North side of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio. It was sculpted by Isidore Konti in 1910. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1640 |
Alessandro Algardi
Alessandro Algardi (November 27, 1598 – June 10, 1654) was an Italian high-Baroque sculptor active almost exclusively in Rome, where for the latter decades of his life, he was, along with Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona, one of the major rivals of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. He is now most admired for his portrait busts that have great vivacity and dignity.
Algardi was born in Bologna, where at a young age, he was apprenticed in the studio of Agostino Carracci. However, his aptitude for sculpture led him to work for Giulio Cesare Conventi (1577–1640), an artist of modest talents. His two earliest known works date back to this period: two statues of saints, made of chalk, in the Oratory of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna. By the age of twenty, Ferdinando I, Duke of Mantua, began commissioning works from him, and he was also employed by local jewelers for figurative designs. After a short residence in Venice, he went to Rome in 1625 with an introduction from the Duke of Mantua to the late pope's nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, who employed him for a time in the restoration of ancient statues.
Propelled by the Borghese and Barberini patronage, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his studio garnered most of the major Roman sculptural commissions. For nearly a decade, Algardi struggled for recognition. In Rome he was aided by friends that included Pietro da Cortona and his fellow Bolognese, Domenichino. His early Roman commissions included terracotta and some marble portrait busts, while he supported himself with small works like crucifixes. In the 1630s he worked on the tombs of the Mellini family in the Mellini Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo.
Algardi's first major commission came about in 1634, when Cardinal Ubaldini (Medici) contracted for a funeral monument for his great-uncle, Pope Leo XI, the third of the Medici popes, who had reigned for less than a month in 1605. The monument was started in 1640, and mostly completed by 1644. The arrangement mirrors the one designed by Bernini for the Tomb of Urban VIII (1628–47), with a central hieratic sculpture of the pope seated in full regalia and offering a hand of blessing, while at his feet, two allegorical female figures flank his sarcophagus. However, in Bernini's tomb, the vigorous upraised arm and posture of the pope is counterbalanced by an active drama below, wherein the figures of "Charity" and "Justice" are either distracted by "putti" or lost in contemplation, while skeletal "Death" actively writes the epitaph. Algardi's tomb is much less dynamic. The allegorical figures of "Magnanimity" and "Liberality" have an impassive, ethereal dignity. Some have identified the helmeted figure of "Magnanimity" with that of Athena and iconic images of "Wisdom". "Liberality" resembles Duquesnoy's famous "Santa Susanna", but rendered more elegant. The tomb is somberly monotone and lacks the polychromatic excitement that detracts from the elegiac mood of Urban VIII's tomb.
In 1635–38, Pietro Boncompagni commissioned from Algardi a colossal statue of Philip Neri with kneeling angels for Santa Maria in Vallicella, completed in 1640. Immediately after this, Algardi produced an interactive sculptural group representing the beheading of Saint Paul with two figures: a kneeling, resigned saint and the executioner poised to strike the sword-blow, for the church of San Paolo, Bologna. These works established his reputation. Like Bernini's characteristic works, they often express the Baroque aesthetic of depicting dramatic attitudes and emotional expressions, yet Algardi's sculpture has a restraining sobriety in contrast to those of his rival.
With the death of the Barberini Pope Urban VIII in 1644 and the accession of the Pamphilj Pope Innocent X, the Barberini family and fell into disrepute, resulting in fewer commissions for Bernini. Algardi, on the other hand, was embraced by the new pope and the pope's nephew, Camillo Pamphilj. Algardi's portraits were highly prized, and their formal severity contrasts with Bernini's more vivacious expression. A large hieratic bronze of Innocent X by Algardi is now to be found in the Capitoline Museums.
Algardi was not renowned for his architectural abilities. Although he was in charge of the project for the papal villa, the Villa Pamphili, now Villa Doria Pamphili, outside the Porta San Pancrazio in Rome, he may have had professional guidance on the design of the casino from the architect/engineer Girolamo Rainaldi and help with supervising its construction from his assistant Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi. The casino was a showcase for the Pamphili collection of sculpture, ancient and contemporary, on which Algardi was well able to advise. In the villa grounds, Algardi and his studio executed sculpture-encrusted fountains and other garden features, where some of his free-standing sculpture and bas-reliefs remain.
In 1650 Algardi met Diego Velázquez, who obtained commissions for his work from Spain. As a consequence there are four chimney-pieces by Algardi in the Royal Palace of Aranjuez, and in the gardens, the figures on the fountain of Neptune are also by him. The Augustinian monastery at Salamanca contains the tomb of the Count and Countess de Monterey, another work by Algardi.
Algardi's large, dramatic, high-relief marble panel of Pope Leo and Attila, created from 1646–1653, is commonly referred to as "Fuga d'Attila" or "Flight of Attila". It was created for St Peter's Basilica, and it reinvigorated the use of such marble reliefs. There had been large marble reliefs used previously in Roman churches, but for most patrons, sculpted marble altarpieces were far too costly. In this relief, the two principal figures, the stern and courageous pope and the dismayed and frightened Attila, surge forward from the center into three dimensions. Only they two see the descending angelic warriors rallying to the pope's defense, while all others in the background reliefs, persist in performing their respective earthly duties.
The subject was apt for a papal state seeking to increase its power, since it depicts the historical legend wherein Saint Leo the Great, the first pope to receive the epithet, with supernatural aid, deterred the Huns from looting Rome. From a baroque standpoint it is a moment of divine intervention in the affairs of man. Algardi's patron's message through the relief would be that all viewers should be sternly reminded of the papal capacity to invoke divine retribution against enemies.
In his later years Algardi controlled a large studio and amassed a great fortune. Algardi's classicizing manner was carried on by pupils, including Ercole Ferrata and Domenico Guidi, and Antonio Raggi initially trained with him. The latter two completed his design for an altarpiece of the "Vision of Saint Nicholas" at San Nicola da Tolentino, Rome, using two separate marble pieces linked together in one event and place, yet successfully separating the divine and earthly spheres. Other lesser known assistants from his studio include Francesco Barrata, Girolamo Lucenti, and Giuseppe Peroni.
Algardi died in Rome within a year of completing his famous relief, which was admired by contemporaries.
Algardi was also known for his portraiture which shows an obsessive attention to details of psychologically revealing physiognomy in a sober but immediate naturalism, and minute attention to costume and draperies, such as in the busts of Laudivio Zacchia, Camillo Pamphilj, and of Muzio Frangipane and his two sons Lello and Roberto.
In temperament, his style was more akin to the classicized and restrained baroque of Duquesnoy than to the emotive works of other baroque artists. From an artistic point of view, he was most successful in portrait-statues and groups of children, where he was obliged to follow nature most closely. His terracotta models, some of them finished works of art, were prized by collectors. An outstanding series of terracotta models is at the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1642 |
Algiers
Algiers ( ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of Algeria. The city's population at the 2008 Census was 2,988,145 and in 2011 was estimated to be around 3,500,000. An estimate puts the population of the larger metropolitan city to be around 5,000,000. Algiers is located on the Mediterranean Sea and in the north-central portion of Algeria.
Algiers is situated on the west side of a bay of the Mediterranean Sea. The modern part of the city is built on the level ground by the seashore; the old part, the ancient city of the deys, climbs the steep hill behind the modern town and is crowned by the casbah or citadel, above the sea. The casbah and the two quays form a triangle.
The city's name is derived via French and Catalan from the Arabic name "al-Jazāʾir" (), "The Islands". This name refers to the four former islands which lay off the city's coast before becoming part of the mainland in 1525. "Al-Jazāʾir" is itself a truncated form of the city's older name "Jazaʾir Banī Mazghanna" (), "The Islands of the Sons of Mazghana", used by early medieval geographers such as al-Idrisi and Yaqut al-Hamawi.
In antiquity, the Greeks knew the town as "Ikósion" (), which was Latinized as Icosium under Roman rule. The Greeks explained the name as coming from their word for "twenty" (, "eíkosi"), supposedly because it had been founded by 20 companions of Hercules when he visited the Atlas Mountains during his labors.
Algiers is also known as "el-Behdja" (, "The Joyous") or "Algiers the White" () for its whitewashed buildings, seen rising from the sea.
A small Phoenician colony on Algiers's former islands was established and taken over by the Carthaginians sometime before the 3rd century. After the Punic Wars, the Romans eventually took over administration of the town, which they called Icosium. Its ruins now form part of the modern city's marine quarter, with the Rue de la Marine following a former Roman road. Roman cemeteries existed near "Bab-el-Oued" and "Bab Azoun". The city was given Latin rights by the emperor Vespasian. The bishops of Icosium are mentioned as late as the 5th century, but the ancient town fell into obscurity during the Muslim conquest of North Africa.
The present city was founded in 944 by Bologhine ibn Ziri, the founder of the Berber Zirid–Sanhaja dynasty. He had earlier (935) built his own house and a Sanhaja center at Ashir, just south of Algiers. Although his Zirid dynasty was overthrown by Roger II of Sicily in 1148, the Zirids had already lost control of Algiers to their cousins the Hammadids in 1014. The city was wrested from the Hammadids by the Almohads in 1159, and in the 13th century came under the dominion of the Ziyanid sultans of Tlemcen. Nominally part of the sultanate of Tlemcen, Algiers had a large measure of independence under amirs of its own due to Oran being the chief seaport of the Ziyanids.
The Peñón of Algiers, an islet in front of Algiers harbour had been occupied by the Spaniards as early as 1302. Thereafter, a considerable amount of trade began to flow between Algiers and Spain. However, Algiers continued to be of comparatively little importance until after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, many of whom sought asylum in the city. In 1510, following their occupation of Oran and other towns on the coast of Africa, the Spaniards fortified the islet of Peñon and imposed a levy intended to suppress corsair activity.
In 1516, the amir of Algiers, Selim b. Teumi, invited the corsair brothers Aruj and Hayreddin "Barbarossa" to expel the Spaniards. Aruj came to Algiers, ordered the assassination of Selim, and seized the town and ousted the Spanish in the Capture of Algiers (1516). Hayreddin, succeeding Aruj after the latter was killed in battle against the Spaniards in the Fall of Tlemcen (1517), was the founder of the "pashaluk", which subsequently became the "beylik", of Algeria. Barbarossa lost Algiers in 1524 but regained it with the Capture of Algiers (1529), and then formally invited the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to accept sovereignty over the territory and to annex Algiers to the Ottoman Empire.
Algiers from this time became the chief seat of the Barbary pirates. In October 1541 in the Algiers expedition, the King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sought to capture the city, but a storm destroyed a great number of his ships, and his army of some 30,000, chiefly made up of Spaniards, was defeated by the Algerians under their Pasha, Hassan.
Formally part of the Ottoman Empire but essentially free from Ottoman control, starting in the 16th century Algiers turned to piracy and ransoming. Due to its location on the periphery of both the Ottoman and European economic spheres, and depending for its existence on a Mediterranean that was increasingly controlled by European shipping, backed by European navies, piracy became the primary economic activity. Repeated attempts were made by various nations to subdue the pirates that disturbed shipping in the western Mediterranean and engaged in slave raids as far north as Iceland. The United States fought two wars (the First and Second Barbary Wars) over Algiers' attacks on shipping.
Among the notable people held for ransom was the future Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, who was captive in Algiers almost five years, and who wrote two plays set in Algiers of the period. The primary source for knowledge of Algiers of this period, since there are no contemporary local sources, is the "Topografía e historia general de Argel" (1612, but written earlier), published by Diego de Haedo, but whose authorship is disputed. This work describes in detail the city, the behavior of its inhabitants, and its military defenses, with the unsuccessful hope of facilitating an attack by Spain so as to end the piracy.
A significant number of renegades lived in Algiers at the time, Christians converted voluntarily to Islam, many fleeing the law or other problems at home. Once converted to Islam, they were safe in Algiers. Many occupied positions of authority, such as Samson Rowlie, an Englishman who became Treasurer of Algiers.
The city under Ottoman control was enclosed by a wall on all sides, including along the seafront. In this wall, five gates allowed access to the city, with five roads from each gate dividing the city and meeting in front of the Ketchaoua Mosque. In 1556, a citadel was constructed at the highest point in the wall. A major road running north to south divided the city in two: The upper city (al-Gabal, or 'the mountain') which consisted of about fifty small quarters of Andalusian, Jewish, Moorish and Kabyle communities, and the lower city (al-Wata, or 'the plains') which was the administrative, military and commercial centre of the city, mostly inhabited by Ottoman Turkish dignitaries and other upper-class families.
In August 1816, the city was bombarded by a British squadron under Lord Exmouth (a descendant of Thomas Pellew, taken in an Algerian slave raid in 1715), assisted by Dutch men-of-war, destroying the corsair fleet harboured in Algiers.
The history of Algiers from 1830 to 1962 is bound to the larger history of Algeria and its relationship to France. On July 4, 1830, under the pretext of an affront to the French consul—whom the dey had hit with a fly-whisk when the consul said the French government was not prepared to pay its large outstanding debts to two Algerian merchants—a French army under General de Bourmont attacked the city in the 1830 invasion of Algiers. The city capitulated the following day. Algiers became the capital of French Algeria.
Many Europeans settled in Algiers, and by the early 20th century they formed a majority of the city's population. During the 1930s, the architect Le Corbusier drew up plans for a complete redesign of the colonial city. Le Corbusier was highly critical of the urban style of Algiers, describing the European district as "nothing but crumbling walls and devastated nature, the whole a sullied blot". He also criticised the difference in living standards he perceived between the European and African residents of the city, describing a situation in which "the 'civilised' live like rats in holes" whereas "the 'barbarians' live in solitude, in well-being". However, these plans were ultimately ignored by the French administration.
During World War II, Algiers was the first city to be seized from the Germans by the Allies during Operation Torch.
In 1962, after a bloody independence struggle in which hundreds of thousands (estimates range between 350,000 and 1,500,000) died (mostly Algerians but also French and Pieds-Noirs) during fighting between the French Army and the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, Algeria gained its independence, with Algiers as its capital. Since then, despite losing its entire "pied-noir" population, the city has expanded massively. It now has about five million inhabitants, or 10 percent of Algeria's population—and its suburbs now cover most of the surrounding Mitidja plain.
Algiers also played a pivotal role in the Algerian War (1954–1962), particularly during the Battle of Algiers when the 10th Parachute Division of the French Army, starting on January 7, 1957, and on the orders of the French Minister of Justice François Mitterrand (who authorized any means "to eliminate the insurrectionists"), led attacks against the Algerian fighters for independence. Algiers remains marked by this battle, which was characterized by merciless fighting between FLN forces which carried out a guerrilla campaign against the French military and police and pro-French Algerian soldiers, and the French Army which responded with a bloody repression, torture and blanket terrorism against the native population. The demonstrations of May 13 during the crisis of 1958 provoked the fall of the Fourth Republic in France, as well as the return of General de Gaulle to power.
Algeria achieved independence on July 5, 1962. Run by the FLN that had secured independence, Algiers became a member of Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. In October 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Algiers was the site of demonstrations demanding the end of the single-party system and the creation of a "real" democracy baptized the "Spring of Algier". The demonstrators were repressed by the authorities (more than 300 dead), but the movement constituted a turning point in the political history of modern Algeria. In 1989, a new constitution was adopted that put an end to the one-party rule and saw the creation of more than fifty political parties, as well as official freedom of the press.
The city became the theatre of many political demonstrations of all descriptions until 1993. In 1991, a political entity dominated by religious conservatives called the Islamic Salvation Front engaged in a political test of wills with the authorities. In the 1992 elections for the Algerian National Assembly, the Islamists garnered a large amount of support in the first round, helped by a massive abstention from disillusioned Algerian voters by the turn of events. Fearing an eventual win by the Islamists, the army canceled the election process, setting off a civil war between the State and armed religious conservatives which would last for a decade.
On December 11, 2007, two car bombs exploded in Algiers. One bomb targeted two United Nations buildings and the other targeted a government building housing the Supreme Court. The death toll was at least 62, with over two hundred injured in the attacks. However, only 26 remained hospitalized the following day. , it is speculated that the attack was carried out by the Al Qaida cell within the city.
Indigenous terrorist groups have been actively operating in Algeria since around 2002.
Algiers has a Mediterranean climate (Köppen climate classification "Csa"). Its proximity to the Mediterranean Sea aids in moderating the city's temperatures. As a result, Algiers usually does not see the extreme temperatures that are experienced in the adjacent interior. Algiers on average receives roughly of rain per year, the bulk of which is seen between October and April. The precipitation is higher than in most of coastal Mediterranean Spain, and similar to most of coastal Mediterranean France, as opposed to the interior North African semi-arid or arid climate.
Snow is very rare; in 2012, the city received of snowfall, its first snowfall in eight years.
The city (and province) of Algiers is composed of 13 administrative districts, sub-divided into 57 "communes" listed below with their populations at the 1998 and 2008 Censuses:
There are many public buildings of interest, including the whole Kasbah quarter, Martyrs Square ("Sahat ech-Chouhada" ساحة الشهداء), the government offices (formerly the British consulate), the "Grand", "New", and Ketchaoua Mosques, the Roman Catholic cathedral of Notre Dame d'Afrique, the Bardo Museum (a former Turkish mansion), the old "Bibliothèque Nationale d'Alger"—a Turkish palace built in 1799–1800—and the new National Library, built in a style reminiscent of the British Library.
The main building in the Kasbah was begun in 1516 on the site of an older building, and served as the palace of the deys until the French conquest. A road has been cut through the centre of the building, the mosque turned into barracks, and the hall of audience allowed to fall into ruin. There still remain a minaret and some marble arches and columns. Traces exist of the vaults in which were stored the treasures of the dey.
Djamaa el Kebir ("Jamaa-el-Kebir" الجامع الكبير) is the oldest mosque in Algiers. It was first built by Yusuf ibn Tashfin, but reconstructed many times. The pulpit ("minbar" منبر) bears an inscription showing that the building existed in 1097. The minaret was built by the sultan of Tlemcen, in 1324. The interior of the mosque is square and is divided into aisles by columns joined by Moorish arches.
The New Mosque ("Jamaa-el-Jedid" الجامع الجديد), dating from the 17th century, is in the form of a Greek cross, surmounted by a large white cupola, with four small cupolas at the corners. The minaret is high. The interior resembles that of the Grand Mosque.
The church of the Holy Trinity (built in 1870) stands at the southern end of the "rue d'Isly" near the site of the demolished Fort Bab Azoun باب عزون. The interior is richly decorated with various coloured marbles. Many of these marbles contain memorial inscriptions relating to the British residents (voluntary and involuntary) of Algiers from the time of John Tipton, the first English consul, in 1580 (NB Some sources give 1585). One tablet records that in 1631 two Algerine pirate crews landed in Ireland, sacked Baltimore, and enslaved its inhabitants.
The Ketchaoua mosque ("Djamaa Ketchaoua" جامع كتشاوة), at the foot of the Casbah, was before independence in 1962 the cathedral of St Philippe, itself made in 1845 from a mosque dating from 1612. The principal entrance, reached by a flight of 23 steps, is ornamented with a portico supported by four black-veined marble columns. The roof of the nave is of Moorish plaster work. It rests on a series of arcades supported by white marble columns. Several of these columns belonged to the original mosque. In one of the chapels was a tomb containing the bones of San Geronimo. The building seems a curious blend of Moorish and Byzantine styles.
Algiers possesses a college with schools of law, medicine, science and letters. The college buildings are large and handsome. The Bardo Museum in Tunisia holds some of the ancient sculptures and mosaics discovered in Algeria, together with medals and Algerian money.
The port of Algiers is sheltered from all winds. There are two harbours, both artificial—the old or northern harbour and the southern or Agha harbour. The northern harbour covers an area of . An opening in the south jetty affords an entrance into Agha harbour, constructed in Agha Bay. Agha harbour has also an independent entrance on its southern side. The inner harbour was begun in 1518 by Khair-ad-Din Barbarossa (see History, below), who, to accommodated his pirate vessels, caused the island on which was Fort Penon to be connected with the mainland by a mole. The lighthouse which occupies the site of Fort Penon was built in 1544.
Algiers was a walled city from the time of the deys until the close of the 19th century. The French, after their occupation of the city (1830), built a rampart, parapet and ditch, with two terminal forts, Bab Azoun باب عزون to the south and Bab-el-Oued اد to the north. The forts and part of the ramparts were demolished at the beginning of the 20th century, when a line of forts occupying the heights of Bouzareah بوزريعة (at an elevation of above the sea) took their place.
Notre Dame d'Afrique, a church built (1858–1872) in a mixture of the Roman and Byzantine styles, is conspicuously situated overlooking the sea, on the shoulder of the Bouzareah hills,
to the north of the city. Above the altar is a statue of the Virgin depicted as a black woman. The church also contains a solid silver statue of the archangel Michael, belonging to the confraternity of Neapolitan fishermen.
Villa Abd-el-Tif, former residence of the dey, was used during the French period, to accommodate French artists, chiefly painters, and winners of the Abd-el-Tif prize, among whom Maurice Boitel, for a while of two years. Nowadays, Algerian artists are back in the villa's studios.
Algiers has a population of about 3,335,418 (2012 estimate).
The ethnic distribution is 53% from an Arabic-speaking background, 44% from a Berber-speaking background and 3% foreign-born.
Algiers is an important economic, commercial and financial center, with in particular a stock exchange with a capitalisation of 60 million euros. The city has the highest cost of living of any city in North Africa, as well as the 50th highest worldwide, as of March 2007, having gained one position compared to the previous year.
Mohamed Ben Ali El Abbar, president of the Council of Administration of the Emirate Group EMAAR, presented five "megaprojects" to Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, during a ceremony which took place Saturday, July 15, within the Palace of the People of Algiers. These projects will transform the city of Algiers and its surroundings by equipping them with a retail area and restoration and leisure facilities.
The first project will concentrate on the reorganization and the development of the infrastructures of the railway station "Aga" located in the downtown area. The ultramodern station intended to accommodate more than 80.000 passengers per day, will become a center of circulation in the heart of the grid system, surrounded by commercial offices and buildings and hotels intended for travelers in transit. A shopping centre and three high-rise office buildings rising with the top of the commercial zone will accompany the project.
The second project will not relate to the bay of Algiers and aims to revitalize the sea front. The development of the sea front will include marinas, channels, luxury hotels, offices, apartments of great standing, luxury stores and leisure amenities. A crescent-shaped peninsula will be set up on the open sea. The project of the bay of Algiers will also comprise six small islands, of which four of round form, connected to each other by bridges and marinas and will include tourist and residential complexes.
The third project will relate to restructuring an area of Algiers, qualified by the originators of the project of "city of wellness". El Abbar indicated to the journalists that the complex would be "agreeable for all those which will want to combine tourism and well-being or tourism and relaxation". The complex will include a university, a research center and a medical centre. It should also include a hospital complex, a care centre, a hotel zone, an urban centre and a thermal spa with villas and apartments. The university will include a medical school and a school for care male nurses which will be able to accommodate 500 students. The university campus will have the possibility of seeing setting up broad ranges of buildings of research laboratories and residences.
Another project relates to technological implantation of a campus in Sidi Abdellah, south-east from Algiers. This site will include shopping centres, residential zones with high standard apartments and a golf course surrounded by villas and hotels. Two other residential zones, including 1.800 apartments and 40 high standard villas, will be built on the surrounding hills.
The fifth project is that of the tourist complex Colonel Abbès, which will be located west from Algiers. This complex will include several retail zones, meeting places, and residential zones composed of apartments and villas with views of the sea.
Currently there is another project under construction, by the name of Algiers Medina. The first step of the project is nearly complete.
A Hewlett Packard office for French-speaking countries in Africa is in Algiers.
Some to the west of Algiers are such seaside resorts as Sidi Fredj (ex-Sidi Ferruch), Palm Beach, Douaouda, Zéralda, and the " Club of the Pines " (residence of State); there are tourist complexes, Algerian and other restaurants, souvenir shops, supervised beaches, and other amenities. The city is also equipped with important hotel complexes such as the hotel Hilton, El-Aurassi or El Djazair. Algiers also has the first water park in the country. The tourism of Algiers is growing but is not as developed as that of the larger cities in Morocco or Tunisia.
International schools for foreign residents include:
There was formerly the École japonaise d'Alger (アルジェ日本人学校 "Aruje Nihonjin Gakkō"), a school for Japanese children.
4 urban beltways:
Algiers is the sporting centre of Algeria. The city has a number of professional clubs in the variety of sports, which have won national and international titles. Among the sports facilities within the city, there is an enormous sporting complex – Complex of OCO – Mohamed Boudiaf. This includes the Stade 5 Juillet 1962 (capacity ), a venue for athletics, an Olympic swimming pool, a multisports room (the Cupola), an 18-hole golf course, and several tennis courts.
The following major sporting events have been held in Algiers (not-exhaustive list):
Major association football club based in Algiers include:
Algiers is twinned with:
Algiers has cooperation agreements with:
"In addition, many of the wards and cities within Algiers maintain sister-city relationships with other foreign cities." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1644 |
Ibn al-Haytham
Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (Latinized as Alhazen ; full name ; ) was an Arab mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age. Also sometimes referred to as "the father of modern optics", he made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular. His most influential work is titled "Kitāb al-Manāẓir" (Arabic: , "Book of Optics"), written during 1011–1021, which survived in a Latin edition. A polymath, he also wrote on philosophy, theology and medicine.
Ibn al-Haytham was the first to explain that vision occurs when light reflects from an object and then passes to one's eyes. He was also the first to demonstrate that vision occurs in the brain, rather than in the eyes. Building upon a naturalistic, empirical method pioneered by Aristotle in ancient Greece, Ibn al-Haytham was an early proponent of the concept that a hypothesis must be supported by experiments based on confirmable procedures or mathematical evidence—an early pioneer in the scientific method five centuries before Renaissance scientists.
Born in Basra, he spent most of his productive period in the Fatimid capital of Cairo and earned his living authoring various treatises and tutoring members of the nobilities. Ibn al-Haytham is sometimes given the byname "al-Baṣrī" after his birthplace, or "al-Miṣrī" ("of Egypt"). Al-Haytham was dubbed the "Second Ptolemy" by Abu'l-Hasan Bayhaqi and "The Physicist" by John Peckham. Ibn al-Haytham paved the way for the modern science of physical optics.
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) was born c. 965 to an Arab family in Basra, Iraq,
which was at the time part of the Buyid emirate.
He held a position with the title "vizier" in his native Basra, and made a name for himself for his knowledge of applied mathematics.
As he claimed to be able to regulate the flooding of the Nile, he was invited to by Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim in order to realise a hydraulic project at Aswan. However, Ibn al-Haytham was forced to concede the impracticability of his project.
Upon his return to Cairo, he was given an administrative post. After he proved unable to fulfill this task as well, he contracted the ire of the caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, and is said to have been forced into hiding until the caliph's death in 1021, after which his confiscated possessions were returned to him.
Legend has it that Alhazen feigned madness and was kept under house arrest during this period. During this time, he wrote his influential "Book of Optics".
Alhazen continued to live in Cairo, in the neighborhood of the famous University of al-Azhar, and lived from the proceeds of his literary production until his death in c. 1040. (A copy of Apollonius' "Conics", written in Ibn al-Haytham's own handwriting exists in Aya Sofya: (MS Aya Sofya 2762, 307 fob., dated Safar 415 a.h. [1024]).)
Among his students were Sorkhab (Sohrab), a Persian from Semnan, and Abu al-Wafa Mubashir ibn Fatek, an Egyptian prince.
Alhazen's most famous work is his seven-volume treatise on optics "Kitab al-Manazir" ("Book of Optics"), written from 1011 to 1021.
"Optics" was translated into Latin by an unknown scholar at the end of the 12th century or the beginning of the 13th century. It was printed by Friedrich Risner in 1572, with the title "Opticae thesaurus: Alhazeni Arabis libri septem, nuncprimum editi; Eiusdem liber De Crepusculis et nubium ascensionibus" (English: Treasury of Optics: seven books by the Arab Alhazen, first edition; by the same, on twilight and the height of clouds). Risner is also the author of the name variant "Alhazen"; before Risner he was known in the west as Alhacen. This work enjoyed a great reputation during the Middle Ages. Works by Alhazen on geometric subjects were discovered in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris in 1834 by E. A. Sedillot. In all, A. Mark Smith has accounted for 18 full or near-complete manuscripts, and five fragments, which are preserved in 14 locations, including one in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and one in the library of Bruges.
Two major theories on vision prevailed in classical antiquity. The first theory, the emission theory, was supported by such thinkers as Euclid and Ptolemy, who believed that sight worked by the eye emitting rays of light. The second theory, the intromission theory supported by Aristotle and his followers, had physical forms entering the eye from an object. Previous Islamic writers (such as al-Kindi) had argued essentially on Euclidean, Galenist, or Aristotelian lines. The strongest influence on the "Book of Optics" was from Ptolemy's "Optics", while the description of the anatomy and physiology of the eye was based on Galen's account. Alhazen's achievement was to come up with a theory that successfully combined parts of the mathematical ray arguments of Euclid, the medical tradition of Galen, and the intromission theories of Aristotle. Alhazen's intromission theory followed al-Kindi (and broke with Aristotle) in asserting that "from each point of every colored body, illuminated by any light, issue light and color along every straight line that can be drawn from that point". This however left him with the problem of explaining how a coherent image was formed from many independent sources of radiation; in particular, every point of an object would send rays to every point on the eye. What Alhazen needed was for each point on an object to correspond to one point only on the eye. He attempted to resolve this by asserting that the eye would only perceive perpendicular rays from the object—for any one point on the eye, only the ray that reached it directly, without being refracted by any other part of the eye, would be perceived. He argued, using a physical analogy, that perpendicular rays were stronger than oblique rays: in the same way that a ball thrown directly at a board might break the board, whereas a ball thrown obliquely at the board would glance off, perpendicular rays were stronger than refracted rays, and it was only perpendicular rays which were perceived by the eye. As there was only one perpendicular ray that would enter the eye at any one point, and all these rays would converge on the centre of the eye in a cone, this allowed him to resolve the problem of each point on an object sending many rays to the eye; if only the perpendicular ray mattered, then he had a one-to-one correspondence and the confusion could be resolved. He later asserted (in book seven of the "Optics") that other rays would be refracted through the eye and perceived "as if" perpendicular.
His arguments regarding perpendicular rays do not clearly explain why "only" perpendicular rays were perceived; why would the weaker oblique rays not be perceived more weakly? His later argument that refracted rays would be perceived as if perpendicular does not seem persuasive. However, despite its weaknesses, no other theory of the time was so comprehensive, and it was enormously influential, particularly in Western Europe. Directly or indirectly, his "De Aspectibus" (Book of Optics) inspired much activity in optics between the 13th and 17th centuries. Kepler's later theory of the retinal image (which resolved the problem of the correspondence of points on an object and points in the eye) built directly on the conceptual framework of Alhazen.
Alhazen showed through experiment that light travels in straight lines, and carried out various experiments with lenses, mirrors, refraction, and reflection. His analyses of reflection and refraction considered the vertical and horizontal components of light rays separately.
The camera obscura was known to the ancient Chinese, and was described by the Han Chinese polymathic genius Shen Kuo in his scientific book "Dream Pool Essays", published in the year 1088 C.E. Aristotle had discussed the basic principle behind it in his "Problems", but Alhazen's work also contained the first clear description, outside of China, of camera obscura in the areas of the Middle East, Europe, Africa and India. and early analysis of the device.
Alhazen used his camera obscura to observe the eclipse. In his essay "On the Form of the Eclipse" he writes that he observed the sickle-like shape of the sun at the time of an eclipse. The introduction to his essay reads as follows: The image of the sun at the time of the eclipse, unless it is total, demonstrates that when its light passes through a narrow, round hole and is cast on a plane opposite to the hole it takes on the form of a moonsickle. His findings solidified the importance in the history of the camera obscura.
Alhazen studied the process of sight, the structure of the eye, image formation in the eye, and the visual system. Ian P. Howard argued in a 1996 "Perception" article that Alhazen should be credited with many discoveries and theories previously attributed to Western Europeans writing centuries later. For example, he described what became in the 19th century Hering's law of equal innervation. He wrote a description of vertical horopters 600 years before Aguilonius that is actually closer to the modern definition than Aguilonius's—and his work on binocular disparity was repeated by Panum in 1858. Craig Aaen-Stockdale, while agreeing that Alhazen should be credited with many advances, has expressed some caution, especially when considering Alhazen in isolation from Ptolemy, with whom Alhazen was extremely familiar. Alhazen corrected a significant error of Ptolemy regarding binocular vision, but otherwise his account is very similar; Ptolemy also attempted to explain what is now called Hering's law. In general, Alhazen built on and expanded the optics of Ptolemy. In a more detailed account of Ibn al-Haytham's contribution to the study of binocular vision based on Lejeune and Sabra, Raynaud showed that the concepts of correspondence, homonymous and crossed diplopia were in place in Ibn al-Haytham's optics. But contrary to Howard, he explained why Ibn al-Haytham did not give the circular figure of the horopter and why, by reasoning experimentally, he was in fact closer to the discovery of Panum's fusional area than that of the Vieth-Müller circle. In this regard, Ibn al-Haytham's theory of binocular vision faced two main limits: the lack of recognition of the role of the retina, and obviously the lack of an experimental investigation of ocular tracts.
Alhazen's most original contribution was that, after describing how he thought the eye was anatomically constructed, he went on to consider how this anatomy would behave functionally as an optical system. His understanding of pinhole projection from his experiments appears to have influenced his consideration of image inversion in the eye, which he sought to avoid. He maintained that the rays that fell perpendicularly on the lens (or glacial humor as he called it) were further refracted outward as they left the glacial humor and the resulting image thus passed upright into the optic nerve at the back of the eye. He followed Galen in believing that the lens was the receptive organ of sight, although some of his work hints that he thought the retina was also involved.
Alhazen's synthesis of light and vision adhered to the Aristotelian scheme, exhaustively describing the process of vision in a logical, complete fashion.
An aspect associated with Alhazen's optical research is related to systemic and methodological reliance on experimentation ("i'tibar")(Arabic: إعتبار) and controlled testing in his scientific inquiries. Moreover, his experimental directives rested on combining classical physics ("ilm tabi'i") with mathematics ("ta'alim"; geometry in particular). This mathematical-physical approach to experimental science supported most of his propositions in "Kitab al-Manazir" ("The Optics"; "De aspectibus" or "Perspectivae") and grounded his theories of vision, light and colour, as well as his research in catoptrics and dioptrics (the study of the reflection and refraction of light, respectively).
According to Matthias Schramm, Alhazen "was the first to make a systematic use of the method of varying the experimental conditions in a constant and uniform manner, in an experiment showing that the intensity of the light-spot formed by the projection of the moonlight through two small apertures onto a screen diminishes constantly as one of the apertures is gradually blocked up." G. J. Toomer expressed some skepticism regarding Schramm's view, partly because at the time (1964) the "Book of Optics" had not yet been fully translated from Arabic, and Toomer was concerned that without context, specific passages might be read anachronistically. While acknowledging Alhazen's importance in developing experimental techniques, Toomer argued that Alhazen should not be considered in isolation from other Islamic and ancient thinkers. Toomer concluded his review by saying that it would not be possible to assess Schramm's claim that Ibn al-Haytham was the true founder of modern physics without translating more of Alhazen's work and fully investigating his influence on later medieval writers.
His work on catoptrics in Book V of the Book of Optics contains a discussion of what is now known as Alhazen's problem, first formulated by Ptolemy in 150 AD. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the normal at that point. This is equivalent to finding the point on the edge of a circular billiard table at which a player must aim a cue ball at a given point to make it bounce off the table edge and hit another ball at a second given point. Thus, its main application in optics is to solve the problem, "Given a light source and a spherical mirror, find the point on the mirror where the light will be reflected to the eye of an observer." This leads to an equation of the fourth degree. This eventually led Alhazen to derive a formula for the sum of fourth powers, where previously only the formulas for the sums of squares and cubes had been stated. His method can be readily generalized to find the formula for the sum of any integral powers, although he did not himself do this (perhaps because he only needed the fourth power to calculate the volume of the paraboloid he was interested in). He used his result on sums of integral powers to perform what would now be called an integration, where the formulas for the sums of integral squares and fourth powers allowed him to calculate the volume of a paraboloid. Alhazen eventually solved the problem using conic sections and a geometric proof. His solution was extremely long and complicated and may not have been understood by mathematicians reading him in Latin translation.
Later mathematicians used Descartes' analytical methods to analyse the problem. An algebraic solution to the problem was finally found in 1965 by Jack M. Elkin, an actuarian. Other solutions were discovered in 1989, by Harald Riede and in 1997 by the Oxford mathematician Peter M. Neumann.
Recently, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) researchers solved the extension of Alhazen's problem to general rotationally symmetric quadric mirrors including hyperbolic, parabolic and elliptical mirrors.
The Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) describes several experimental observations that Alhazen made and how he used his results to explain certain optical phenomena using mechanical analogies. He conducted experiments with projectiles and concluded that only the impact of perpendicular projectiles on surfaces was forceful enough to make them penetrate, whereas surfaces tended to deflect oblique projectile strikes. For example, to explain refraction from a rare to a dense medium, he used the mechanical analogy of an iron ball thrown at a thin slate covering a wide hole in a metal sheet. A perpendicular throw breaks the slate and passes through, whereas an oblique one with equal force and from an equal distance does not. He also used this result to explain how intense, direct light hurts the eye, using a mechanical analogy: Alhazen associated 'strong' lights with perpendicular rays and 'weak' lights with oblique ones. The obvious answer to the problem of multiple rays and the eye was in the choice of the perpendicular ray, since only one such ray from each point on the surface of the object could penetrate the eye.
Sudanese psychologist Omar Khaleefa has argued that Alhazen should be considered the founder of experimental psychology, for his pioneering work on the psychology of visual perception and optical illusions. Khaleefa has also argued that Alhazen should also be considered the "founder of psychophysics", a sub-discipline and precursor to modern psychology. Although Alhazen made many subjective reports regarding vision, there is no evidence that he used quantitative psychophysical techniques and the claim has been rebuffed.
Alhazen offered an explanation of the Moon illusion, an illusion that played an important role in the scientific tradition of medieval Europe. Many authors repeated explanations that attempted to solve the problem of the Moon appearing larger near the horizon than it does when higher up in the sky. Alhazen argued against Ptolemy's refraction theory, and defined the problem in terms of perceived, rather than real, enlargement. He said that judging the distance of an object depends on there being an uninterrupted sequence of intervening bodies between the object and the observer. When the Moon is high in the sky there are no intervening objects, so the Moon appears close. The perceived size of an object of constant angular size varies with its perceived distance. Therefore, the Moon appears closer and smaller high in the sky, and further and larger on the horizon. Through works by Roger Bacon, John Pecham and Witelo based on Alhazen's explanation, the Moon illusion gradually came to be accepted as a psychological phenomenon, with the refraction theory being rejected in the 17th century. Although Alhazen is often credited with the perceived distance explanation, he was not the first author to offer it. Cleomedes ( 2nd century) gave this account (in addition to refraction), and he credited it to Posidonius ( 135–50 BC). Ptolemy may also have offered this explanation in his "Optics", but the text is obscure. Alhazen's writings were more widely available in the Middle Ages than those of these earlier authors, and that probably explains why Alhazen received the credit.
Besides the "Book of Optics", Alhazen wrote several other treatises on the same subject, including his "Risala fi l-Daw"' ("Treatise on Light"). He investigated the properties of luminance, the rainbow, eclipses, twilight, and moonlight. Experiments with mirrors and the refractive interfaces between air, water, and glass cubes, hemispheres, and quarter-spheres provided the foundation for his theories on catoptrics.
Alhazen discussed the physics of the celestial region in his "Epitome of Astronomy", arguing that Ptolemaic models must be understood in terms of physical objects rather than abstract hypotheses—in other words that it should be possible to create physical models where (for example) none of the celestial bodies would collide with each other. The suggestion of mechanical models for the Earth centred Ptolemaic model "greatly contributed to the eventual triumph of the Ptolemaic system among the Christians of the West". Alhazen's determination to root astronomy in the realm of physical objects was important, however, because it meant astronomical hypotheses "were accountable to the laws of physics", and could be criticised and improved upon in those terms.
He also wrote "Maqala fi daw al-qamar" ("On the Light of the Moon").
In his work, Alhazen discussed theories on the motion of a body. In his "Treatise on Place", Alhazen disagreed with Aristotle's view that nature abhors a void, and he used geometry in an attempt to demonstrate that place ("al-makan") is the imagined three-dimensional void between the inner surfaces of a containing body.
In his "On the Configuration of the World" Alhazen presented a detailed description of the physical structure of the earth:
The book is a non-technical explanation of Ptolemy's "Almagest", which was eventually translated into Hebrew and Latin in the 13th and 14th centuries and subsequently had an influence on astronomers such as Georg von Peuerbach during the European Middle Ages and Renaissance.
In his "Al-Shukūk ‛alā Batlamyūs", variously translated as "Doubts Concerning Ptolemy" or "Aporias against Ptolemy", published at some time between 1025 and 1028, Alhazen criticized Ptolemy's "Almagest", "Planetary Hypotheses", and "Optics", pointing out various contradictions he found in these works, particularly in astronomy. Ptolemy's "Almagest" concerned mathematical theories regarding the motion of the planets, whereas the "Hypotheses" concerned what Ptolemy thought was the actual configuration of the planets. Ptolemy himself acknowledged that his theories and configurations did not always agree with each other, arguing that this was not a problem provided it did not result in noticeable error, but Alhazen was particularly scathing in his criticism of the inherent contradictions in Ptolemy's works. He considered that some of the mathematical devices Ptolemy introduced into astronomy, especially the equant, failed to satisfy the physical requirement of uniform circular motion, and noted the absurdity of relating actual physical motions to imaginary mathematical points, lines and circles:
Having pointed out the problems, Alhazen appears to have intended to resolve the contradictions he pointed out in Ptolemy in a later work. Alhazen believed there was a "true configuration" of the planets that Ptolemy had failed to grasp. He intended to complete and repair Ptolemy's system, not to replace it completely. In the "Doubts Concerning Ptolemy" Alhazen set out his views on the difficulty of attaining scientific knowledge and the need to question existing authorities and theories:
He held that the criticism of existing theories—which dominated this book—holds a special place in the growth of scientific knowledge.
Alhazen's "The Model of the Motions of Each of the Seven Planets" was written 1038. Only one damaged manuscript has been found, with only the introduction and the first section, on the theory of planetary motion, surviving. (There was also a second section on astronomical calculation, and a third section, on astronomical instruments.) Following on from his "Doubts on Ptolemy", Alhazen described a new, geometry-based planetary model, describing the motions of the planets in terms of spherical geometry, infinitesimal geometry and trigonometry. He kept a geocentric universe and assumed that celestial motions are uniformly circular, which required the inclusion of epicycles to explain observed motion, but he managed to eliminate Ptolemy's equant. In general, his model didn't try to provide a causal explanation of the motions, but concentrated on providing a complete, geometric description that could explain observed motions without the contradictions inherent in Ptolemy's model.
Alhazen wrote a total of twenty-five astronomical works, some concerning technical issues such as "Exact Determination of the Meridian", a second group concerning accurate astronomical observation, a third group concerning various astronomical problems and questions such as the location of the Milky Way; Alhazen argued for a distant location, based on the fact that it does not move in relation to the fixed stars. The fourth group consists of ten works on astronomical theory, including the "Doubts" and "Model of the Motions" discussed above.
In mathematics, Alhazen built on the mathematical works of Euclid and Thabit ibn Qurra and worked on "the beginnings of the link between algebra and geometry".
He developed a formula for summing the first 100 natural numbers, using a geometric proof to prove the formula.
Alhazen explored what is now known as the Euclidean parallel postulate, the fifth postulate in Euclid's "Elements", using a proof by contradiction, and in effect introducing the concept of motion into geometry. He formulated the Lambert quadrilateral, which Boris Abramovich Rozenfeld names the "Ibn al-Haytham–Lambert quadrilateral".
In elementary geometry, Alhazen attempted to solve the problem of squaring the circle using the area of lunes (crescent shapes), but later gave up on the impossible task. The two lunes formed from a right triangle by erecting a semicircle on each of the triangle's sides, inward for the hypotenuse and outward for the other two sides, are known as the lunes of Alhazen; they have the same total area as the triangle itself.
Alhazen's contributions to number theory include his work on perfect numbers. In his "Analysis and Synthesis", he may have been the first to state that every even perfect number is of the form 2"n"−1(2"n" − 1) where 2"n" − 1 is prime, but he was not able to prove this result; Euler later proved it in the 18th century.
Alhazen solved problems involving congruences using what is now called Wilson's theorem. In his "Opuscula", Alhazen considers the solution of a system of congruences, and gives two general methods of solution. His first method, the canonical method, involved Wilson's theorem, while his second method involved a version of the Chinese remainder theorem.
Alhazen discovered the sum formula for the fourth power, using a method that could be generally used to determine the sum for any integral power. He used this to find the volume of a paraboloid. He could find the integral formula for any polynomial without having developed a general formula.
Alhazen also wrote a "Treatise on the Influence of Melodies on the Souls of Animals", although no copies have survived. It appears to have been concerned with the question of whether animals could react to music, for example whether a camel would increase or decrease its pace.
In engineering, one account of his career as a civil engineer has him summoned to Egypt by the Fatimid Caliph, Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, to regulate the flooding of the Nile River. He carried out a detailed scientific study of the annual inundation of the Nile River, and he drew plans for building a dam, at the site of the modern-day Aswan Dam. His field work, however, later made him aware of the impracticality of this scheme, and he soon feigned madness so he could avoid punishment from the Caliph.
In his "Treatise on Place", Alhazen disagreed with Aristotle's view that nature abhors a void, and he used geometry in an attempt to demonstrate that place ("al-makan") is the imagined three-dimensional void between the inner surfaces of a containing body. Abd-el-latif, a supporter of Aristotle's philosophical view of place, later criticized the work in "Fi al-Radd 'ala Ibn al-Haytham fi al-makan" ("A refutation of Ibn al-Haytham’s place") for its geometrization of place.
Alhazen also discussed space perception and its epistemological implications in his "Book of Optics". In "tying the visual perception of space to prior bodily experience, Alhazen unequivocally rejected the intuitiveness of spatial perception and, therefore, the autonomy of vision. Without tangible notions of distance and size for
correlation, sight can tell us next to nothing about such things."
Alhazen was a Muslim; it is not certain to which school of Islam he belonged. As a Sunni, he may have been either a follower of the Ash'ari school, or a follower of the Mu'tazili school.
Sabra (1978) even suggested he might have been an adherent of Shia Islam.
Alhazen wrote a work on Islamic theology in which he discussed prophethood and developed a system of philosophical criteria to discern its false claimants in his time.
He also wrote a treatise entitled "Finding the Direction of Qibla by Calculation" in which he discussed finding the Qibla, where prayers (salat) are directed towards, mathematically.
There are occasional references to theology or religious sentiment in his technical works, e.g.
in "Doubts Concerning Ptolemy":
In "The Winding Motion":
Regarding the relation of objective truth and God:
Alhazen made significant contributions to optics, number theory, geometry, astronomy and natural philosophy. Alhazen's work on optics is credited with contributing a new emphasis on experiment.
His main work, "Kitab al-Manazir" ("Book of Optics"), was known in the Muslim world mainly, but not exclusively, through the thirteenth-century commentary by Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī, the "Tanqīḥ "al-Manāẓir" li-dhawī l-abṣār wa l-baṣā'ir". In al-Andalus, it was used by the eleventh-century prince of the Banu Hud dynasty of Zaragossa and author of an important mathematical text, al-Mu'taman ibn Hūd. A Latin translation of the "Kitab al-Manazir" was made probably in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. This translation was read by and greatly influenced a number of scholars in Christian Europe including: Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Witelo, Giambattista della Porta, Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Christiaan Huygens, René Descartes, and Johannes Kepler. His research in catoptrics (the study of optical systems using mirrors) centred on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant, and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His work on catoptrics also contains the problem known as "Alhazen's problem". Meanwhile in the Islamic world, Alhazen's work influenced Averroes' writings on optics, and his legacy was further advanced through the 'reforming' of his "Optics" by Persian scientist Kamal al-Din al-Farisi (died c. 1320) in the latter's "Kitab Tanqih al-Manazir" ("The Revision of" [Ibn al-Haytham's] "Optics"). Alhazen wrote as many as 200 books, although only 55 have survived. Some of his treatises on optics survived only through Latin translation. During the Middle Ages his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew and other languages.
The impact crater Alhazen on the Moon is named in his honour, as was the asteroid 59239 Alhazen. In honour of Alhazen, the Aga Khan University (Pakistan) named its Ophthalmology endowed chair as "The Ibn-e-Haitham Associate Professor and Chief of Ophthalmology". Alhazen, by the name Ibn al-Haytham, is featured on the obverse of the Iraqi 10,000-dinar banknote issued in 2003, and on 10-dinar notes from 1982.
The 2015 International Year of Light celebrated the 1000th anniversary of the works on optics by Ibn Al-Haytham.
In 2014, the "Hiding in the Light" episode of "", presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson, focused on the accomplishments of Ibn al-Haytham. He was voiced by Alfred Molina in the episode.
Over forty years previously, Jacob Bronowski presented Alhazen's work in a similar television documentary (and the corresponding book), "The Ascent of Man". In episode 5 ("The Music of the Spheres"), Bronowski remarked that in his view, Alhazen was "the one really original scientific mind that Arab culture produced", whose theory of optics was not improved on till the time of Newton and Leibniz.
H. J. J. Winter, a British historian of science, summing up the importance of Ibn al-Haytham in the history of physics wrote:
After the death of Archimedes no really great physicist appeared until Ibn al-Haytham. If, therefore, we confine our interest only to the history of physics, there is a long period of over twelve hundred years during which the Golden Age of Greece gave way to the era of Muslim Scholasticism, and the experimental spirit of the noblest physicist of Antiquity lived again in the Arab Scholar from Basra.
UNESCO declared 2015 the International Year of Light and its Director-General Irina Bokova dubbed Ibn al-Haytham 'the father of optics'. Amongst others, this was to celebrate Ibn Al-Haytham's achievements in optics, mathematics and astronomy. An international campaign, created by the 1001 Inventions organisation, titled "1001 Inventions and the World of Ibn Al-Haytham" featuring a series of interactive exhibits, workshops and live shows about his work, partnering with science centers, science festivals, museums, and educational institutions, as well as digital and social media platforms. The campaign also produced and released the short educational film 1001 Inventions and the World of Ibn Al-Haytham.
According to medieval biographers, Alhazen wrote more than 200 works on a wide range of subjects, of which at least 96 of his scientific works are known. Most of his works are now lost, but more than 50 of them have survived to some extent. Nearly half of his surviving works are on mathematics, 23 of them are on astronomy, and 14 of them are on optics, with a few on other subjects. Not all his surviving works have yet been studied, but some of the ones that have are given below. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1645 |
Alessandro Allori
Alessandro di Cristofano di Lorenzo del Bronzino Allori (Florence, 31 May 153522 September 1607) was an Italian portrait painter of the late Mannerist Florentine school.
In 1540, after the death of his father, he was brought up and trained in art by a close friend, often referred to as his 'uncle', the mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino, whose name he sometimes assumed in his pictures. In some ways, Allori is the last of the line of prominent Florentine painters, of generally undiluted Tuscan artistic heritage: Andrea del Sarto worked with Fra Bartolomeo (as well as Leonardo da Vinci), Pontormo briefly worked under Andrea, and trained Bronzino, who trained Allori. Subsequent generations in the city would be strongly influenced by the tide of Baroque styles pre-eminent in other parts of Italy.
Freedberg derides Allori as derivative, claiming he illustrates "the ideal of Maniera by which art (and style) are generated out of pre-existing art." The polish of figures has an unnatural marble-like form as if he aimed for cold statuary. It can be said of late phase mannerist painting in Florence, that the city that had early breathed life into statuary with the works of masters like Donatello and Michelangelo, was still so awed by them that it petrified the poses of figures in painting. While by 1600 the Baroque elsewhere was beginning to give life to painted figures, Florence was painting two-dimensional statues. Furthermore, in general, with the exception of the Counter-"Maniera" (Counter-Mannerism) artists, it dared not stray from high themes or stray into high emotion.
Among his collaborators was Giovanni Maria Butteri and his main pupil was Giovanni Bizzelli. Cristoforo del Altissimo, Cesare Dandini, Aurelio Lomi, John Mosnier, Alessandro Pieroni, Giovanni Battista Vanni, and Monanni also were his pupils. Allori was one of the artists, working under Vasari, included in the decoration of the Studiolo of Francesco I.
He was the father of the painter Cristofano Allori (1577–1621).
In 2006 the BBC foreign correspondent Sir Charles Wheeler returned an original Alessandro Allori painting to the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. He had been given it in Germany in 1952, but only recently realized its origin and that it must have been looted in the wake of World War II. The work is possibly a portrait of Eleonora (Dianora) di Toledo de' Medici, niece of Eleonora di Toledo, and measures 12 cm x 16 cm. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1647 |
Aloe
Aloe ( , ), also written "Aloë", is a genus containing over 500 species of flowering succulent plants. The most widely known species is "Aloe vera", or "true aloe", so called because it is cultivated as the standard source of so-called "aloe vera" for assorted pharmaceutical purposes. Other species, such as "Aloe ferox", are also cultivated or harvested from the wild for similar applications.
The APG IV system (2016) places the genus in the family Asphodelaceae, subfamily Asphodeloideae. Within the subfamily it may be placed in the tribe Aloeae. In the past, it has been assigned to the family Aloaceae (now included in the Asphodeloidae) or to a broadly circumscribed family Liliaceae (the lily family). The plant "Agave americana", which is sometimes called "American aloe", belongs to the Asparagaceae, a different family.
The genus is native to tropical and southern Africa, Madagascar, Jordan, the Arabian Peninsula, and various islands in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius, Réunion, Comoros, etc.). A few species have also become naturalized in other regions (Mediterranean, India, Australia, North and South America, Hawaiian Islands, etc.).
Most "Aloe" species have a rosette of large, thick, fleshy leaves. "Aloe" flowers are tubular, frequently yellow, orange, pink, or red, and are borne, densely clustered and pendant, at the apex of simple or branched, leafless stems. Many species of "Aloe" appear to be stemless, with the rosette growing directly at ground level; other varieties may have a branched or unbranched stem from which the fleshy leaves spring. They vary in color from grey to bright-green and are sometimes striped or mottled. Some aloes native to South Africa are tree-like (arborescent).
The APG IV system (2016) places the genus in the family Asphodelaceae, subfamily Asphodeloideae. In the past it has also been assigned to the families Liliaceae and Aloeaceae, as well as the family Asphodelaceae sensu stricto, before this was merged into the Asphodelaceae sensu lato.
The circumscription of the genus has varied widely. Many genera, such as "Lomatophyllum", have been brought into synonymy. Species at one time placed in "Aloe", such as "Agave americana", have been moved to other genera. Molecular phylogenetic studies, particularly from 2010 onwards, suggested that as then circumscribed, "Aloe" was not monophyletic and should be divided into more tightly defined genera. In 2014, John Charles Manning and coworkers produced a phylogeny in which "Aloe" was divided into six genera: "Aloidendron", "Kumara", "Aloiampelos", "Aloe", "Aristaloe" and "Gonialoe".
Over 500 species are accepted in the genus "Aloe", plus even more synonyms and unresolved species, subspecies, varieties, and hybrids. Some of the accepted species are:
In addition to the species and hybrids between species within the genus, several hybrids with other genera have been created in cultivation, such as between "Aloe" and "Gasteria" ("×Gasteraloe"), and between "Aloe" and "Astroloba" ("×Aloloba").
Aloe species are frequently cultivated as ornamental plants both in gardens and in pots. Many aloe species are highly decorative and are valued by collectors of succulents. "Aloe vera" is used both internally and externally on humans as folk or alternative medicine. The plants can also be made into types of special soaps or used in other skin care products (see natural skin care).
Numerous cultivars with mixed or uncertain parentage are grown. Of these, "Aloe" ‘Lizard Lips’ has gained the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit.
Historical use of various aloe species is well documented. Documentation of the clinical effectiveness is available, although relatively limited.
Of the 500+ species, only a few were used traditionally as herbal medicines, "Aloe vera" again being the most commonly used species. Also included are "A. perryi" and "A. ferox". The Ancient Greeks and Romans used "Aloe vera" to treat wounds. In the Middle Ages, the yellowish liquid found inside the leaves was favored as a purgative. Unprocessed aloe that contains aloin is generally used as a laxative, whereas processed juice does not usually contain significant aloin.
Some species, particularly "Aloe vera", are used in alternative medicine and first aid. Both the translucent inner pulp and the resinous yellow aloin from wounding the aloe plant are used externally for skin discomforts. As an herbal medicine, "Aloe vera" juice is commonly used internally for digestive discomfort.
According to Cancer Research UK, a potentially deadly product called T-UP is made of concentrated aloe, and promoted as a cancer cure. They say "there is currently no evidence that aloe products can help to prevent or treat cancer in humans".
On May 9, 2002, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a final rule banning the use of aloin, the yellow sap of the aloe plant, for use as a laxative ingredient in over-the-counter drug products. Most aloe juices today do not contain significant aloin.
According to W. A. Shenstone, two classes of aloins are recognized: (1) nataloins, which yield picric and oxalic acids with nitric acid, and do not give a red coloration with nitric acid; and (2) barbaloins, which yield aloetic acid (C7H2N3O5), chrysammic acid (C7H2N2O6), picric and oxalic acids with nitric acid, being reddened by the acid. This second group may be divided into a-barbaloins, obtained from Barbados "Aloe", and reddened in the cold, and b-barbaloins, obtained from "Aloe Socotrina" and Zanzibar "Aloe", reddened by ordinary nitric acid only when warmed or by fuming acid in the cold. Nataloin (2C17H13O7·H2O) forms bright-yellow scales, barbaloin (C17H18O7) prismatic crystals. "Aloe" species also contain a trace of volatile oil, to which their odour is due.
"Aloe perryi", "A. barbadensis", "A. ferox", and hybrids of this species with "A. africana" and "A. spicata" are listed as natural flavoring substances in the US government "Electronic Code of Federal Regulations". "Aloe socotrina" is said to be used in yellow Chartreuse.
"Aloe rubrolutea" occurs as a charge in heraldry, for example in the Civic Heraldry of Namibia. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1650 |
Alyattes of Lydia
Alyattes (Greek "Aluáttēs", likely from a Lydian '; reigned c. 610–560 BC), sometimes described as Alyattes I, was the fourth king of the Mermnad dynasty in Lydia, the son of Sadyattes and grandson of Ardys. He was succeeded by his son Croesus. A battle between his forces and those of Cyaxares, king of Media, was interrupted by the solar eclipse of 28 May 584 BC. After this, a truce was agreed and Alyattes married his daughter Aryenis to Astyages, the son of Cyaxares. The alliance preserved Lydia for another generation, during which it enjoyed its most brilliant period. Alyattes continued to wage a war against Miletus for many years but eventually he heeded the Delphic Oracle and rebuilt a temple, dedicated to Athena, which his soldiers had destroyed. He then made peace with Miletus.
Alyattes was the first monarch who issued coins, made from electrum (and his successor Croesus was the first to issue gold coins). Alyattes is therefore sometimes mentioned as the originator of coinage, or of currency.
The Greek form is most likely derived from a name with initial digamma, ("walwattes"), from a Lydian "" (Lydian alphabet: ).
Dates for the Mermnad kings are uncertain and are based on a computation by J. B. Bury and Russell Meiggs (1975) who estimated c.687–c.652 BC for the reign of Gyges. Herodotus gave reign lengths for Gyges' successors, but there is uncertainty about these as the total exceeds the timespan between 652 (probable death of Gyges, fighting the Cimmerians) and 547/546 (fall of Sardis to Cyrus the Great). Bury and Meiggs concluded that Ardys and Sadyattes reigned through an unspecified period in the second half of the 7th century BC, but they did not propose dates for Alyattes except their assertion that his son Croesus succeeded him in 560 BC. The timespan 560–546 BC for the reign of Croesus is almost certainly accurate.
For several years Alyattes continued the war against the Greek colony of Miletus begun by his father Sadyattes, but was obliged to turn his attention towards the Medes and Babylonians. On 28 May 585 BC, during the Battle of Halys fought against Cyaxares, king of Media, a solar eclipse occurred; hostilities were suspended, peace concluded, and the Halys River was fixed as the boundary between the two kingdoms.
Alyattes drove the Cimmerians from Asia Minor, with the help of war dogs. He further subdued the Carians, and took several Ionian cities, including Smyrna and Colophon. Smyrna was sacked and destroyed with its inhabitants forced to move into the countryside.
He created the first coins in history made from electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver. The weight of either precious metal could not just be weighed so they contained an imprint that identified the issuer who guaranteed the value of its contents. Today we still use a token currency, where the value is guaranteed by the state and not by the value of the metal used in the coins. Almost all coins used today descended from his invention after the technology passed into Greek usage through Hermodike II - a Greek princess from Cyme who was likely one of his wives (assuming he was referred to a dynastic 'Midas' because of the wealth his coinage amassed and because the electrum was sourced from Midas' famed river Pactolus; she was also likely the mother of Croesus (see croeseid symbolism. He standardised the weight of coins (1 stater = 168 grains of wheat). The coins were produced using an anvil die technique and stamped with a lion's head, the symbol of the Mermnadae.
Alyattes' tomb still exists on the plateau between Lake Gygaea and the river Hermus to the north of the Lydian capital Sardis — a large mound of earth with a substructure of huge stones. It was excavated by Spiegelthal in 1854, who found that it covered a large vault of finely cut marble blocks approached by a flat-roofed passage of the same stone from the south. The sarcophagus and its contents had been removed by early plunderers of the tomb. All that was left were some broken alabaster vases, pottery and charcoal. On the summit of the mound were large phalli of stone.
Herodotus described the tomb:
Some authors have suggested that Buddhist stupas were derived from a wider cultural tradition from the Mediterranean to the Indus valley, and can be related to the funeral conical mounds on circular bases that can be found in Lydia or in Phoenicia from the 8th century BCE, such as the tomb of Alyattes.
In "The Histories", Herodotus recounts how Alyattes continued his father's war against Miletus. According to Herodotus, Sadyattes had invaded Miletus annually to burn their crops over the course of six years. The troops left the horses and houses untouched so that the Milesians could plant a new crop, which the Lydians would then burn the following year. Alyattes did the same over the next five years until the end of the war.
The end came about because of a Lydian fire which, driven out of control by a strong wind, destroyed the temple of Athene at Assesos. Soon afterwards, Alyattes became seriously ill and decided to asked the Delphic Oracle for advice. The priestess refused to answer his emissary until the Lydians had rebuilt the temple. Alyattes immediately sent an embassy to Miletus and agreed a peace treaty. The temple was rebuilt and Alyattes recovered his health.
Attribution: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1652 |
Age of consent
The age of consent is the age at which a person is considered to be legally competent to consent to sexual acts. Consequently, an adult who engages in sexual activity with a person younger than the age of consent is unable to legally claim that the sexual activity was consensual, and such sexual activity may be considered child sexual abuse or statutory rape. The person below the minimum age is regarded as the victim, and their sex partner is regarded as the offender, unless both are underage. The purpose of setting an age of consent is to protect an underage person from sexual advances.
The term "age of consent" rarely appears in legal statutes. Generally, a law will instead establish the age below which it is illegal to engage in sexual activity with that person. It has sometimes been used with other meanings, such as the age at which a person becomes competent to consent to marriage, but the meaning given above is the one now generally understood. It should not be confused with other laws regarding age minimums including, but not limited to, the age of majority, age of criminal responsibility, voting age, drinking age, and driving age.
Age of consent laws vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, though most jurisdictions set the age of consent in the range 14 to 18. The laws may also vary by the type of sexual act, the gender of the participants or other considerations, such as involving a position of trust; some jurisdictions may also make allowances for minors engaged in sexual acts with each other, rather than a single age. Charges and penalties resulting from a breach of these laws may range from a misdemeanor, such as "corruption of a minor", to what is popularly called "statutory rape".
There are many "grey areas" in this area of law, some regarding unspecific and untried legislation, others brought about by debates regarding changing societal attitudes, and others due to conflicts between federal and state laws. These factors all make age of consent an often confusing subject and a topic of highly charged debates.
In traditional societies, the age of consent for a sexual union was a matter for the family to decide, or a tribal custom. In most cases, this coincided with signs of puberty, menstruation for a woman, and pubic hair for a man. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod in "Works and Days" (c. 700 BC) suggests that a man should marry around the age of thirty, and that he should take a wife who is five years past puberty.
Reliable data for ages at marriage is scarce. In England, for example, the only reliable data in the early modern period comes from property records made after death. Not only were the records relatively rare, but not all bothered to record the participants' ages, and it seems that the more complete the records are, the more likely they are to reveal young marriages. Modern historians have sometimes shown reluctance to accept evidence of young ages of marriage, dismissing it as a 'misreading' by a later copier of the records.
In the 12th century, Gratian, the influential founder of canon law in medieval Europe, accepted the age of puberty for marriage to be around twelve for girls and around fourteen for boys but acknowledged consent to be meaningful if both children were older than seven years of age. There were authorities that said that consent could take place earlier. Marriage would then be valid as long as neither of the two parties annulled the marital agreement before reaching puberty, or if they had already consummated the marriage. Judges sometimes honored marriages based on mutual consent at ages younger than seven: in contrast to established canon, there are recorded marriages of two- and three-year-olds.
The first "recorded" age-of-consent law dates from 1275 in England; as part of its provisions on rape, the Statute of Westminster 1275 made it a misdemeanor to "ravish" a "maiden within age," whether with or without her consent. The phrase "within age" was later interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke (England, 17th century) as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was twelve years of age.
The American colonies followed the English tradition, and the law was more of a guide. For example, Mary Hathaway (Virginia, 1689) was only nine when she was married to William Williams. Sir Edward Coke "made it clear that the marriage of girls under 12 was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was eligible for a dower from her husband's estate was 9 even though her husband be only four years old."
In the 16th century, a small number of Italian and German states set the minimum age for sexual intercourse for girls, setting it at twelve years. Towards the end of the 18th century, other European countries also began to enact similar laws. The first French Constitution of 1791 established the minimum age at eleven years. Portugal, Spain, Denmark and the Swiss cantons initially set the minimum age at ten to twelve years.
Age of consent laws were, historically, difficult to follow and enforce: legal norms based on "age" were not, in general, common until the 19th century, because clear proof of exact age and precise date of birth were often unavailable.
In Australia, 18th century thought was that children were inherently sinful and vulnerable to sexual temptations. Punishment for "giving in" to these temptations was generally left to parents and was not seen as a government matter, except in the case of rape. Australian children had few rights and were legally considered the chattel of their parents. From the late 18th century, and especially in the 19th century, attitudes started to change. By the mid-19th century there was increased concern over child sexual abuse.
A general shift in social and legal attitudes toward issues of sex occurred during the modern era. Attitudes on the appropriate age of permission for females to engage in sexual activity drifted toward adulthood. While ages from ten to thirteen years were typically regarded as acceptable ages for sexual consent in Western countries during the mid-19th century, by the end of the 19th century changing attitudes towards sexuality and childhood resulted in the raising of the age of consent.
English common law had traditionally set the age of consent within the range of ten to twelve years old, but the Offences Against the Person Act 1875 raised this to thirteen in Great Britain and Ireland. Early feminists of the Social Purity movement, such as Josephine Butler and others, instrumental in securing the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, began to turn towards the problem of child prostitution by the end of the 1870s. Sensational media revelations about the scourge of child prostitution in London in the 1880s then caused outrage among the respectable middle-classes, leading to pressure for the age of consent to be raised again.
The investigative journalist William Thomas Stead of the "Pall Mall Gazette" was pivotal in exposing the problem of child prostitution in the London underworld through a publicity stunt. In 1885 he "purchased" one victim, Eliza Armstrong, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a chimney sweep, for five pounds and took her to a brothel where she was drugged. He then published a series of four exposés entitled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon", which shocked its readers with tales of child prostitution and the abduction, procurement, and sale of young English virgins to Continental "pleasure palaces". The "Maiden Tribute" was an instant sensation with the reading public, and Victorian society was thrown into an uproar about prostitution. Fearing riots on a national scale, the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, pleaded in vain with Stead to cease publication of the articles. A wide variety of reform groups held protest meetings and marched together to Hyde Park demanding that the age of consent be raised. The government was forced to propose the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen and clamped down on prostitution.
In the United States, as late as the 1880s most states set the minimum age at ten to twelve (in Delaware, it was seven in 1895). Inspired by the "Maiden Tribute" articles, female reformers in the U.S. initiated their own campaign, which petitioned legislators to raise the legal minimum age to at least sixteen, with the ultimate goal to raise the age to eighteen. The campaign was successful, with almost all states raising the minimum age to sixteen to eighteen years by 1920.
In France, Portugal, Denmark, the Swiss cantons and other countries, the minimum age was raised to between thirteen and sixteen years in the following decades. Though the original arguments for raising the age of consent were based on morality, since then the "raison d'être" of the laws has changed to child welfare and a so-called right to childhood or innocence.
In France, under the Napoleonic Code, the age of consent was set in 1832 at eleven, and was raised to thirteen in 1863. It was increased to fifteen in 1945.
In Spain, it was set in 1822 at "puberty age", and changed to twelve in 1870, which was kept until 1999, when it became 13; and in 2015 it was raised to 16.
In the 21st century, concerns about child sex tourism and commercial sexual exploitation of children gained international prominence, and have resulted in legislative changes in several jurisdictions, as well as in the adoption of several international instruments.
The Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (Lanzarote, 25 October 2007), and the European Union's "Directive 2011/92/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council" of 13 December 2011 on combating the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children and child pornography were adopted.
The Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography came into force in 2002.
The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, which came into force in 2003, prohibits commercial sexual exploitation of children.
The Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (which came into force in 2008) also deals with commercial sexual exploitation of children.
Several Western countries have raised their ages of consent recently. These include Canada (in 2008—from 14 to 16); and in Europe, Iceland (in 2007—from 14 to 15), Lithuania (in 2010—from 14 to 16), Croatia (in 2013—from 14 to 15), and Spain (in 2015—from 13 to 16).
The International Criminal Court Statute does not provide a specific age of consent in its rape/sexual violence statute, but makes reference to sexual acts committed against persons ""incapable of giving genuine consent""; and the explicative footnote states, "It is understood that a person may be incapable of giving genuine consent if affected by natural, induced or "age-related incapacity"." (see note 51)
Sexual relations with a person under the age of consent is a crime in most countries; exceptions to this include Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. Jurisdictions use a variety of terms for the offense, including "child sexual abuse", "statutory rape", "illegal carnal knowledge", "corruption of a minor", besides others.
The enforcement practices of age-of-consent laws vary depending on the social sensibilities of the particular culture (see above). Often, enforcement is not exercised to the letter of the law, with legal action being taken only when a sufficiently socially-unacceptable age gap exists between the two individuals, or if the perpetrator is in a position of power over the minor (e.g. a teacher, minister, or doctor). The sex of each participant can also influence perceptions of an individual's guilt and therefore enforcement.
The threshold age for engaging in sexual activity varies between jurisdictions. Most jurisdictions have set a fixed age of consent. However, some jurisdictions permit sex with a person after the onset of their puberty, such as Yemen, but only in marriage. Ages can also vary based on the type of calendar used, such as the Lunar calendar, how birth dates in leap years are handled, or even the method by which birth date is calculated.
The age of consent is a legal barrier to the minor's ability to consent and therefore obtaining consent is not in general a defense to having sexual relations with a person under the prescribed age, for example:
A growing number of countries have specific extraterritorial legislation that prosecutes their citizens in their homeland should they engage in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign country with children. In 2008, ECPAT reported that 44 countries had extraterritorial child sex legislation. For example, PROTECT Act of 2003, a federal United States law bans sexual activity by its citizens with foreigners or with U.S. citizens from another state, if the partner is under 18 and the activity is illegal under the federal, state, or local law. This applies in cases where any of the partners travels into or out of the United States, or from one state into another, for the purpose of an illegal sexual encounter.
There is debate as to whether the gender of those involved should lead to different treatment of the sexual encounter, in law or in practice. Traditionally, age of consent laws regarding vaginal intercourse were often meant to protect the chastity of unmarried girls. Many feminists and social campaigners in the 1970s have objected to the social importance of virginity, and have also attempted to change the stereotypes of female passivity and male aggression; demanding that the law protect children from exploitation regardless of their gender, rather than dealing with concerns of chastity. This has led to gender-neutral laws in many jurisdictions. On the other hand, there is an opposing view which argues that the act of vaginal intercourse is an "unequal act" for males and females, due to issues such as pregnancy, increased risk of STDs, and risk of physical injury if the girl is too young and not physically ready. In the US, in "Michael M. v. Superior Ct.450 U.S. 464 (1981)" it was ruled that the double standard of offering more legal protection to girls is valid because "the Equal Protection Clause does not mean that the physiological differences between men and women must be disregarded".
Traditionally, many age of consent laws dealt primarily with men engaging in sexual acts with underage girls and boys (the latter acts often falling under sodomy and buggery laws). This means that in some legal systems, issues of women having sexual contact with underage partners were rarely acknowledged. For example, until 2000, in the UK, before the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000, there was no statutory age of consent for lesbian sex. In New Zealand, before 2005, there were no age of consent laws dealing with women having sex with underage boys. Previously, in Fiji, male offenders of child sexual abuse could receive up to life imprisonment, whilst female offenders would receive up to seven years. Situations like these have been attributed to societal views on traditional gender roles, and to constructs of male sexuality and female sexuality; according to E Martellozzo, "[V]iewing females as perpetrators of sexual abuse goes against every stereotype that society has of women: women as mothers and caregivers and not as people who abuse and harm". Alissa Nutting argues that women are not acknowledged as perpetrators of sex crimes because society does not accept that women have an autonomous sexuality of their own.
The age at which a person can be legally married can differ from the age of consent. In jurisdictions where the marriageable age is lower than the age of consent, those laws usually override the age of consent laws in the case of a married couple where one or both partners are below the age of consent. Some jurisdictions prohibit all sex outside of marriage irrespective of age, as in the case of Yemen.
In many countries, there are specific laws dealing with child prostitution.
In some countries, states, or other jurisdictions, the age of consent may be lower than the age at which a person can appear in pornographic images and films. In many jurisdictions, the minimum age for participation and even viewing such material is 18. As such, in some jurisdictions, films and images showing individuals under the age of 18, but above the age of consent, that meet the legal definition of child pornography are prohibited despite the fact that the sexual acts depicted are legal to engage in otherwise under that jurisdiction's age of consent laws. In those cases, it is only the filming of the sex act that is the crime as the act itself would not be considered a sex crime. For example, in the United States under federal law it is a crime to film minors below 18 in sexual acts, even in states where the age of consent is below 18. In those states, charges such as child pornography can be used to prosecute someone having sex with a minor, who could not otherwise be prosecuted for statutory rape, provided they filmed or photographed the act.
Jailbait images can be differentiated from child pornography, as they do not feature minors before the onset of puberty, nor do they contain nudity. The images are, however, usually sexualized, often featuring tween or young teenagers in bikinis, skirts, underwear or lingerie. Whether or not these images are legal is debated. When questioned regarding their legality legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin stated he thought it was not illegal, though legal expert Sunny Hostin was more skeptical, describing jailbait images as "borderline" child pornography which may be illegal.
The human immune system continues to develop after puberty. The age of exposure has an influence upon if the immune system can fend off infections in general, and this is also true in the case of some sexually transmitted diseases. For example, a risk factor for HPV strains causing genital warts is sexual debut at a young age; if this extends to the cancer causing strains, then sexual debut at a young age would potentially also increase risk of persistence of HPV infections that cause the very HPV induced cancers that are being diagnosed in spiking numbers of relatively young people.
Age-of-consent reform refers to the efforts of some individuals or groups, for different reasons, to alter or abolish age-of-consent laws. These efforts advocate positions such as: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1653 |
Afonso I of Portugal
Afonso I (; 1106 / 25 July 1109 / August 1109 / 11116 December 1185), nicknamed the Conqueror (), the Founder () or the Great () by the Portuguese, and El-Bortukali ([in Arabic ] "the Portuguese") and "Ibn-Arrink" or "Ibn Arrinq" ([in Arabic or ] "son of Henry", "Henriques") by the Moors whom he fought, was the first king of Portugal. He achieved the independence of the County of Portugal, establishing a new kingdom and doubling its area with the "Reconquista", an objective that he pursued until his death.
Afonso was the son of Teresa of León and Henry of Burgundy, rulers of the County of Portugal. Henry died in 1112, leaving Theresa to rule alone. Unhappy with Theresa's alliance with Galicia, the Portuguese nobility rallied around Afonso, who revolted and defeated his mother at the Battle of São Mamede in 1128 and became Count of Portugal soon afterwards. In 1139, Afonso renounced the suzerainty of the Kingdom of León and established the independent Kingdom of Portugal.
Afonso actively campaigned against the Moors in the south. In 1139 he won a decisive victory at the Battle of Ourique, and in 1147 he conquered Santarém and Lisbon from the Moors. He secured the independence of Portugal following a victory over León at Valdevez and received papal approval through "Manifestis Probatum". Afonso died in 1185 and was succeeded by his son, Sancho I.
Afonso was the son of Teresa, the illegitimate daughter of King Alfonso VI of León and Castile, and her husband, Henry of Burgundy. According to Fernão Lopes' "Crónica de Portugal de 1419," the future Portuguese king was born in Guimarães, which was at the time the most important political center of his parents. This was accepted by most Portuguese scholarship until in 1990 Torquato de Sousa Soares proposed Coimbra, the center of the county of Coimbra and another political center of Afonso's progenitors, as his birthplace, which caused outrage in Guimarães and a polemic between this historian and José Hermano Saraiva. Almeida Fernandes later proposed Viseu as the birthplace of Afonso basing himself on the "Chronica Gothorum", which states Afonso was born in 1109, a position followed by José Mattoso in his biography of the king. Abel Estefânio has suggested a different date and thesis, proposing 1106 as the birth date and the region of Tierra de Campos or even Sahagún as likely birth places based on the known itineraries of counts Henry and Teresa.
Henry and Teresa reigned jointly as count and countess of Portugal until his death on 22 May 1112 during the siege of Astorga, after which Teresa ruled Portugal alone. She would proclaim herself queen (a claim recognised by Pope Paschal II in 1116) but was captured and forced to reaffirm her vassalage to her half-sister, Urraca of León.
It is not known who was the tutor of Afonso. Later traditions, probably started with João Soares Coelho (a bastard descendant of Egas Moniz through a female line) in the mid-13th century and ampliated by later chronicles such as the "Crónica de Portugal de 1419", asserted he had been Egas Moniz de Ribadouro, possibly with the help of oral memories that associated the tutor to the house of Ribadouro. Yet, contemporary documents, namely from the chancery of Afonso in his early years as count of Portucale, indicate according to the historian José Mattoso that the most likely tutor of Afonso Henriques was Egas Moniz's oldest brother, Ermígio Moniz, who, besides being the senior brother within the family of Ribadouro, became the "dapifer" and "majordomus" of Afonso I from 1128 until his death in 1135, which indicates his closer proximity to the prince.
In an effort to pursue a larger share in the Leonese inheritance, his mother Teresa joined forces with Fernando Pérez de Trava, the most powerful count in Galicia. The Portuguese nobility disliked the alliance between Galicia and Portugal and rallied around Afonso. The Archbishop of Braga was also concerned with the dominance of Galicia, apprehensive of the ecclesiastical pretensions of his new rival the Galician Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, Diego Gelmírez, who had claimed an alleged discovery of relics of Saint James in his town, as a way to gain power and riches over the other cathedrals in the Iberian Peninsula. In 1122, Afonso turned fourteen, the adult age in the 12th century. In symmetry with his cousin he made himself a knight on his own account in the Cathedral of Zamora in 1125, with the permission of his mother. After the military campaign of Alfonso VII against his mother in 1127, Afonso revolted against her and proceeded to take control of the county from its queen.
In 1128, near Guimarães at the Battle of São Mamede, Afonso and his supporters overcame troops under both his mother and her lover, Count Fernando Peres de Trava of Galicia. Afonso exiled his mother to Galicia, and took over rule of the County of Portucale. Thus the possibility of re-incorporating Portucale into a Kingdom of Portugal and Galicia as before was eliminated and Afonso became sole ruler following demands for greater independence from the county's church and nobles. The battle was mostly ignored by the Leonese suzerain who was occupied at the time with a revolt in Castille. He was also, most likely, waiting for the reaction of the Galician families. After Teresa's death in 1131, Afonso VII of León and Castille proceeded to demand vassalage from his cousin. On 6 April 1129, Afonso Henriques dictated the writ in which he proclaimed himself Prince of Portugal or Prince of the Portuguese, an act informally allowed by Afonso VII, as it was thought to be Afonso Henriques's right by blood, as one of two grandsons of the Emperor of Hispania.
Afonso then turned his arms against the persistent problem of the Moors in the south. His campaigns were successful and, on 25 July 1139, he obtained an overwhelming victory in the Battle of Ourique, and straight after was (possibly unanimously) proclaimed King of the Portuguese by his soldiers, establishing his equality in rank to the other realms of the Peninsula, although the first reference to his royal title dates from 1140. The first assembly of the Portuguese Cortes convened at Lamego (wherein he would have been given the crown from the Archbishop of Braga, to confirm his independence) is a 17th-century embellishment of Portuguese history.
Complete independence from Alfonso VII of León's suzerainty, however, could not be achieved by military means alone. The County of Portugal still had to be acknowledged diplomatically by the neighboring lands as a kingdom and, most importantly, by the Catholic Church and the pope. Afonso wed Mafalda of Savoy, daughter of Count Amadeus III of Savoy, and sent ambassadors to Rome to negotiate with the pope. He succeeded in renouncing the suzerainty of his cousin, Alfonso VII of León, becoming instead a vassal of the papacy, as the kings of Sicily and Aragon had done before him.
In Portugal he built several monasteries and convents and bestowed important privileges to religious orders. He is notably the builder of Alcobaça Monastery, to which he called the Cistercian Order of his uncle Bernard of Clairvaux of Burgundy. In 1143, he wrote to Pope Innocent II to declare himself and the kingdom servants of the church, swearing to pursue driving the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula. Bypassing any king of León, Afonso declared himself the direct liege man of the papacy. Afonso continued to distinguish himself by his exploits against the Moors, from whom he wrested Santarém (see Conquest of Santarém) and Lisbon in 1147 (see Siege of Lisbon). He also conquered an important part of the land south of the Tagus River, although this was lost again to the Moors in the following years.
Meanwhile, King Alfonso VII of León regarded the independent ruler of Portugal as nothing but a rebel. Conflict between the two was constant and bitter in the following years. Afonso became involved in a war, taking the side of the Aragonese king, an enemy of Castile. To ensure the alliance, his son Sancho was engaged to Dulce of Aragon. Finally after winning the Battle of Valdevez, the Treaty of Zamora (1143) established peace between the cousins and the recognition by the Kingdom of León that Portugal was a fully independent kingdom.
In 1169 the now old King Afonso was possibly disabled in an engagement near Badajoz, by a fall from his horse and slamming against the castle gate, and made prisoner by the soldiers of King Ferdinand II of León, his son-in-law. He spent months at the hot springs of São Pedro do Sul, but never recovered and from this time onward the Portuguese king never rode a horse again. However, it is not certain if this was because of the disability: according to the later Portuguese chronistic tradition, this happened because Afonso would have to surrender himself again to Ferdinand or risk war between the two kingdoms if he ever rode a horse again. Portugal was obliged to surrender as his ransom almost all the conquests Afonso had made in Galicia (north of the Minho River) in the previous years. This event became known in Portuguese history as the Disaster of Badajoz ("o Desastre de Badajoz").
In 1179 the privileges and favors given to the Catholic Church were compensated. With consistent effort by several parties, such as the primate archbishop of Braga, Paio Mendes, in the papal court, the papal bull "Manifestis Probatum" was promulgated accepting the new king as vassal to the pope exclusively. In it Pope Alexander III also acknowledged Afonso as king and Portugal as an independent kingdom with the right to conquer lands from the Moors.
In 1184, the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf rallied a great Almohad force to retaliate against the Portuguese raids done since the end of a five-year truce in 1178 and besieged Santarém, which was defended by Afonso's son Sancho. The Almohad siege failed when news arrived the archbishop of Compostella had come to the defense of the city and Fernando II of León himself with his army. The Almohads ended the siege and their retreat turned into a rout due to panic in their camp, with the Almohad caliph being injured in the process (according to one version, because of a crossbow bolt) and dying on the way back to Seville. Afonso died shortly after, probably out of a sudden cause of death, on 6 December 1185. The Portuguese revere him as a hero, both on account of his personal character and as the founder of their nation. There are mythical stories that it took 10 men to carry his sword, and that Afonso wanted to engage other monarchs in personal combat, but no one would dare accept his challenge. It is also told, despite his honourable character, that he had a temper. Several chronicles give the example of a papal legate that brought a message from the Pope Paschal II refusing to acknowledge Afonso's claim as king: either after committing or saying a small offense against him or after being simply read the letter, Afonso almost killed, in his rage, the papal representative, taking several portucalense nobles and soldiers to physically restrain the young would-be king.
In July 2006, the tomb of the king (which is located in the Santa Cruz Monastery in Coimbra) was to be opened for scientific purposes by researchers from the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and the University of Granada (Spain). The opening of the tomb provoked considerable concern among some sectors of Portuguese society and Portuguese State Agency for Architectural Patrimony ("Instituto Português do Património Arquitectónico" – IPPAR) halted the opening, requesting more protocols from the scientific team because of the importance of the king in the nation's heart and public thought.
In 1146, Afonso married Mafalda, daughter of Amadeus III, Count of Savoy and Mahaut of Albon, both appearing together for the first time in May of that year confirming royal charters. They had the following issue:
Before his marriage to Mafalda, King Afonso fathered his first son with Chamoa Gómez, daughter of Count Gómez Núñez and Elvira Pérez, sister of Fernando and Bermudo Pérez de Traba:
The extramarital offspring by Elvira Gálter were:
King Afonso was also the father of: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1657 |
Afonso II of Portugal
Afonso II (; English: "Alphonzo"), or "Affonso" (Archaic Portuguese), "Alfonso" or "Alphonso" (Portuguese-Galician) or "Alphonsus" (Latin version), nicknamed the Fat (Portuguese "o Gordo"), King of Portugal, was born in Coimbra on 23 April 1185 and died on 25 March 1223 in the same city. He was the second but eldest surviving son of Sancho I of Portugal by his wife, Dulce, "Infanta" of Aragon. Afonso succeeded his father on 27 March 1211.
As a king, Afonso II set a different approach of government. Hitherto, his father Sancho I and his grandfather Afonso I were mostly concerned with military issues either against the neighbouring Kingdom of Castile or against the Moorish lands in the south. Afonso did not pursue territory enlargement policies and managed to ensure peace with Castile during his reign. Despite this, some towns, like Alcácer do Sal in 1217, were conquered from the Moors by the private initiative of noblemen. This does not mean that he was a weak or somehow cowardly man. The first years of his reign were marked instead by internal disturbances between Afonso and his brothers and sisters. The king managed to keep security within Portuguese borders only by outlawing and exiling his kin.
Since military issues were not a government priority, Afonso established the state's administration and centralized power on himself. He designed the first set of Portuguese written laws. These were mainly concerned with private property, civil justice, and minting. Afonso also sent ambassadors to European kingdoms outside the Iberian Peninsula and began amicable commercial relations with most of them.
Other reforms included the always delicate matters with the pope. In order to get the independence of Portugal recognized by Rome, his grandfather, Afonso I, had to legislate an enormous number of privileges to the Church. These eventually created a state within the state. With Portugal's position as a country firmly established, Afonso II endeavoured to weaken the power of the clergy and to apply a portion of the enormous revenues of the Catholic Church to purposes of national utility. These actions led to a serious diplomatic conflict between the pope and Portugal. After being excommunicated for his audacities by Pope Honorius III, Afonso II promised to make amends to the church, but he died in Coimbra on 25 March 1223 before making any serious attempts to do so.
King Afonso was buried originally at the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra where his body remained for nearly ten years. His remains were transferred subsequently to Alcobaça Monastery, as he had stipulated in his will. He and his wife, Queen Urraca, were buried at its Royal Pantheon.
In 1206, he married Urraca, daughter of Alfonso VIII of Castile and Eleanor of England. The couple were both descendants of King Alfonso VI of León. The offspring of this marriage were:
Out of wedlock, he had two illegitimate sons: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1658 |
Afonso III of Portugal
Afonso III (; rare English alternatives: "Alphonzo" or "Alphonse"), or "Affonso" (Archaic Portuguese), "Alfonso" or "Alphonso" (Portuguese-Galician) or "Alphonsus" (Latin), the Boulonnais (Port. "o Bolonhês"), King of Portugal (5 May 121016 February 1279) was the first to use the title "King of Portugal and the Algarve", from 1249. He was the second son of King Afonso II of Portugal and his wife, Urraca of Castile; he succeeded his brother, King Sancho II of Portugal, who died on 4 January 1248.
Afonso was born in Coimbra. As the second son of King Afonso II of Portugal, he was not expected to inherit the throne, which was destined to go to his elder brother Sancho.
He lived mostly in France, where he married Matilda, the heiress of Boulogne, in 1238, thereby becoming Count of Boulogne, Mortain, Aumale and Dammartin-en-Goële "jure uxoris".
In 1246, conflicts between his brother, the king, and the church became unbearable. In 1247, Pope Innocent IV ordered Sancho II to be removed from the throne and to be replaced by the Count of Boulogne. Afonso, of course, did not refuse the papal order and consequently marched to Portugal. Since Sancho was not a popular king the order was not hard to enforce, and he fled in exile to Toledo, Castile, where he died on 4 January 1248. Until his brother's death and his own eventual coronation, Afonso retained and used the title of "Visitador, Curador e Defensor do Reino" (Overseer, Curator and Defender of the Kingdom).
In order to ascend the throne Afonso abdicated his rights to the county of Boulogne in 1248. In 1253, he divorced Matilde in order to marry Beatrice of Castile, illegitimate daughter of Alfonso X, King of Castile, and Mayor Guillén de Guzmán.
Determined not to make the same mistakes as his brother, Afonso III paid special attention to what the middle class, composed of merchants and small land owners, had to say. In 1254, in the city of Leiria, he held the first session of the "Cortes", a general assembly comprising the nobility, the middle class and representatives of all municipalities. He also made laws intended to restrain the upper classes from abusing the least favored part of the population. Remembered as a notable administrator, Afonso III founded several towns, granted the title of city to many others and reorganized public administration.
Afonso showed extraordinary vision for the time. Progressive measures taken during his kingship include: representatives of the commons, besides the nobility and clergy, were involved in governance; the end of preventive arrests such that henceforward all arrests had to be first presented to a judge to determine the detention measure; and fiscal innovation, such as negotiating extraordinary taxes with the mercantile classes and direct taxation of the Church, rather than debasement of the coinage. These may have led to his excommunication by the holy see and possibly precipitated his death, and his son Denis's premature rise to the throne at only 18 years old.
Secure on the throne, Afonso III then proceeded to make war with the Muslim communities that still thrived in the south. In his reign the Algarve became part of the kingdom, following the capture of Faro.
Following his success against the Moors, Afonso III had to deal with a political situation concerning the country's borders with Castile. The neighbouring kingdom considered that the newly acquired lands of the Algarve should be Castilian, not Portuguese, which led to a series of wars between the two kingdoms. Finally, in 1267, the Treaty of Badajoz (1267) was signed in Badajoz, determining that the southern border between Castile and Portugal should be the River Guadiana, as it is today.
Afonso died in Alcobaça, Coimbra or Lisbon, aged 68.
Afonso's first wife was Matilda II, Countess of Boulogne, daughter of Renaud, Count of Dammartin, and Ida, Countess of Boulogne. They had no surviving children. He divorced Matilda in 1253 and, in the same year, married Beatrice of Castile, illegitimate daughter of Alfonso X, King of Castile, and Mayor Guillén de Guzmán. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1659 |
Afonso IV of Portugal
Afonso IV (; 8 February 129128 May 1357), called the Brave (), was King of Portugal from 1325 until his death. He was the only legitimate son of King Denis of Portugal by his wife Elizabeth of Aragon.
Afonso, born in Lisbon, was the rightful heir to the Portuguese throne. However, he was not Denis' favourite son, the old king preferring his illegitimate son, Afonso Sanches. The notorious rivalry between the half brothers led to civil war several times. On 7 January 1325, Afonso's father died and he, Afonso IV, became king, whereupon he exiled his rival, Afonso Sanches, to Castile, and stripped him of all the lands and fiefdom given by their father, Denis. From Castile, Afonso Sanches orchestrated a series of attempts to usurp the crown. After a few failed attempts at invasion, the brothers signed a peace treaty, arranged by Afonso's mother Queen Elizabeth.
In 1309, Afonso IV married Infanta Beatrice of Castile, daughter of King Sancho IV of Castile by his wife María de Molina. The first-born of this union was Infanta Maria of Portugal.
In 1325 Alfonso XI of Castile entered a child-marriage with Constanza Manuel of Castile, the daughter of one of his regents. Two years later, he had the marriage annulled so he could marry Afonso's daughter, Maria of Portugal. Maria became Queen of Castile in 1328 upon her marriage to Alfonso XI, who soon became involved publicly with a mistress. Constanza was imprisoned in a castle in Toro while her father, Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena, waged war against Alfonso XI until 1329. Eventually, the two reached a peaceful accord after mediation by Juan del Campo, Bishop of Oviedo; this secured Constance's release from prison.
The public humiliation of his daughter led Afonso IV to have his son and heir, Peter, marry the no less aggrieved Castilian infanta, Constanza. Afonso subsequently started a war against Castile, peace arriving four years later, through the intervention of the Infanta Maria herself. A year after the peace treaty was signed in Seville, Portuguese troops played an important role in defeating the Moors at the Battle of Río Salado in October 1340.
Political intrigue marked the last part of Afonso IV's reign, although Castille was torn by civil war after Alfonso XI died. Henry of Trastámara challenged the new King Peter of Castile, who sent many Castilian nobles into exile in Portugal. Afonso's heir, Pedro, fell in love with his new wife's lady-in-waiting, Inês de Castro. Inês was the daughter of an important noble family from Galicia, with links (albeit illegitimate) to both the royal houses of Castile and Portugal. Her brothers were aligned with the Trastamara faction, and became favorites of crown prince Pedro, much to the dismay of others at the Portuguese court, who considered them Castilian upstarts. When Constance of Peñafiel died weeks after giving birth to their third child, Pedro began living openly with Inês, recognized all her children as his and repudiated the idea of marrying anyone other than Inês herself. His father refused to go to war again against Castile, hoping his heir's infatuation would end, and tried to arrange another dynastic marriage for Pedro.
The situation became worse as the years passed and the aging Afonso lost control over his court. His grandson and Pedro's only legitimate son, future king Fernando of Portugal, was a sickly child, while Inês' illegitimate children thrived. Worried about his legitimate grandson's life, and the growing power of Castile within Portugal's borders, Afonso ordered Inês de Castro first imprisoned in his mother's old convent in Coimbra, and then murdered in 1355. He expected his son to give in and marry a princess, but the heir became enraged upon learning of his lover's decapitation in front of their young children. Pedro put himself at the head of an army and devastated the country between the Douro and the Minho rivers before he was reconciled to his father in early 1357. Afonso died almost immediately after, in Lisbon in May.
Afonso IV's nickname "the Brave" alludes to his martial exploits. However, his most important accomplishments were the relative peace enjoyed by the country during his long reign and the support he gave to the Portuguese Navy. Afonso granted public funding to raise a proper commercial fleet and ordered the first Portuguese maritime explorations. The conflict with Pedro, and the explorations he initiated, eventually became the foundation of the Portuguese national epic, "Os Lusíadas" by Luís de Camões.
The dramatic circumstances of the relationship between father and son and Inês de Castro was used as the basis for the plot of more than twenty operas and ballets. The story with its tragic denouement is immortalized in several plays and poems in Portuguese, such as "The Lusíadas" by Luís de Camões (canto iii, stanzas 118-135), and in Spanish, including "Nise lastimosa" and "Nise laureada" (1577) by Jerónimo Bermúdez, "Reinar despues de morir" by Luís Vélez de Guevara, as well as a play by French playwright Henry de Montherlant called "La Reine morte" ("The Dead Queen"). Mary Russell Mitford also wrote a drama based on the story entitled "Inez de Castro". "Inês de Castro" is a novel by Maria Pilar Queralt del Hierro in Spanish and Portuguese.
On 12 September 1309, Afonso married Beatrice of Castile, daughter of Sancho IV of Castile, and María de Molina, and had four sons and three daughters. Afonso broke the tradition of previous kings and did not have any children out of wedlock. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1660 |
Alfonso XII of Spain
Alfonso XII (Alfonso Francisco de Asís Fernando Pío Juan María de la Concepción Gregorio Pelayo; 28 November 185725 November 1885), also known as El Pacificador or the Peacemaker, was King of Spain, reigning from 1874 to 1885. After a revolution that deposed his mother Isabella II from the throne in 1868, Alfonso studied in Austria and France. His mother abdicated in his favour in 1870, and he returned to Spain as king in 1874 following a military coup against the First Republic. Alfonso died aged 27 in 1885, and was succeeded by his unborn son, who became Alfonso XIII on his birth the following year. To date, he is the last monarch of Spain to have died whilst on the throne.
Alfonso was born in Madrid as the eldest son of Queen Isabella II. Officially, his father was her husband, Infante Francis. Alfonso's biological paternity is uncertain: there is speculation that his biological father may have been Enrique Puigmoltó y Mayans (a captain of the guard). These rumours were used as political propaganda against Alfonso by the Carlists.
His mother's accession created the second cause of instability, which was the Carlist Wars. The supporters of the Count of Molina as king of Spain rose to have him enthroned. In addition, within the context of the post-Napoleonic restorations and revolutions which engulfed the West both in Europe and the Americas, both the Carlistas and the Isabelino conservatives were opposed to the new Napoleonic constitutional system. Much like in Britain, which subtracted itself from the liberal constitutional process, Spanish conservatives wanted to continue with the Traditional Spanish Organic Laws such as the Fuero Juzgo, the Novísima Recopilación and the Partidas of Alfonso X. This led to the third cause of instability of note, the "Independence of the American Kingdoms", recognized between 1823 and 1850.
When Queen Isabella II and her husband were forced to leave Spain by the Revolution of 1868, Alfonso accompanied them to Paris. From there, he was sent to the Theresianum in Vienna to continue his studies. On 25 June 1870, he was recalled to Paris, where his mother abdicated in his favour, in the presence of a number of Spanish nobles who had tied their fortunes to those of the exiled queen. He assumed the name Alfonso XII, for although no king of united Spain had borne the name "Alfonso XI", the Spanish monarchy was regarded as continuous with the more ancient monarchy represented by the 11 kings of Asturias, León and Castile also named Alfonso.
Following Amadeo's abandonment in 1873, Parliament established the Federal Republic (including the territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Pacific Archipelagos). The first act of President Estanislao Figueras was to extend the Abolition Act to Puerto Rico. Cuban slaves would have to wait until 1889.
But the republicans were not in agreement either, and they had to contend with the War in Cuba, and Muslim uprisings in Spanish Morocco. In the midst of the crisis during and after the First Spanish Republic, the Carlist party made itself strong in areas with claims over their national and institutional specificity, such as Catalonia or the Basque districts. By 1872, the Third Carlist War erupted. This unrest led to the creation of a group in favor of the Bourbon restoration, made by some sectors of the conservatives led by Canovas del Castillo.
The Prince of Asturias, Alfonso, was the person chosen to develop the new road map proposed by Canovas, which led to the June 1870 abdication of Queen Isabel II in favour of her son Prince Alfonso. The new road map, which indeed ended the eternal crisis begun in 1810 was called 'Alfonsismo', and the moderate centrist Cánovas del Castillo became the spokesman. As having Alfonso in Spain would be a problem, Cánovas became responsible for his education. He sent Alfonso to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in England, where the training Alfonso received was severe but more cosmopolitan than in Spain, given the current atmosphere.
On 1 December 1874, Alfonso issued the Sandhurst Manifesto, where he set the ideological basis of the Bourbon Restoration. It was drafted in reply to a birthday greeting from his followers, a manifesto proclaiming himself the sole representative of the Spanish monarchy. At the end of 1874, Brigadier Martínez Campos, who had long been working more or less openly for the king, led some battalions of the central army to Sagunto, rallied to his own flag the troops sent against him, and entered Valencia in the king's name. Thereupon the President resigned, and his power was transferred to the king's plenipotentiary and adviser, Antonio Cánovas. The 29 December 1874 military coup of Gen. Martinez Campos in Sagunto ended the failed republic and meant the rise of the young Prince Alfonso.
Within a few days after Canovas del Castillo took power as Premier, the new king, proclaimed on 29 December 1874, arrived at Madrid, passing through Barcelona and Valencia and was acclaimed everywhere (1875). In 1876, a vigorous campaign against the Carlists, in which the young king took part, resulted in the defeat of Don Carlos and the Duke's abandonment of the struggle.
Initially led by Canovas del Castillo as moderate prime minister, what was thought at one time as a coup aimed at placing the military in the political-administrative positions of power, in reality ushered in a civilian regime that lasted until Primo de Rivera's 1923 coup d'état. Cánovas was the real architect of the new regime of the Restoration.
In order to eliminate one of the problems of the reign of Isabel II, the single party and its destabilizing consequences, the Liberal Party was allowed to incorporate and participate in national politics, and the 'turnismo' or alternation was to become the new system. Turnismo would be endorsed in the Constitution of 1876 and the Pact of Pardo Palace (1885). It meant that liberal and conservative prime ministers would succeed each other ending thus the troubles.
This led to the end of the Carlist revolts and the victory over the New York-backed Cuban revolutionaries, and led to a huge backing both by insular and peninsular Spaniards of Alfonso as a wise and able king.
Alfonso's short reign established the foundations for the final socioeconomic recuperation of Spain after the 1808–1874 crisis. Both European (the coastal regions, such as the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Asturias) and Overseas – Antilles and Pacific were able to grow steadily. Cuba and Puerto Rico prospered to the point that Spain's first train was between Havana and Camagüey, and the first telegraph in Latin America was in Puerto Rico, established by Samuel Morse, whose daughter lived there with her husband. Upon the American invasion of Puerto Rico, ten US dollars were needed to buy one Puerto Rican peso.
On 23 January 1878 at the Basilica of Atocha in Madrid, Alfonso married his first cousin, Princess Maria de las Mercedes, but she died within six months of the marriage.
On 29 November 1879 at the Basilica of Atocha in Madrid, Alfonso married a much more distant relative, Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria. During the honeymoon, a pastry cook named Otero fired at the young sovereign and his wife as they were driving in Madrid.
The children of this marriage were:
Alfonso had two sons by Elena Armanda Nicolasa Sanz y Martínez de Arizala (15 December 1849, in Castellón de la Plana – 24 December 1898, in Paris):
In 1881 Alfonso refused to sanction a law by which the ministers were to remain in office for a fixed term of 18 months. Upon the consequent resignation of Canovas del Castillo, he summoned Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, the Liberal leader, to form a new cabinet.
In November 1885, Alfonso died, just short of his 28th birthday, at the Royal Palace of El Pardo near Madrid. He had been suffering from tuberculosis, but the immediate cause of his death was a recurrence of dysentery.
In 1902, his widow Maria Cristina initiated a national contest to build a monument in memory of Alfonso. The winning design, by José Grases Riera, was erected in an artificial lake in Madrid's Parque del Buen Retiro in 1922.
Coming to the throne at such an early age Alfonso had served no apprenticeship in the art of ruling. Benevolent and sympathetic in disposition, he won the affection of his people by fearlessly visiting districts ravaged by cholera or devastated by earthquake in 1885. His capacity for dealing with men was considerable, and he never allowed himself to become the instrument of any particular party. During his short reign, peace was established both at home and abroad, finances were well regulated, and the various administrative services were placed on a basis that afterwards enabled Spain to pass through the disastrous war with the United States without the threat of a revolution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1676 |
Alfonso XIII of Spain
Alfonso XIII (17 May 1886 – 28 February 1941), also known as El Africano or the African, was King of Spain from 1886 until the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931. Alfonso was monarch from birth as his father, Alfonso XII, had died the previous year. Alfonso's mother, Maria Christina of Austria, served as regent until he assumed full powers on his sixteenth birthday in 1902.
During Alfonso's reign of the Kingdom of Spain, it experienced four major problems that contributed to the end of the liberal monarchy: the lack of real political representation of broad social groups; the poor situation of the popular classes, especially peasants; problems arising from the Rif War; and Catalan nationalism. The political and social turbulence that began with the Spanish–American War prevented the turnaround parties from establishing a true liberal democracy, which led to the establishment of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. With the political failure of the dictatorship, Alfonso impelled a return to the democratic normality with the intention of regenerating the regime. Nevertheless, it was abandoned by all political classes, as they felt betrayed by the king's support of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
He left Spain voluntarily after the municipal elections of April 1931, which were taken as a plebiscite on abolishing the monarchy.
Alfonso was born at Royal Palace of Madrid in Madrid on 17 May 1886. He was the posthumous son of Alfonso XII of Spain, who had died in November 1885, and became King of Spain upon his birth. Just after he was born, he was carried naked to the Spanish prime minister Práxedes Mateo on a silver tray.
Five days later he was carried in a solemn court procession with a Golden Fleece round his neck and was baptized with water specially brought from the River Jordan in Palestine. The French newspaper "Le Figaro" described the young king in 1889 as "the happiest and best-loved of all the rulers of the earth". His mother, Maria Christina of Austria, served as his regent until his 16th birthday. During the regency, in 1898, Spain lost its colonial rule over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States as a result of the Spanish–American War.
When he came of age in May 1902, the week of his majority was marked by festivities, bullfights, balls and receptions throughout Spain. He took his oath to the constitution before members of the Cortes on 17 May.
By 1905, Alfonso was looking for a suitable consort. On a state visit to the United Kingdom, he stayed in London at Buckingham Palace with King Edward VII. There he met Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, the daughter of Edward's youngest sister Princess Beatrice, and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. He found her attractive, and she returned his interest. There were obstacles to the marriage. Victoria was a Protestant, and would have to become a Catholic. Victoria's brother Leopold was a haemophiliac, so there was a 50 percent chance that Victoria was a carrier of the trait. Finally, Alfonso's mother Maria Christina wanted him to marry a member of her family, the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, or some other Catholic princess, as she considered the Battenbergs to be non-dynastic.
Victoria was willing to change her religion, and her being a haemophilia carrier was only a possibility. Maria Christina was eventually persuaded to drop her opposition. In January 1906 she wrote an official letter to Princess Beatrice proposing the match. Victoria met Maria Christina and Alfonso in Biarritz, France, later that month, and converted to Catholicism in San Sebastián in March.
In May, diplomats of both kingdoms officially executed the agreement of marriage. Alfonso and Victoria were married at the Royal Monastery of San Jerónimo in Madrid on 31 May 1906, with British royalty in attendance, including Victoria's cousins the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King George V and Queen Mary). The wedding was marked by an assassination attempt on Alfonso and Victoria by Catalan anarchist Mateu Morral. As the wedding procession returned to the palace, he threw a bomb from a window which killed 30 bystanders and members of the procession, while 100 others were wounded.
On 10 May 1907, the couple's first child, Alfonso, Prince of Asturias, was born. However, Victoria was in fact a haemophilia carrier, and Alfonso inherited the condition.
Neither of the two daughters born to the King and Queen were haemophilia carriers, but another of their sons, Gonzalo (1914–1934), had the condition. Alfonso distanced himself from his wife for transmitting the condition to their sons. From 1914 on, he had several mistresses, and fathered five illegitimate children. A sixth illegitimate child had been born before his marriage.
During World War I, because of his family connections with both sides and the division of popular opinion, Spain remained neutral. The King established an office for assistance to prisoners of war on all sides. This office used the Spanish diplomatic and military network abroad to intercede for thousands of POWs – transmitting and receiving letters for them, and other services. The office was located in the Royal Palace.
Alfonso became gravely ill during the 1918 flu pandemic. Spain was neutral and thus under no wartime censorship restrictions, so his illness and subsequent recovery were reported to the world, while flu outbreaks in the belligerent countries were concealed. This gave the misleading impression that Spain was the most-affected area and led to the pandemic being dubbed "the Spanish Flu."
Following World War I, Spain entered the lengthy yet victorious Rif War (1920–1926) to preserve its colonial rule over northern Morocco. Critics of the monarchy thought the war was an unforgivable loss of money and lives, and nicknamed Alfonso "el Africano" ("the African"). Alfonso had not acted as a strict constitutional monarch, and supported the Africanists who wanted to conquer for Spain a new empire in Africa to compensate for the lost empire in the Americas and Asia. The Rif War had starkly polarized Spanish society between the Africanists who wanted to conquer an empire in Africa vs. the "abandonistas" who wanted to abandon Morocco as not worth the blood and treasure. Alfonso liked to play favourites with his generals, and one of his most favored generals was Manuel Fernández Silvestre. In 1921, when Silvestre advanced up into the Rif mountains of Morocco, Alfonso sent him a telegram whose first line read "Hurrah for real men!", urging Silvestre not to retreat at a time when Silvestre was experiencing major difficulties. Silvestre stayed the course, leading his men into the Battle of Annual, one of Spain's worst defeats. Alfonso, who was on holiday in the south of France at the time, was informed of the "Disaster of the Annual" while he was playing golf. Reportedly, Alfonso's response to the news was to shrug his shoulders and say "Chicken meat is cheap", before resuming his game. Alfonso remained in France and did not return to Spain to comfort the families of the soldiers lost in the battle, which many people at the time saw as a callous and cold act, a sign that the King was indifferent over the lives of his soldiers. In 1922, the "Cortes" started an investigation into the responsibility for the Annual disaster and soon discovered evidence that the King had been one of the main supporters of Silvestre's advance into the Rif mountains.
After the "Disaster of the Annual", Spain's war in the Rif went from bad to worse, and as the Spanish were barely hanging onto Morocco, support for the "abandonistas" grew as many people could see no point to the war. In August 1923, Spanish soldiers embarking for Morocco mutinied, other soldiers in Malaga simply refused to board the ships that were to take them to Morocco, while in Barcelona huge crowds of left-wingers had staged anti-war protests at which Spanish flags were burned while the flag of the Rif Republic was waved about. With the Africanists comprising only a minority, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the "abandonistas" forced the Spanish to give up on the Rif, which was part of the reason for the military coup d'état later in 1923. On September 13, 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera, seized power in a military coup. He ruled as a dictator with Alfonso's support until 1930. It is believed that one of Alfonso's main reasons for supporting the coup was his desire to suppress the publication of the damning "Cortes" report into the Annual disaster. The poetic Generation of '27 as well as Catalan and Basque nationalism grew in this era.
On 28 January 1930, amid economic problems, general unpopularity and an impending putschist plot led by General Manuel Goded (of which Alfonso XIII was most probably aware), Miguel Primo de Rivera was forced to resign, exiling to Paris (only to die a weeks later of the complication of a diagnosed diabetes in combination with the effects of a flu). Alfonso XIII appointed General Dámaso Berenguer as new Prime Minister, leading to the period known as the "dictablanda". The King was so closely associated with the Primo de Rivera dictatorship that it was difficult for him to distance himself from the regime he had supported for almost seven years. The enforced changes relied on the incorrect assumption that Spaniards would accept to assume that nothing had happened after 1923 and that going back to the prior state of things was possible.
In April 1931, General José Sanjurjo told him even the army was not loyal. On 12 April, the republican parties won a landslide victory in the 1931 municipal elections, perceived as a plebiscite on monarchy. Alfonso left the country on 14 April as the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed, but did not formally abdicate. He eventually settled in Rome.
By a law of 26 November 1931, Alfonso was accused by the Cortes of high treason. This law would later be repealed by a new law dated 15 December 1938, signed by Francisco Franco.
In 1933, his two eldest sons, Alfonso and Jaime, renounced their claims to the defunct throne, and in 1934 his youngest son Gonzalo died. This left his third son Juan, Count of Barcelona his only male heir. Juan later was the father of Juan Carlos I.
When the Army rose up against the democratically elected Republican Government and war broke out, Alfonso made it clear he favoured the "Nationalist" military rebels against the Republic. But in September 1936 the Nationalist leader, General Francisco Franco, declared that the Nationalists would not restore Alfonso as king. (The Nationalist army included many Carlist supporters of a rival pretender.) Nevertheless, Alfonso sent his son Juan to Spain in 1936, to participate in the uprising. However, General Mola had Juan arrested near the French border and expelled from the country.
On 29 September 1936, upon the death of Infante Alfonso Carlos, Duke of San Jaime (the Carlist pretender), Alfonso also became the senior heir of Hugh Capet and so was hailed by some French legitimists as King Alphonse I of France and Navarre.
On 15 January 1941, Alfonso XIII renounced his rights to the defunct Spanish throne in favour of Juan. He died in Rome on 28 February of that year.
In Spain, the "caudillo" Franco ordered three days of national mourning. His funeral was held in Rome in the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. Alfonso was buried in the Church of Santa Maria in Monserrato degli Spagnoli, the Spanish national church in Rome, immediately below the tombs of Popes Callixtus III and Alexander VI. In January 1980 his remains were transferred to El Escorial in Spain.
Alfonso was a promoter of tourism in Spain. The need for the lodging of his wedding guests prompted the construction of the luxurious Hotel Palace in Madrid. He also supported the creation of a network of state-run lodges, paradores, in historic buildings of Spain. His fondness for the sport of football led to the patronage of several "Royal" ("Real" in Spanish) football clubs, the first being Real Club Deportivo de La Coruña in 1907. Selected others include Real Madrid, Real Sociedad, Real Betis, Real Unión, Espanyol and Real Zaragoza.
An avenue in the northern Madrid neighbourhood of Chamartín, Avenida de Alfonso XIII, is named after him. A plaza or town center in Iloilo City, Philippines (now Plaza Libertad) was named in his honour called Plaza Alfonso XIII. A street in Merthyr Tydfil, in Wales, was built especially to house Spanish immigrants in the mining industry and named Alphonso Street after Alfonso XIII.
Alfonso XIII appears as "King Buby" in Luis Coloma's story of Ratoncito Pérez (1894), which was written for the King when he was 8 years old. The story of Ratoncito Pérez has been adapted into further literary works and movies since then, with the character of Alfonso XIII appearing in some. Alfonso XIII is also mentioned on the plaque to Ratoncito Pérez on the second floor of "la calle del Arenal".
On 31 May 1906, Alfonso married British-born Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg (1887–1969). Only entitled to the style of "Serene Highness" by birth, Ena, as she was known, was granted the higher honorific of "Royal Highness" one month before her wedding.
Alfonso and Ena had seven children: Alfonso, Prince of Asturias (1907–1938); Infante Jaime, Duke of Segovia (1908–1975); Infanta Beatriz (1909–2002), Infante Fernando (stillborn); Infanta María Cristina (1911–1996); Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona (1913–1993) and Infante Gonzalo (1914–1934).
Alfonso also had six known illegitimate children:
By French aristocrat Mélanie de Gaufridy de Dortan, married to Philippe de Vilmorin, he had Roger Marie Vincent Philippe Lévêque de Vilmorin (1905–1980); by Pauline of Saint Glen, he had Charles Maxime Victor of Saint Glen (1914–1934); by Béatrice Noon, he had Juana Alfonsa Milán y Quiñones de León (1916–2005); by Spanish actress María del Carmen Ruiz y Moragas he had Ana María Teresa Ruiz y Moragas (1925–1965) and Leandro Alfonso Luis Ruiz y Moragas (1929–2016); and, by Marie Sousa he had Alonso of Borbon Sousa (1930–1934).
In the Royal Library of Madrid, there are many books with different emblems and super libros of the king. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1677 |
Alfonso the Battler
Alfonso I ("c". 1073/10747 September 1134), called the Battler or the Warrior (), was the king of Aragon and Navarre from 1104 until his death in 1134. He was the second son of King Sancho Ramírez and successor of his brother Peter I. With his marriage to Urraca, queen regnant of Castile, León and Galicia, in 1109, he began to use, with some justification, the grandiose title Emperor of Spain, formerly employed by his father-in-law, Alfonso VI. Alfonso the Battler earned his sobriquet in the Reconquista. He won his greatest military successes in the middle Ebro, where he conquered Zaragoza in 1118 and took Ejea, Tudela, Calatayud, Borja, Tarazona, Daroca, and Monreal del Campo. He died in September 1134 after an unsuccessful battle with the Muslims at the Battle of Fraga.
His nickname comes from the Aragonese version of the "Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña" (c. 1370), which says that "they called him lord Alfonso the battler because in Spain there wasn't as good a knight who won twenty-nine battles" ("clamabanlo don Alfonso batallador porque en Espayna no ovo tan buen cavallero que veynte nueve batallas vençió").
His earliest years were passed in the monastery of Siresa, learning to read and write and to practice the military arts under the tutelage of Lope Garcés the Pilgrim, who was repaid for his services by his former charge with the county of Pedrola when Alfonso came to the throne.
During his brother's reign, he participated in the taking of Huesca (the Battle of Alcoraz, 1096), which became the largest city in the kingdom and the new capital. He also joined El Cid's expeditions in Valencia. His father gave him the lordships of Biel, Luna, Ardenes, and Bailo.
A series of deaths put Alfonso directly in line for the throne. His brother's children, Isabella and Peter (who married María Rodríguez, daughter of El Cid), died in 1103 and 1104 respectively.
A passionate fighting-man (he fought twenty-nine battles against Christian or Moor), he was married (when well over 30 years and a habitual bachelor) in 1109 to the ambitious Queen Urraca of León, widow of Raymond of Burgundy, a passionate woman unsuited for a subordinate role. The marriage had been arranged by her father Alfonso VI of León in 1106 to unite the two chief Christian states against the Almoravids, and to supply them with a capable military leader. But Urraca was tenacious of her right as queen regnant and had not learnt chastity in the polygamous household of her father. Husband and wife quarrelled with the brutality of the age and came to open war, even placing Urraca under siege at Astorga in 1112. Alfonso had the support of one section of the nobles who found their account in the confusion. Being a much better soldier than any of his opponents he won the Battle of Candespina and the Battle of Viadangos, but his only trustworthy supporters were his Aragonese, who were not numerous enough to keep Castile and León subjugated. The marriage of Alfonso and Urraca was declared null by the Pope, as they were second cousins, in 1110, but he ignored the papal nuncio and clung to his liaison with Urraca until 1114. During his marriage, he had called himself "King and Emperor of Castile, Toledo, Aragón, Pamplona, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza" in recognition of his rights as Urraca's husband; of his inheritance of the lands of his father, including the kingdom of his great-uncle Gonzalo; and his prerogative to conquer Andalusia from the Muslims. He inserted the title of "imperator" on the basis that he had three kingdoms under his rule.
Alfonso's late marriage and his failure to remarry and produce the essential legitimate heir that should have been a dynastic linchpin of his aggressive territorial policies have been adduced as a lack of interest in women. Ibn al-Athir (1166–1234) describes Alfonso as a tireless soldier who would sleep in his armor without benefit of cover, whom when asked why he did not take his pleasure from one of the captives of Muslim chiefs, responded that the man devoted to war needs the companionship of men not women.
The king quarrelled with the church, and particularly the Cistercians, almost as violently as with his wife. As he defeated her, so he drove Archbishop Bernard into exile and expelled the monks of Sahagún. He was finally compelled to give way in Castile and León to his stepson, Alfonso VII of Castile, son of Urraca and her first husband. The intervention of Pope Calixtus II brought about an arrangement between the old man and his young namesake.
In 1122 in Belchite, he founded a confraternity of knights to fight against the Almoravids. It was the start of the military orders in Aragon. Years later, he organised a branch of the "Militia Christi" of the Holy Land at Monreal del Campo.
Alfonso spent his first four years as king in near-constant war with the Muslims. In 1105, he conquered Ejea and Tauste and refortified Castellar and Juslibol. In 1106, he defeated Ahmad II al-Musta'in of Zaragoza at Valtierra. In 1107, he took Tamarite de Litera and Esteban de la Litera. Then followed a period dominated by his relations with Castile and León through his wife, Urraca. He resumed his conquest in 1117 by conquering Fitero, Corella, Cintruénigo, Murchante, Monteagudo, and Cascante.
In 1118, the Council of Toulouse declared a crusade to assist in the conquest of Zaragoza. Many Frenchmen consequently joined Alfonso at Ayerbe. They took Almudévar, Gurrea de Gállego, and Zuera, besieging Zaragoza itself by the end of May. The city fell on 18 December, and the forces of Alfonso occupied the Azuda, the government tower. The great palace of the city was given to the monks of Bernard. Promptly, the city was made Alfonso's capital. Two years later, in 1120, he defeated a Muslim army intent on reconquering his new capital at the Battle of Cutanda. He promulgated the "fuero" of "tortum per tortum", facilitating taking the law into one's own hands, which among others reassumed the Muslim right to dwell in the city and their right to keep their properties and practice their religion under their own jurisdiction as long as they maintained tax payment and relocated to the suburbs.
In 1119, he retook Cervera, Tudejen, Castellón, Tarazona, Ágreda, Magallón, Borja, Alagón, Novillas, Mallén, Rueda, Épila and populated the region of Soria. He began the siege of Calatayud, but left to defeat the army at Cutanda trying to retake Zaragoza. When Calatayud fell, he took Bubierca, Alhama de Aragón, Ariza, and Daroca (1120). In 1123, he besieged and took Lleida, which was in the hands of the count of Barcelona. From the winter of 1124 to September 1125, he was on a risky expedition to Peña Cadiella deep in Andalusia.
In the great raid of 1125, he carried away a large part of the subject Christians from Granada, and in the south-west of France, he had rights as king of Navarre. From 1125 to 1126, he was on campaign against Granada, where he was trying to install a Christian prince, and Córdoba, where he got only as far as Motril. In 1127, he reconquered Longares, but simultaneously lost all his Castilian possessions to Alfonso VII. He confirmed a treaty with Castile the next year (1128) with the Peace of Támara, which fixed the boundaries of the two realms.
He conquered Molina de Aragón and populated Monzón in 1129, before besieging Valencia, which had fallen again upon the Cid's death.
He went north of the Pyrenees in October 1130 to protect the Val d'Aran. Early in 1131, he besieged Bayonne. It is said he ruled "from Belorado to Pallars and from Bayonne to Monreal."
At the Siege of Bayonne in October 1131, three years before his death, he published a will leaving his kingdom to three autonomous religious orders based in Palestine and politically largely independent - the Knights Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, whose influences might have been expected to cancel one another out. The will has greatly puzzled historians, who have read it as a bizarre gesture of extreme piety uncharacteristic of Alfonso's character, one that effectively undid his life's work. Elena Lourie (1975) suggested instead that it was Alfonso's attempt to neutralize the papacy's interest in a disputed succession — Aragon had been a fief of the Papacy since 1068 — and to fend off Urraca's son from her first marriage, Alfonso VII of Castile, for the Papacy would be bound to press the terms of such a pious testament. Generous bequests to important churches and abbeys in Castile had the effect of making the noble churchmen there beneficiaries who would be encouraged by the will to act as a brake on Alfonso VII's ambitions to break it — and yet among the magnates witnessing the will in 1131 there is not a single cleric. In the event it was a will that his nobles refused to carry out — instead bringing his brother Ramiro from the monastery to assume royal powers — an eventuality that Lourie suggests was Alfonso's hidden intent.
His final campaigns were against Mequinenza (1133) and Fraga (1134), where García Ramírez, the future king of Navarre, and a mere 500 other knights fought with him. It fell on 17 July. He was dead by September. His tomb is in the monastery of San Pedro in Huesca.
The testament of Alfonso leaving his kingdom to the three orders was dismissed out of hand by the nobility of his kingdoms, and possible successors were sought. Alfonso's only brother, Ramiro, had been a Benedictine monk since childhood, and his commitment to the church, his temperament and vow of celibacy made him ill-suited to rule a kingdom under constant military threat and in need of a stable line of succession. The step-son of the deceased king, Alfonso VII of León, as reigning monarch and legitimate descendant of Sancho III of Navarre, put himself forward but garnered no local support. The nobility of Navarre aligned behind Pedro de Atarés, the grandson of Alfonso's illegitimate uncle, while the Aragonese nobility rallied around the abbot-bishop Ramiro. A convention was called at Borja to develop a consensus, but there Peter so alienated his own partisans with perceived arrogance that they abandoned him, yet were unwilling to accept Ramiro. The convention broke up without arriving at a compromise and the two regional factions then acted independently.
The choice of the Navarrese lords fell on García Ramírez, Lord of Monzón, descendant of an illegitimate son of García Sánchez III and protégé of Alfonso VII to be their king. The Aragonese took Ramiro out of a monastery and made him king, marrying him without papal dispensation to Agnes, sister of the Duke of Aquitaine, then betrothing their newborn daughter to Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, who was then named Ramiro's heir. "The result of the crisis produced by the result of Alfonso I's will was a major reorientation of the peninsula's kingdoms: the separation of Aragon and Navarre, the union of Aragon and Catalonia and — a moot point but stressed particularly by some Castilian historians — the affirmation of 'Castilian hegemony' in Spain" by the rendering of homage for Zaragoza by Alfonso's eventual heir, Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona.
Sometime during the reign of Alfonso II of Aragon, the Battler's grandnephew, a man came forward claiming to be Alfonso the Battler. The only contemporary references to this event are two letters of Alfonso II addressed to Louis VII of France; they were carried to Louis by Berengar, the Bishop of Lleida, but are not dated. According to the second of these, the pretender was then living in Louis's domains, meaning the Principality of Catalonia, which was ruled by Alfonso under Louis's suzerainty. This pretender was an old man (appropriately, since the Battler had died some decades earlier) and Alfonso II expressed confidence that Louis would arrest him at the earliest possible moment and bring him to justice. The first letter supplies sufficient information to date it approximately, since the Bishop sojourned at the court of Louis on his way to Rome. It is known from other sources that Berengar attended the Third Lateran Council in March 1179. The letters were probably written towards the end of 1178 or in January 1179 at the latest. According to an annalist source for the years 1089–1196, the pretender was received with honour and pomp in Zaragoza, Calatayud, and Daroca, which the Battler had conquered, but after it was found out that he was false he was executed before the city of Barcelona in 1181. Modern historian Antonio Ubieto Arteta has hypothesised that the Aragonese lords of the tenancies of Zaragoza, Calatayud, and Daroca — Pedro de Luesia, Loferrench de Luna, Pedro de Castillazuelo (lord of Calatayud), Pedro Cornel (lord of Murillo de Gállego), and the majordomo Jimeno de Artusilla, all of whom disappear between 1177 and 1181 in the documentation of their tenancies — supported, at least initially, the pretender. These lords also appear in the later legend of the Bell of Huesca, which has no historical basis, as the victims of Ramiro II (1136). Since, historically, they were not active in the 1130s, it is possible that the historically-based legend of the pseudo-Alfonso had some influence on the genesis of the Bell of Huesca.
The earliest chronicle source for the imposture is Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, writing in the middle of the thirteenth century, who records that there were several legends then current about the death of Alfonso the Battler: some believed he perished in the battle of Fraga, some that his body had never been recovered, others that he was buried in the monastery of Montearagón, and still others that he had fled from Fraga in shame after his defeat and became a pilgrim as an act of penance. Some years later, Rodrigo writes, though he does not give a year, an impostor arose and was received by many as the Battler, though Alfonso II had him arrested and hanged. This is the earliest reference to the impostor's end. The legend was amplified in later years. According to the fourteenth-century "Crónica de los Estados Peninsulares", the Battler went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he lived for many years. The "Crónica de San Juan de la Peña" also recounts the incident, but it depends entirely on Rodrigo and the "Estados Peninsulares". It is not until the seventeenth-century historian Jerónimo Zurita penned his "Anales de la Corona de Aragón" that new details were added to the legend. Zurita dates the impostor's appearance to the death of Raymond Berengar IV of Barcelona, who had been exercising power in Aragon, and the succession of the child Alfonso II in 1162. The death of the impostor, by hanging, must have occurred in 1163. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1679 |
Amaryllis
Amaryllis () is the only genus in the subtribe Amaryllidinae (tribe Amaryllideae). It is a small genus of flowering bulbs, with two species. The better known of the two, "Amaryllis belladonna", is a native of the Western Cape region of South Africa, particularly the rocky southwest area between the Olifants River Valley and Knysna. For many years there was confusion among botanists over the generic names "Amaryllis" and "Hippeastrum", one result of which is that the common name "amaryllis" is mainly used for cultivars of the genus "Hippeastrum", widely sold in the winter months for their ability to bloom indoors. Plants of the genus "Amaryllis" are known as belladonna lily, Jersey lily, naked lady, amarillo, Easter lily in Southern Australia or, in South Africa, March lily due to its propensity to flower around March. This is one of numerous genera with the common name "lily" due to their flower shape and growth habit. However, they are only distantly related to the true lily, "Lilium". In the Victorian Language of Flowers (see Plant symbolism), amaryllis means "pride".
"Amaryllis" is a bulbous plant, with each bulb being in diameter. It has several strap-shaped, green leaves, long and broad, arranged in two rows.
Each bulb produces one or two leafless stems 30–60 cm tall, each of which bears a cluster of two to twelve funnel-shaped flowers at their tops. Each flower is diameter with six tepals (three outer sepals, three inner petals, with similar appearance to each other). The usual color is white with crimson veins, but pink or purple also occur naturally.
The single genus is in subtribe Amaryllidinae, in the tribe Amaryllideae. The taxonomy of the genus has been controversial. In 1753 Carl Linnaeus created the name "Amaryllis belladonna", the type species of the genus "Amaryllis". At the time both South African and South American plants were placed in the same genus; subsequently they were separated into two different genera. The key question is whether Linnaeus's type was a South African plant or a South American plant. If the latter, "Amaryllis" would be the correct name for the genus "Hippeastrum", and a different name would have to be used for the genus discussed here. Alan W. Meerow et al. have briefly summarized the debate, which took place from 1938 onwards and involved botanists on both sides of the Atlantic. The outcome was a decision by the 14th International Botanical Congress in 1987 that "Amaryllis" L. should be a conserved name (i.e. correct regardless of priority) and ultimately based on a specimen of the South African "Amaryllis belladonna" from the Clifford Herbarium at the Natural History Museum in London.
Amaryllidinae are placed within Amaryllideae as follow:
These are phylogenetically related as follows:
The name "Amaryllis" is taken from a shepherdess in Virgil's pastoral "Eclogues", (from the Greek (""), meaning "to sparkle") and also from "Amarella" for the bitterness of the bulb.
Although the 1987 decision settled the question of the scientific name of the genus, the common name "amaryllis" continues to be used differently. Bulbs sold as amaryllis and described as "ready to bloom for the holidays" belong to the allied genus "Hippeastrum". The common name "naked lady" used for "Amaryllis" is also used for other bulbs with a similar growth and flowering pattern; some of these have their own widely used and accepted common names, such as the resurrection lily ("Lycoris squamigera"). The common name "naked lady" comes from the plant's pattern of flowering when the foliage has died down.
In areas of its native habitat with mountainous fynbos flowering tends to be suppressed until after bush fires as dense overhead vegetation prevents growth. In more open sandy areas of the Western Cape, the plant flowers annually. Plants tend to be very localized in dense concentrations due to the seeds' large size and heavy weight. Strong winds shake loose the seeds, which fall to ground and immediately start to germinate, aided by the first winter rains.
The leaves are produced in the autumn or early spring in warm climates depending on the onset of rain and eventually die down by late spring. The bulb is then dormant until late summer. The plant is not frost-tolerant, nor does it do well in tropical environments since they require a dry resting period between leaf growth and flower spike production.
One or two leafless stems arise from the bulb in the dry ground in late summer (March in its native habitat and August in USDA zone 7).
The plant has a symbiotic relationship with carpenter bees. It is also visited by noctuid moths at night. The relative importance of these animals as pollinators has not yet been established; however, Carpenter bees are thought to be the main pollinators of amaryllis on the Cape Peninsula. The plant's main parasite is the lily borer "Brithys crini" and/or "Diaphone eumela".
"Amaryllis belladonna" was introduced into cultivation at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It reproduces slowly by either bulb division or seeds and has gradually naturalized from plantings in urban and suburban areas throughout the lower elevations and coastal areas in much of the West Coast of the USA since these environments mimic their native South African habitat. Hardiness zones 6–8. It is also naturalized in Australia.
There is an "Amaryllis belladonna" hybrid which was bred in the 1800s in Australia. No one knows the exact species it was crossed with to produce color variations of white, cream, peach, magenta and nearly red hues. The hybrids were crossed back onto the original "Amaryllis belladonna" and with each other to produce naturally seed-bearing crosses that come in a very wide range of flower sizes, shapes, stem heights and intensities of pink. Pure white varieties with bright green stems were bred as well. The hybrids are quite distinct in that the many shades of pink also have stripes, veining, darkened edges, white centers and light yellow centers, also setting them apart from the original light pink. In addition, the hybrids often produce flowers in a fuller circle rather than the "side-facing" habit of the "old-fashioned" pink. The hybrids are able to adapt to year-round watering and fertilization but can also tolerate completely dry summer conditions if need be.
"A. belladonna" has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.
"Amaryllis belladonna" has been crossed in cultivation with "Crinum moorei" to produce a hybrid called × "Amarcrinum", which has named cultivars. Hybrids said to be between "Amaryllis belladonna" and "Brunsvigia josephinae" have been called × "Amarygia". Neither hybrid genus name is accepted by the "World Checklist of Selected Plant Families". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1680 |
Amathus
Amathus or Amathous () was an ancient city and one of the ancient royal cities of Cyprus until about 300 BC. Some of its impressive remains can be seen today on the southern coast in front of Agios Tychonas, about west of Larnaca and east of Limassol. Its ancient cult sanctuary of Aphrodite was the second most important in Cyprus, her homeland, after Paphos.
Archaeological work has recently been continued at the site and many finds are exhibited in the Limassol Museum.
The pre-history of Amathus survives in both myth and archaeology. Archaeology has detected human activity from the earliest Iron Age, BC.
The city's legendary founder was Cinyras, linked with the birth of Adonis, who called the city after his mother Amathous. According to a version of the Ariadne legend noted by Plutarch, Theseus abandoned Ariadne at Amathousa, where she died giving birth to her child and was buried in a sacred tomb. According to Plutarch's source, Amathousians called the sacred grove where her shrine was situated the Wood of Aphrodite Ariadne. More purely Hellenic myth would have Amathus settled instead by one of the sons of Heracles, thus accounting for the fact that he was worshiped there.
It was said in antiquity that the people of Amathus were autochthonous, most likely Eteocyprian or "Pelasgian". Their non-Greek language is confirmed on the site by Eteocypriot inscriptions in the Cypriot syllabary which alone in the Aegean world survived the Bronze Age collapse and continued to be used down to the 4th century BC.
Amathus was built on the coastal cliffs with a natural harbour and flourished at an early date, soon requiring several cemeteries. Greeks from Euboea left their pottery at Amathus from the 10th century BC. During the post-Phoenician era of the 8th century BC, a palace was erected and a port was also constructed, which served the trade with the Greeks and the Levantines. A special burial ground for infants, a "tophet" served the culture of the Phoenicians. For the Hellenes, high on the cliff a temple was built, which became a worship site devoted to Aphrodite, in her particular local presence as "Aphrodite Amathusia" along with a bearded male Aphrodite called "Aphroditos". The excavators discovered the final stage of the Temple of Aphrodite, also known as Aphrodisias, which dates approximately to the 1st century BC. According to the legend, it was where festive Adonia took place, in which athletes competed in hunting wild boars during sport competitions; they also competed in dancing and singing, all to the honour of Adonis.
The earliest remains hitherto found on the site are tombs of the early Iron Age period of Graeco-Phoenician influences (1000-600 BC). Amathus is identified with "Kartihadasti" (Phoenician "New-Town") in the Cypriote tribute-list of Esarhaddon of Assyria (668 BC). It certainly maintained strong Phoenician sympathies, for it was its refusal to join the philhellene league of Onesilos of Salamis which provoked the revolt of Cyprus from Achaemenid Persia in 500-494 BC, when Amathus was besieged unsuccessfully and avenged itself by the capture and execution of Onesilos. Herodotus reports
Amathus was a rich and densely populated kingdom with a flourishing agriculture (grain and sheep) and copper mines situated very close to the northeast Kalavasos.
About 385-380 BC, the philhellene Evagoras of Salamis was similarly opposed by Amathus, allied with Citium and Soli; and even after Alexander the city resisted annexation, and was bound over to give hostages to Seleucus. Its political importance was now ended but its temple of Adonis and Aphrodite Amathusia remained famous in Roman times. The epithet "Amathusia" in Roman poetry often means little more than "Cypriote," but attesting to the fame of the city.
From the 4th century BC the pedestals of two sculptures donated by the last Basileus of Amathous, Androkles, representing his two sons, Orestheus and Andragoras, have survived. Their inscriptions are in both Eteocyprian and Greek languages.
The decline of Amathus is often measured by the Ptolemaic gifts to Argos, where Amathus donated only 40 drachmas in 170-160 BC, but Kition and Salamis gave 208, Kourion 172, and Paphos 100. However, this figure contradicts the archaeologic evidence of new buildings in this period including a balneion, a bath, a gymnasium, as well as fortifications of the Acropolis, including a new tower. The port of Paphos appears to have lost traffic compared to Amathus in the Ptolemaic period, an indication that Paphos, as the capital of the island, perhaps offered fewer drachmas than the other cities for different reasons, like Amathus.
In the Roman era Amathus became the capital of one of the four administrative regions of Cyprus.
A Roman temple was built in the 1st century AD on top of the Hellenistic predecessor. The temple facilities remained so important in Roman times that 'Amathusia' was used as a synonym for 'Cypriot'.
Later, in the 4th century AD, Amasus became the see of a Christian bishop and continued to flourish until the Byzantine period. Of its bishops, Heliodorus was at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and Alexander at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. In the late 6th century, Saint Ioannis Eleimonas (John the Charitable), protector of the Knights of St. John, was born in Amathus and after 614 sent Theodorus, bishop of Amathus, to Jerusalem to ransom some slaves.
Today, Amathus is a see of the Church of Cyprus and is also listed (under the name "Amathus in Cypro", to distinguish it from "Amathus in Transjordan") as a titular see by the Catholic Church, which however, in line with the practice adopted after the Second Vatican Council, has made no appointments to the bishopric since the death of the last Latin titular bishop in 1984.
Anastasius Sinaita, the famous 7th-century prolific monk of Saint Catherine's Monastery, was born here. It is thought that he left Cyprus after the 649 Arab conquest of the island, setting out for the Holy Land, and eventually becoming a monk on Sinai.
Amathus declined and was already almost deserted when Richard Plantagenet won Cyprus by a victory there over Isaac Comnenus in 1191. The tombs were plundered and the stones from the beautiful edifices were brought to Limassol to be used for new constructions. Much later, in 1869, a great number of blocks of stone from Amathus were used for the construction of the Suez Canal. A ruined Byzantine church marks its site.
A new settlement close to Amathus but further inland, Agios Tychonas, is named after the bishop Saint Tychon of Amathus. The site of the ruins is within the borders of this village, though the expansion of the Limassol tourist area has threatened the ruins: it is speculated that some of the hotels are on top of the Amathus necropolis.
The city had vanished, except for fragments of wall and of a great stone urn on the acropolis, dating from the 6th century BC of which a similar vessel was taken to the Musée du Louvre in 1867. It is tall and weighs 14 tons. It was made from a single piece of stone and has four curved handles carved with bulls. In the 1870s, Luigi Palma di Cesnola excavated the necropolis of Amathus, as elsewhere in Cyprus, enriching the early collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; some objects went to the British Museum. More modern archaeological joint Cypriote-French excavations started in 1980 and still continue. The Acropolis, the Temple of Aphrodite, the agora, the city's walls, the basilica and the port have all been excavated.
Further archaeological objects found during the excavations are preserved at both the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia and the Limassol District Archaeological Museum.
In the agora there are marble columns decorated with spirals and a huge paved squares. On the coastal side of the city there is an Early Christian basilica with mosaic floors decorated with semi-precious stones. Further, near the terraced road leading to the Temple, situated on the top of the cliff, several houses built in a row dating to the Hellenistic period have been discovered. At the east and west extremes of the city the two acropoleis are situated where a number of tombs have been found, many of which are intact.
Two small sanctuaries, with terracotta votive offerings of Graeco-Phoenician age, lie not far off, but the location of the great shrines of Adonis and Aphrodite have not been identified (M. Ohnefalsch-Richter, "Kypros," i. ch.1). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1687 |
Amati
Amati (, ) is the last name of a family of Italian violin makers who lived at Cremona from about 1538 to 1740. Their importance is considered equal to those of the Bergonzi, Guarneri, and Stradivari families. Today, violins created by Nicolò Amati are valued at around $600,000. Because of their age and rarity, Amati instruments are mostly kept in museum or private collections and are seldom played in public.
Andrea Amati (December 20,1577) designed and created the violin, viola and cello known as the "violin family". He standardized the basic form, shape, size, materials and method of construction. Makers from nearby Brescia experimented, such as Gasparo da Salò, Micheli, Zanetto and Pellegrino, but it was Andrea Amati in Cremona, Italy, who gave the modern violin family their definitive profile.
The first violin was ordered by Lorenzo de' Medici in 1555. His letter to Amati stated the instrument was to be "made of the highest quality materials like that of a lute, but simple to play". What became of this first violin is not known. A number of his instruments survived for some time, dating between 1538 (Amati made the first Cello called "The King" in 1538 [1]) and 1574. The largest number these are from 1560, a set for an entire orchestra of 38 ordered by Catherine de Médicis the regent queen of France and bore hand painted royal French decorations in gold including the motto and coat of arms of her son Charles IX of France. Of these 38 instruments ordered, Amati created violins of two sizes, violas of two sizes and large-sized cellos. They were in use until the French revolution of 1789 and only 14 of these instruments survived. His work is marked by selection of the finest materials, great elegance in execution, soft clear amber, soft translucent varnish, and an in depth use of acoustic and geometrical principles in design.
Andrea Amati was succeeded by his sons Antonio Amati (–1607) and Girolamo Amati (–1630). "The Brothers Amati", as they were known, implemented far-reaching innovations in design, including the perfection of the shape of the f-holes. They are also thought to have pioneered the modern alto format of viola, in contrast to older tenor violas, but the widespread belief that they were the first ones to do so is incorrect given that Gasparo da Salo made violas ranging from altos of 39 cm to tenors of 44.7 cm.
Nicolò Amati (December 3, 1596April 12, 1684) was the son of Girolamo Amati. He was the most eminent of the family. He improved the model adopted by the rest of the Amatis and produced instruments capable of yielding greater power of tone. His pattern was unusually small, but he also made a wider model now known as the "Grand Amati", which have become his most sought-after violins.
Of his pupils, the most famous were Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri, the first of the Guarneri family of violin makers. (There is much controversy regarding the apprenticeship of Antonio Stradivari. While the label on Stradivari's first known violin states that he was a pupil of Amati, the validity of his statement is questioned.)
The last maker of the family was Nicolò's son, Girolamo Amati, known as Hieronymus II (February 26, 1649February 21, 1740). He improved the arching of his father's instruments.
Instruments in the UK include Andrea Amati violins from the set delivered to Charles IX of France in 1564. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1690 |
Amazons
In Greek mythology, the Amazons (Ancient Greek: Αμαζόνες "Amazónes", singular Αμαζών "Amazōn") were a tribe of warrior women believed to live in Asia Minor. Apollonius Rhodius, in his "Argonautica", mentions that the Amazons were the daughters of Ares and Harmonia (a nymph of the Akmonian Wood), that they were brutal and aggressive, and their main concern in life was war. Lysias, Isocrates, Philostratus the Elder also said that their father was Ares.
Herodotus and Strabo place them on the banks of the Thermodon River. According to Diodorus, giving the account of Dionysius of Mitylene (who in turn drew on Thymoetas), the Amazons inhabited Ancient Libya long before they settled along the Thermodon. Migrating from Libya, these Amazons passed through Egypt and Syria, and stopped at the Caïcus in Aeolis, near which they founded several cities. Later, Diodorus maintains, they established Mytilene a little way beyond the Caïcus. Aeschylus, in "Prometheus Bound", places the original home of the Amazons in the country about Lake Maeotis, and from which they moved to Themiscyra on the Thermodon. Homer tells that the Amazons were sought and found somewhere near Lycia.
Notable queens of the Amazons are Penthesilea, who participated in the Trojan War, and her sister Hippolyta, whose magical girdle, given to her by her father Ares, was the object of one of the labours of Heracles. The Amazons fought on the side of Troy against the Greeks during the Trojan War. Diodorus mentions that the Amazons traveled from Libya under Queen Myrina. Amazon warriors were often depicted in battle with Greek warriors in amazonomachies in classical art. Archaeological discoveries of burial sites with female warriors on the Eurasian Steppes suggest that the Scythian women may have inspired the Amazon myth. From the early modern period, their name has become a term for female warriors in general. Amazons were said to have founded the cities and temples of Smyrna, Sinope, Cyme, Gryne, Ephesus, Pitania, Magnesia, Clete, Pygela, Latoreria and Amastris; according to legend, the Amazons also invented the cavalry.
Palaephatus, who was trying to rationalize the Greek myths in his "On Unbelievable Tales" (), wrote that the Amazons were probably men who were mistaken for women by their enemies because they wore clothing which reached their feet, tied up their hair in headbands and shaved their beards, and in addition, because they did not exist during his time, most probably they did nοt exist in the past either. In 2019 a grave with Amazons in golden royal crowns was found near Russia's Voronezh.
The origin of the word is uncertain. It may be derived from an Iranian ethnonym "*ha-mazan-" "warriors", a word attested indirectly through a derivation, a denominal verb in Hesychius of Alexandria's gloss (""": 'to make war' in Persian"), where it appears together with the Indo-Iranian root "*kar-" "make".
It may also be derived from "" "manless, without husbands" ("a-" privative and a derivation of "*man-" also found in Slavic "muzh") has been proposed, an explanation deemed "unlikely" by Hjalmar Frisk. A further explanation proposes Iranian *"ama-janah" "virility-killing" as source.
Among Classical Greeks, "amazon" was given a folk etymology as originating from ' () and ' (), "without breast", connected with an etiological tradition once claimed by Marcus Justinus who alleged that Amazons had their right breast cut off or burnt out. There is no indication of such a practice in ancient works of art, in which the Amazons are always represented with both breasts, although one is frequently covered. Adrienne Mayor suggests that the false etymology led to the myth.
Herodotus and Strabo placed the Amazons on the banks of the Thermodon (today's Terme river) and Themiscyra (probably close to the modern city of Terme). Herodotus also mentions that some Amazons lived in Scythia because after the Greeks defeated the Amazons in battle, they sailed away carrying in three ships as many Amazons as they had been able to take alive, but out at sea the Amazons attacked the crews and killed them, then these Amazons landed on Scythian lands. Strabo writes that the original home of the Amazons was in Themiscyra and the plains about Thermodon and the mountains that lie above them, but that they were later driven out of these places, and during his time they were said to live in the mountains above Caucasian Albania (not to be confused with the modern Albania). But he also states that some others, among them Metrodorus of Scepsis and Hypsicrates, say that after Themiscyra, the Amazons traveled and lived on the borders of the Gargarians, in the northerly foothills of those parts of the Caucasian Mountains which are called Ceraunian.
Aeschylus, in "Prometheus Bound", places the original home of the Amazons in the country about Lake Maeotis and they later moved to Themiscyra on the Thermodon. Homer had placed the Amazons much closer to the Greek world of his times, saying that the Amazons were sought and found somewhere near Lycia.
Diodorus Siculus, giving the account of Dionysius of Mitylene, who, on his part, drew on Thymoetas, states that before the Amazons of the Thermodon there were, much earlier in time, the Amazons of Libya. These Amazons started from Libya passed through Egypt and Syria, and stopped at the Caïcus in Aeolis, near which they founded several cities. Later, he says, they established Mitylene a little way beyond the Caïcus.
Plutarch mentions that the campaigns of Heracles and Theseus against the Amazons took place on the Euxine Sea (the modern Black Sea). According to Pseudo-Plutarch, the Amazons lived in and about the Tanais () river (modern Don river), formerly called the Amazonian or Amazon () river, because the Amazons bathed themselves therein. The Amazons later moved to Themiscyra (speculated to be modern Terme, though no ruins exist) on the River Thermodon (the Terme river in northern Turkey).
The Amazons were supposed to have founded many towns, amongst them Smyrna, Ephesus, Cyme, Myrina, Sinope, Paphos, Mitylene. At Patmos there was a place called Amazonium. Also, on the island of Lemnos, there was another Myrina. The cities of Myrina had this name after the amazon Myrina.
Apollonius Rhodius, in his "Argonautica" (third century BC), mentions that at Thermodon the Amazons were not gathered together in one city, but scattered over the land, parted into three tribes. In one part dwelt the Themiscyreians (), in another the Lycastians (), and in another the Chadesians ().
Greeks also used other descriptive phrases for them. Herodotus used the "Androktones" (, singular , ') ("killers/slayers of men") and "Androleteirai" (, singular , ') ("destroyers of men, murderesses"), in the Iliad they are also called "Antianeirai" (, singular , "") ("equivalent to men") and Aeschylus used the "Styganor" () ("those who loathe all men") in his work Prometheus Bound and in the Suppliant Maidens he called them "...τὰς ἀνάνδρους κρεοβόρους τ᾽ Ἀμαζόνας" ("the unwed, flesh-devouring Amazons"). In Hippolytus play, Phaedra calls Hippolytus, "the son of the horse-loving Amazon" (). Nonnus at Dionysiaca call the Amazons of Dionysus, "Androphonus" () ("men slaying").
Herodotus stated that in the Scythian language they were called "Oiorpata", "oior" meaning "man", and "pata" meaning "to slay".
Classicist Peter Walcot wrote, "Wherever the Amazons are located by the Greeks, whether it is somewhere along the Black Sea in the distant north-east, or in Libya in the furthest south, it is always beyond the confines of the civilized world. The Amazons exist outside the range of normal human experience."
Nevertheless, there are various proposals for a historical nucleus of the Amazons of Greek historiography, the most obvious candidates being historical Scythia and Sarmatia in line with the account by Herodotus, but some authors prefer a comparison to cultures of Asia Minor or even Minoan Crete.
The Amazons appear in Greek art of the Archaic period and in connection with several Greek legends and myths. According to the "Iliad", Amazons attacked the Phrygians, who were assisted by Priam, then a young man. In his later years, however, towards the end of the Trojan War, his old opponents took his side against the Greeks under their queen Penthesilea "of Thracian birth", who was slain by Achilles. The Lycian King Iobates sent Bellerophon against the Amazons, hoping that they would kill him, but Bellerophon killed them all.
The tomb of Myrine is mentioned in the "Iliad"; later interpretation made an Amazon of her. According to Diodorus, the Amazons under the rule of Queen Myrina, invaded the lands of the Atlantians. Amazons defeated the army of the Atlantian city of Cerne, treated the captives savagely, killed all the men, led into slavery the children and women, and razed the city. When the terrible fate of the inhabitants of Cerne became known among the other Atlantians, they were struck with terror, surrendered their cities on terms of capitulation and announced that they would do whatever should be commanded them. Queen Myrina bearing herself honourably towards the Atlantians, established friendship with them and founded a city to bear her name in place of the city of Cerne which had been razed; and in it she settled both the captives and any native who so desired. Atlantians presented her with magnificent presents and by public decree voted to her notable honours, and she in return accepted their courtesy and in addition promised that she would show kindness to their nation. Diodorus also mentions that the Amazons of Queen Myrina used the skins of gigantic snakes, from Libya, to protect themselves at battle. Later Queen Myrine led her Amazons to victory against the Gorgons. After the battle against the Gorgons, Myrina accorded a funeral to her fallen comrades on three pyres and raised up three great heaps of earth as tombs, which are called "Amazon Mounds" ().
Herodotus mentions that when Greeks defeated the Amazons at war, they sailed away carrying in three ships as many Amazons as they had been able to take alive, out at sea the Amazons attacked the crews and killed them. But the Amazons knew nothing about ships so they were driven about by waves and winds and they were disembarked at the land of the Scythians. There they met first with a troop of horses feeding, they seized them and mounted upon these they plundered the property of the Scythians. The Scythians were not able to understand them because they did not know either their speech or their dress or the race to which they belonged, and they thought that they were men. Scythians fought a battle against them, and after the battle the Scythians got possession of the bodies of the dead, and thus they discovered that they were women. After the battle Scythians sent young men and told them to encamp near the Amazons and to do whatsoever they should do. If the women should come after them, they were not to fight but to retire before them, and when the women stopped, they were to approach near and encamp.
This plan was adopted by the Scythians because they desired to have children born from them. When the Amazons perceived that they had not come to do them any harm, they let them alone; and the two camps approached nearer to one another every day: and the young men, like the Amazons, had nothing except their arms and their horses and got their living, as the Amazons did, by hunting and by taking booty. One day a Scythian and an Amazon came close. They could not speak to each other because they were speaking different languages, but the Amazon made signs to him with her hand to come. Later the young Scythians and the Amazons joined their camps and lived together, each man having for his wife her with whom he had had dealings at first. The men were not able to learn the language of the Amazons, but the women learned Scythian.
In some versions of the myth, the Amazons lived always isolated from men, communicating with them only to reproduce, and raising only female offspring. As Sue Blundell notes in her modern work, "Women in Ancient Greece", "For... [some] ancient authors the Amazons, in spite of their separatist habits, were not immune to the lure of sexual desire", and went on to cite a story from Herodotus. The article on the Amazons in the 1911 "Encyclopædia Britannica" argues—based on the evidence available at that time—that while men were not permitted to have sexual encounters or reside in Amazon country, the Amazons visited the Gargareans, a neighbouring tribe, once a year, in order to prevent their race from dying out. Strabo, giving credits to Metrodorus of Scepsis and Hypsicrates, mentions that at his time the Amazons were believed to live on the borders of the Gargareans. There were two special months in the spring in which they would go up into the neighboring mountain which separates them and the Gargareans. The Gargareans also, in accordance with an ancient custom, would go there to offer sacrifice with the Amazons and also to have intercourse with them for the sake of begetting children. They did this in secrecy and darkness, any Gargareans at random with any Amazon, and after making them pregnant they would send them away. Any females that were born are retained by the Amazons themselves, but the males would be taken to the Gargareans to be brought up; and each Gargarean to whom a child is brought would adopt the child as his own, regarding the child as his son because of his uncertainty.
Strabo also stated that the Gargareans went up from Themiscyra into this region with the Amazons, then, in company with some Thracians and Euboeans who had wandered thus far, waged war against them. They later ended the war against the Amazons and made a compact that they should have dealings with one another only in the matter of children, and that each people should live independent of the other. In addition, he states that the right breasts of all Amazons are seared when they are infants, so that they can easily use their right arm for every needed purpose, and especially that of throwing the javelin and using the bow.
Apollonius Rhodius, in his "Argonautica", mentions that Amazons were the daughters of Ares and Harmonia (a nymph of the Akmonian Wood). They were brutal and aggressive, and their main concern in life was war. According to him, the Amazons were not gathered together in one city, but scattered over the land, parted into three tribes. In one part dwelt the Themiscyreians (), in another the Lycastians (), and in another the Chadesians (). Also, he mentions that on an island, the Queens of the Amazons, Otrere () and Antiope (), built a marble temple to Ares. On this desert island there were ravening birds, which in countless numbers haunt it. The island mentioned is the Aretias. Argonauts passed by Themiscyra on their journey to Colchis. Zeus sent Boreas (the North Wind), and with his help the Argonauts stood out from the shore near Themiscyra where the Themiscyreian Amazons were arming for battle.
One of the tasks imposed upon Hercules by the king of Tyrins, Eurystheus, was to obtain possession of the girdle of the Amazonian queen Hippolyta. He was accompanied by his friend Theseus, who carried off the princess Antiope, sister of Hippolyta, an incident which led to a retaliatory invasion of Attica, in which Antiope perished fighting by the side of Theseus. First Hippolyte had been favorable to gift the girdle to Heracles, but Hera, disguised as Hippolyte, started the war. Sthenelus was killed during the war. In some versions, however, Theseus marries Hippolyta and in others, he marries Antiope and she does not die; by this marriage with the Amazon Theseus had a son Hippolytus. In another version of this myth, Theseus made this voyage on his own account, after the time of Heracles.
The battle between the Athenians and Amazons is often commemorated in an entire genre of art, amazonomachy, in marble bas-reliefs such as from the Parthenon or the sculptures of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. In "The Eumenides", Athena says to the citizens of Attica that Amazons used the Areopagus as a camp during their campaign against Athens and Theseus. Plutarch, in his "Parallel Lives" ("The Life of Theseus"), mentions that Bion said that the Amazons, were naturally friendly to men, and did not fly from Theseus when he touched upon their coasts.
Amazons are also heard of in the time of Alexander, when some of the king's biographers make mention of the Amazon Queen Thalestris visiting him and becoming a mother by him (the story is known from the "Alexander Romance"). However, several other biographers of Alexander dispute the claim, including the highly regarded secondary source, Plutarch. In his writing he makes mention of a moment when Alexander's secondary naval commander, Onesicritus, was reading the Amazon passage of his Alexander history to King Lysimachus of Thrace who was on the original expedition: the king smiled at him and said "And where was I, then?"
According to Plutarch, when the god Dionysus and his entourage fought the Amazons at Ephesus, the Amazons fled to Samos. Dionysus pursued them and at Samos he killed a great number of them on a spot which was, from that occurrence, called Panaema (), which means blood-soaked field. The Christian author Eusebius writes that during the reign of Oxyntes, one of the mythical kings of Athens, the Amazons burned down the temple at Ephesus.
In another myth Dionysus united with the Amazons to fight against Cronus and the Titans. Polyaenus writes that after Dionysus had subdued the Indians, he formed an alliance with them and the Amazons, and took them into his service. He later used them in his campaign against the Bactria. Nonnus in his "Dionysiaca" writes about the Amazons of Dionysus, but he says that they were not from Thermodon.
Magnes (), a poet from Smyrna had sung of the bravery of Lydians in a cavalry-battle against the Amazons.
Virgil's characterization of the Volscian warrior maiden Camilla in the "Aeneid" borrows heavily from the myth of the Amazons. Philostratus, in "Heroica", writes that the Mysian women fought from horses alongside the men, just as the Amazons did, and the leader was Hiera (), wife of Telephus.
The Amazons are also said to have undertaken an expedition against the island of Leuke, at the mouth of the Danube, where the ashes of Achilles had been deposited by Thetis. The ghost of the dead hero appeared and so terrified the horses, that they threw and trampled upon the invaders, who were forced to retire. Pompey is said to have found them in the army of Mithridates.
Jordanes' "Getica" (), purporting to give the earliest history of the Goths, relates that the Goths' ancestors, descendants of Magog, originally dwelt within Scythia, on the Sea of Azov between the Dnieper and Don Rivers. After a few centuries, following an incident where the Goths' women successfully fended off a raid by a neighboring tribe, while the menfolk were off campaigning against Pharaoh Vesosis, the women formed their own army under Marpesia and crossed the Don, invading Asia. Her sister Lampedo remained in Europe to guard the homeland. They procreated with men once a year. These Amazons conquered Armenia, Syria, and all of Asia Minor, even reaching Ionia and Aeolis, holding this vast territory for 100 years. Jordanes also mentions that they fought with Hercules, and in the Trojan War, and that a smaller contingent of them endured in the Caucasus Mountains until the time of Alexander. He mentions by name the Queens Menalippe, Hippolyta, and Penthesilea.
In the Grottaferrata Version of "Digenes Akritas", the twelfth century medieval epic of Basil, the Greek-Syrian knight of the Byzantine frontier, the hero battles with and kills the female warrior Maximo, descended from some Amazons and taken by Alexander from the Brahmans.
There are several conflicting) lists of names of Amazons.
Quintus Smyrnaeus lists the attendant warriors of Penthesilea: "Clonie was there, Polemusa, Derinoe, Evandre, and Antandre, and Bremusa, Hippothoe, dark-eyed Harmothoe, Alcibie, Derimacheia, Antibrote, and Thermodosa glorying with the spear."
Diodorus Siculus lists twelve Amazons who challenged Heracles to single combat during his quest for Hippolyta's girdle and died against him one by one: Aella, Philippis, Prothoe, Eriboea, Celaeno, Eurybia, Phoebe, Deianeira, Asteria, Marpe, Tecmessa, Alcippe. After Alcippe's death, a group attack followed. She also mentions Melanippe, who he set free after accepting her girdle as ransom and Antiope, who he gifted to Theseus.
Diodorus also lists another group of Amazons in book 3. He mentions Myrina as the queen who commanded the Amazons in a military expedition in Lybia, as well as her sister Mytilene, after whom she named the city of the same name. Myrina also named three more cities after the Amazons who held the most important commands under her, Cyme, Pitane, and Priene.
Both Justin in his "Epitome of Trogus Pompeius" and Paulus Orosius give an account of the Amazons, citing the same names. Queens Marpesia and Lampedo shared the power during and incursion in Europe and Asia, where they were slain. Marpesia's daughter Orithyia succeeded them and was greatly admired for her skill on war. She shared power with her sister Antiope, but she was engaged in war abroad when Heracles attacked. Two of Antiope's sisters were taken prisoner, Menalippe by Heracles and Hippolyta by Theseus. Heracles latter restored Menalippe to her sister after receiving the queen's arms in exchange, though, on other accounts she was killed by Telamon. They also mention Penthesilea's role in the Trojan War.
Justin is the only who mentions another queen, Minithya or Thalestris, who shared the bed of Alexander the Great in order to conceive, while Paulus mentions Sinope, successor of Lampedo and Marpesia.
Another list of Amazons' names is found in Hyginus' "Fabulae". Along with Hippolyta, Otrera, Antiope and Penthesilea, it attests the following names: Ocyale, Dioxippe, Iphinome, Xanthe, Hippothoe, Laomache, Glauce, Agave, Theseis, Clymene, Polydora.
Perhaps the most important is Queen Otrera, consort of Ares and mother by him of Hippolyta and Penthesilea. She's also known for building a temple to Artemis at Ephesus.
Another different set of names is found in Valerius Flaccus' "Argonautica": he mentions Euryale, Harpe, Lyce, Menippe and Thoe. Of these Lyce also appears in a fragment preserved in the "Latin Anthology" where she is said to have killed the hero Clonus of Moesia, son of Doryclus, with her javelin.
John Tzetzes in "Posthomerica" enumerates the Amazons who fell at Troy: Hippothoe, Antianeira, Toxophone, Toxoanassa, Gortyessa, Iodoce, Pharetre, Andro, Ioxeia, Oïstrophe, Androdaïxa, Aspidocharme, Enchesimargos, Cnemis, Thorece, Chalcaor, Eurylophe, Hecate, Anchimache and Andromache the queen. For almost all the names on the list, except Antianeira and Andromache, this is a unique attestation.
Stephanus of Byzantium provides an alternate list of the Amazons who fell against Heracles, describing them as "the most prominent" of their people: Tralla, Isocrateia, Thiba, Palla, Coea (Koia), Coenia (Koinia). Eustathius gives the same list minus the last two names. Both Stephanus and Eustathius write of these Amazons in connection with the placename Thibais, which they report to have been derived from Thiba's name.
Stephanus also mentions other Amazons in other entries of his work:
Other names of Amazons from various sources include:
According to ancient sources (Plutarch, Theseus, Pausanias), Amazon tombs could be found frequently throughout what was once known as the ancient Greek world. Some are found in Megara, Athens, Chaeronea, Chalcis, Thessaly at Skotousa, in Cynoscephalae, and statues of Amazons are all over Greece. Stephanus of Byzantium, quoting Ephorus, mention that the tomb of the amazon Anaea () was at the city of Anaea (), which also has this name after the amazon.
At both Chalcis and Athens, Plutarch tells us that there was an Amazoneum or shrine of Amazons that implied the presence of both tombs and cult. At the entrance of Athens there was a monument to the Amazon Antiope. On the day before the Thesea at Athens there were annual sacrifices to the Amazons. In the Axiochus, mention about an Amazonian stele near the Itonian Gate at Athens.
In historical times Greek maidens of Ephesus performed an annual circular dance with weapons and shields that had been established by Hippolyta and her Amazons. They had initially set up wooden statues of Artemis, a "bretas" (Pausanias, (): "Description of Greece", Book I: Attica).
Harpokration mention that Ammonius of Athens in his book "On Altars and Sacrifices" writes that the Amazons founded the Amazoneion sanctuary at Athens.
In works of art, battles between Amazons and Greeks are placed on the same level as – and often associated with – battles of Greeks and centaurs. The belief in their existence, however, having been once accepted and introduced into the national poetry and art, it became necessary to surround them as far as possible with the appearance of natural beings. Amazons were therefore depicted in the manner of Scythian or Sarmatian horsemen. Their occupation was hunting and war; their arms the bow, spear, axe, a half shield, nearly in the shape of a crescent, called "pelta", and in early art a helmet. The model in the Greek mind had apparently been the goddess Athena. In later art they approach the model of Artemis, wearing a thin dress, girt high for speed; while on the later painted vases their dress is often peculiarly Persian – that is, close-fitting trousers and a high cap called the "kidaris". They were usually on horseback but sometimes on foot.
This depiction of Amazons demonstrates just how closely, in the Greek mind, the Amazons were linked to the Scythians. Their manner of dress has been noted to bear a striking similarity to the traditional dress of nomadic peoples from the Crimea to Mongolia. Amazons were described by Herodotus as wearing trousers and having tall stiff caps. The double-sided axe was the most emblematic of their weapons. Amazons can also be identified in vase paintings by the fact that they are wearing one earring. The battle between Theseus and the Amazons (Amazonomachy) is a favourite subject on the friezes of temples (e.g. the reliefs from the frieze of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, now in the British Museum), vases and sarcophagus reliefs; at Athens it was represented on the shield of the statue of Athena Parthenos, on wall-paintings in the Theseum and in the "Stoa Poikile". There were also three standard Amazon statue types.
In the Essays in Portraiture, Lucian of Samosata ask Polystratos which, he think, is the best work of Phidias and Polystratos respond "The Lemnian Athene, which bears the artist's own signature; and of course the Amazon leaning on her spear."
Later in the Renaissance, as Amazon myth evolved, artists started to depict warrior women in a new light. Queen Elizabeth was often thought of as an Amazon-like warrior during her reign and was sometimes depicted as such. Though, as explained in "Divinia Viagro" by Winfried Schleiner, Celeste T. Wright "has given a detailed account of the bad press Amazons had in the Renaissance (with respect to their unwomanly conduct and Scythian cruelty). She notes that she has not found any Elizabethans comparing the queen directly to an Amazon, and suggests that they might have hesitated to do so because of the association of Amazons with enfranchisement of women, which was considered contemptible."
Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel depicted the Battle of the Amazons around 1598, showing many attributes of Renaissance-styled paintings. Amazons also appear in the Rococo period in another painting titled "Battle of the Amazons" by Johann Georg Platzer. As a part of the Romantic period revival, German artist Anselm Feuerbach painted the Amazons as well. His paintings “engendered all the aspirations of the Romantics: their desire to transcend the boundaries of the ego and of the known world; their interest in the occult in nature and in the soul; their search for a national identity, and the ensuing search for the mythic origins of the Germanic nation; finally, their wish to escape the harsh realities of the present through immersion in an idealized past.”
Herodotus reported that the Sarmatians were descendants of Amazons and Scythians, and that their wives observed their ancient maternal customs, "frequently hunting on horseback with their husbands; in war taking the field; and wearing the very same dress as the men". Moreover, said Herodotus, "No girl shall wed till she has killed a man in battle". In the story related by Herodotus, a group of Amazons was blown across the Maeotian Lake (the Sea of Azov) into Scythia near the cliff region (today's southeastern Crimea). After learning the Scythian language, they agreed to marry Scythian men, on the condition that they not be required to follow the customs of Scythian women. According to Herodotus, this band moved toward the northeast, settling beyond the Tanais (Don) river, and became the ancestors of the Sauromatians. According to Herodotus, the Sarmatians fought with the Scythians against Darius the Great in the 5th century BC.
Xenophon in Anabasis writes that Democrates of Temnus captured a man with a Persian bow, a quiver and a battleaxe of the same sort that Amazons carry.
Hippocrates describes them as: "They have no right breasts...for while they are yet babies their mothers make red-hot a bronze instrument constructed for this very purpose and apply it to the right breast and cauterize it, so that its growth is arrested, and all its strength and bulk are diverted to the right shoulder and right arm."
Amazons came to play a role in Roman historiography. Caesar reminded the Senate of the conquest of large parts of Asia by Semiramis and the Amazons. Successful Amazon raids against Lycia and Cilicia contrasted with effective resistance by Lydian cavalry against the invaders (Strabo 5.504; Nicholas Damascenus). Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus pays particularly detailed attention to the Amazons. The story of the Amazons as deriving from a Cappadocian colony of two Scythian princes Ylinos and Scolopetos is due to him. Pliny the Elder records some surprising facts pointing to the valley of the Terme River as possibly being their home: a mountain named for them (the modern Mason Dagi), as well as a settlement Amazonium; Herodotus (VI.86) first mentions their capital Themiscyra, which Pliny locates near the Terme. Philostratus places the Amazons in the Taurus Mountains. Ammianus places them east of Tanais, as neighbouring the Alans. Procopius places them in the Caucasus. Diodorus Siculus ("Bibliotheca historica" III, chapter 52) mentioned that besides Pontus Amazons existed much older race (at that time entirely disappeared) of Amazons from western Libya, and retells their mythological story which includes Atlantis and Greek mythology.
Although Strabo shows skepticism as to their historicity, the Amazons in general continue to be taken as historical throughout Late Antiquity. Several Church Fathers speak of the Amazons as of a real people. Solinus embraces the account of Pliny. Under Aurelianus, captured Gothic women were identified as Amazons (Claudianus). The account of Justinus was influential, and was used as a source by Orosius who continued to be read during the European Middle Ages. Medieval authors thus continue the tradition of locating the Amazons in the North, Adam of Bremen placing them at the Baltic Sea and Paulus Diaconus in the heart of Germania.
Pausanias at the Description of Greece writes that near Pyrrhichus there were sanctuaries of the gods Artemis, called Astrateia (), and Apollo, called Amazonius () with images of the gods said to have been dedicated by the women from Thermodon.
Amazons continued to be discussed by authors of the European Renaissance, and with the Age of Exploration, they were located in ever more remote areas. In 1542, Francisco de Orellana reached the Amazon River ("Amazonas" in Spanish), naming it after a tribe of warlike women he claimed to have encountered and fought on the Nhamundá River, a tributary of the Amazon. Afterwards the whole basin and region of the Amazon ("Amazônia" in Portuguese, "Amazonía" in Spanish) were named after the river. Amazons also figure in the accounts of both Christopher Columbus and Walter Raleigh. Famous medieval traveller John Mandeville mentions them in his book:
Medieval and Renaissance authors credit the Amazons with the invention of the battle-axe. This is probably related to the "sagaris", an axe-like weapon associated with both Amazons and Scythian tribes by Greek authors (see also Thracian tomb of Aleksandrovo kurgan). Paulus Hector Mair expresses astonishment that such a "manly weapon" should have been invented by a "tribe of women", but he accepts the attribution out of respect for his authority, Johannes Aventinus.
Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" contains a country of warrior women, ruled by Queen Orontea; the epic describes an origin much like that in Greek myth, in that the women, abandoned by a band of warriors and unfaithful lovers, rallied together to form a nation from which men were severely reduced, to prevent them from regaining power. The Amazons and Queen Hippolyta are also referenced in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" in "The Knight's Tale".
Speculation that the idea of Amazons contains a core of reality is based on archaeological findings from burials, pointing to the possibility that some Sarmatian women may have participated in battle. These findings have led scholars to suggest that the Amazonian legend in Greek mythology may have been "inspired by real warrior women".
Evidence of high-ranking warrior women comes from kurgans in southern Ukraine and Russia. David Anthony notes, "About 20% of Scythian-Sarmatian 'warrior graves' on the lower Don and lower Volga contained women dressed for battle similar to how men dress, a phenomenon that probably inspired the Greek tales about the Amazons."
Up to 25% of military burials were of armed Sarmatian women usually including bows. Russian archaeologist Vera Kovalevskaya points out that when Scythian men were away fighting or hunting, nomadic women would have to be able to defend themselves, their animals and pasture-grounds competently. During the time that the Scythians advanced into Asia and achieved near-hegemony in the Near East, there was a period of twenty-eight years when the men would have been away on campaigns for long periods. During this time the women would not only have had to defend themselves, but to reproduce, and this could well be the origin of the idea that Amazons mated once a year with their neighbours, if Herodotus actually based his accounts on fact.
Before modern archaeology uncovered some of the Scythian burials of warrior-maidens entombed under kurgans in the region of Altai Mountains and Sarmatia,
giving concrete form at last to the Greek tales, the origin of the Amazon story had been the subject of speculation among classics scholars. In the 1911 "Encyclopædia Britannica" speculation ranged along the following lines:
When Minoan archeology was still in its infancy, nevertheless, a theory raised in an essay regarding the Amazons contributed by Lewis Richard Farnell and John Myres to Robert Ranulph Marett's "Anthropology and the Classics" (1908), placed their possible origins in Minoan civilization, drawing attention to overlooked similarities between the two cultures. According to Myres, the tradition interpreted in the light of evidence furnished by supposed Amazon cults seems to have been very similar and may have even originated in Minoan culture.
Niketas Choniates wrote that when the Germans attacked during the Emperor Manuel I Komnenos reign, females were numbered among them riding horses and bearing weapons and they were like the Amazons. Added that one stood out from the rest as another Penthesilea.
Francisco de Orellana gave the Amazon river its name after reporting pitched battles with tribes of female warriors, whom he likened to the Amazons.
The city of Samsun in modern-day Turkey features a recently constructed "Amazon Village" museum, created to bring attention to the legacy of the Amazons and to generate both academic interest and popular tourism. A festival is also held every year in the Terme district of Samsun Province to celebrate the Amazons.
In Greece, female equestrians are also called "Amazons" ().
Amazons became an important subject of the fine arts around 1900, especially in the work of the Munich painter and sculptor Franz Stuck (1863–1928).
In Nazi Germany open air events called "Nacht der Amazonen" (Night of the Amazons) were performed at Nymphenburg Palace in Munich between 1936 and 1939. These revues with bare-breasted girls presented an allegedly emancipated female role as part of the "new race" intended to be realized by racial fanatics.
The study by Carl Jung of the sexual archetypes has been studied extensively under the collective title of the Jungian archetypes. The sexual archetypes, which include feminist archetypes depicted by Amazonian cultural portrayals, are used to elaborate and clarify various academic and sociological approaches taken to interpret both human sexuality and feminist views on sexuality.
Notes
Further reading | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1695 |
Ambergris
Ambergris ( or , , ), "ambergrease", or "grey amber", is a solid, waxy, flammable substance of a dull grey or blackish colour produced in the digestive system of sperm whales. Freshly produced ambergris has a marine, fecal odor. It acquires a sweet, earthy scent as it ages, commonly likened to the fragrance of rubbing alcohol without the vaporous chemical astringency.
Ambergris has been highly valued by perfumers as a fixative that allows the scent to endure much longer, although it has been mostly replaced by synthetic ambroxide. Dogs are attracted to the smell of ambergris and are sometimes used by ambergris searchers.
The word "ambergris" comes from the Old French "ambre gris" or "grey amber". The word "amber" comes from the same source, but it has been applied almost exclusively to fossilized tree resins from the Baltic region since the late 13th century in Europe.
Ambergris is formed from a secretion of the bile duct in the intestines of the sperm whale, and can be found floating on the sea or washed up on coastlines. It is sometimes found in the abdomens of dead sperm whales. Because the beaks of giant squids have been discovered within lumps of ambergris, scientists have theorized that the substance is produced by the whale's gastrointestinal tract to ease the passage of hard, sharp objects that it may have eaten. The sperm whale usually vomits these, but if one travels further down the gut, it will be covered in ambergris.
Ambergris is usually passed in the fecal matter. It is speculated that an ambergris mass too large to be passed through the intestines is expelled via the mouth, leading to the reputation of ambergris as primarily coming from whale vomit. Ambergris takes years to form. Christopher Kemp, the author of "Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris", says that it is only produced by sperm whales, and only by an estimated one percent of them. Ambergris is rare; once expelled by a whale, it often floats for years before making landfall. The very small chance of finding ambergris, and the legal ambiguity involved led perfume makers away from ambergris and led chemists on a quest to find viable alternatives.
Ambergris is primarily found in the Atlantic Ocean and on the coasts of South Africa, Brazil, Madagascar, the East Indies, The Maldives, China, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the Molucca Islands. Most commercially collected ambergris comes from the Bahamas in the Atlantic, particularly New Providence. Fossilised ambergris from 1.75 million years ago has also been found.
Ambergris is found in lumps of various shapes and sizes, usually weighing from to , sometimes more. When initially expelled by or removed from the whale, the fatty precursor of ambergris is pale white in colour (sometimes streaked with black), soft, with a strong fecal smell. Following months to years of photodegradation and oxidation in the ocean, this precursor gradually hardens, developing a dark grey or black colour, a crusty and waxy texture, and a peculiar odour that is at once sweet, earthy, marine, and animalic. Its scent has been generally described as a vastly richer and smoother version of isopropanol without its stinging harshness. In this developed condition, ambergris has a specific gravity ranging from 0.780 to 0.926. It melts at about to a fatty, yellow resinous liquid; and at it is volatilised into a white vapour. It is soluble in ether, and in volatile and fixed oils.
Ambergris is relatively nonreactive to acid. White crystals of a terpene known as ambrein can be separated from ambergris by heating raw ambergris in alcohol, then allowing the resulting solution to cool. Breakdown of the relatively scentless ambrein through oxidation produces ambroxan and ambrinol, the main odor components of ambergris.
Ambroxan is now produced synthetically and used extensively in the perfume industry.
Ambergris has been mostly known for its use in creating perfume and fragrance much like musk. Perfumes can still be found with ambergris.
Ambergris has historically been used in food and drink. A serving of eggs and ambergris was reportedly King Charles II of England's favorite dish. A recipe for Rum Shrub liqueur from the mid 19th century called for a thread of ambergris to be added to rum, almonds, cloves, cassia, and the peel of oranges in making a cocktail from "The English and Australian Cookery Book". It has been used as a flavoring agent in Turkish coffee and in hot chocolate in 18th century Europe. The substance is considered an aphrodisiac in some cultures.
Ancient Egyptians burned ambergris as incense, while in modern Egypt ambergris is used for scenting cigarettes. The ancient Chinese called the substance "dragon's spittle fragrance". During the Black Death in Europe, people believed that carrying a ball of ambergris could help prevent them from contracting plague. This was because the fragrance covered the smell of the air which was believed to be a cause of plague.
During the Middle Ages, Europeans used ambergris as a medication for headaches, colds, epilepsy, and other ailments.
From the 18th to the mid-19th century, the whaling industry prospered. By some reports, nearly 50,000 whales, including sperm whales, were killed each year. Throughout the 1800s, "millions of whales were killed for their oil, whalebone, and ambergris" to fuel profits, and they soon became endangered as a species as a result. Due to studies showing that the whale populations were being threatened, the International Whaling Commission instituted a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982. Although ambergris is not harvested from whales, many countries also ban the trade of ambergris as part of the more general ban on the hunting and exploitation of whales.
Urine, faeces and ambergris (that has been naturally excreted by a sperm whale) are waste products not considered parts or derivatives of a CITES species and are therefore not covered by the provisions of the Convention.
Illegal
Legal
The knowledge of ambergris and how it is produced may have been a kept secret. Glaswegian apothecary John Spreul told the historian Robert Wodrow about the substance but said he had never told anyone else. Ibn Battuta wrote about ambergris, "I sent along with them all the things that I valued and the gems and ambergris..."
In chapter 91 of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (1851), Stubb, one of the mates of the "Pequod," fools the captain of a French whaler ("Rose-bud") into abandoning the corpse of a sperm whale found floating in the sea. His plan is to recover the corpse himself in hopes that it contains ambergris. His hope proves well founded, and the "Pequod"'s crew recovers a valuable quantity of the substance. Melville devotes the following chapter to a discussion of ambergris, with special attention to the irony that "fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale."
In "A Romance of Perfume Lands or the Search for Capt. Jacob Cole", F. S. Clifford, October 1881, the last chapter concerns one of the novel's characters discovering an area of a remote island which contains large amounts of ambergris. He hopes to use this knowledge to help make his fortune in the manufacture of perfumes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1697 |
August Wilhelm Ambros
August Wilhelm Ambros (17 November 181628 June 1876) was an Austrian composer and music historian of Czech descent.
He was born at Mýto, Rokycany District, Bohemia. His father was a cultured man, and his mother was the sister of Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (1773–1850), the musical archaeologist and collector. Ambros studied at the University of Prague and was well-educated in music and the arts, which were his abiding passion. He was, however, destined for the law and an official career in the Austrian civil service, and he occupied various important posts under the ministry of justice, music being an avocation.
From 1850 onwards he became well known as a critic and essay-writer, and in 1860 he began working on his magnum opus, his "History of Music", which was published at intervals from 1862 in five volumes, the last two (1878, 1882) being edited and completed by Otto Kade and Wilhelm Langhans.
Ambros was professor of the history of music at Prague from 1869 to 1871. Also in Prague, he sat on the board of governors in the Prague Royal Conservatory. By 1872, he was living in Vienna and was employed by the Department of Justice as an officer and by Prince Rudolf's family as his tutor. Through his work in Vienna, he was given leave of absence for half the year in order to let him travel the world to collect musical information to include in his "History of Music" book. He was an excellent pianist, and the author of numerous compositions somewhat reminiscent of Felix Mendelssohn.
Ambros died at Vienna, Austria at the age of 59. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1700 |
Amazon River
The Amazon River (, ; , ) in South America is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world, and by most accepted definitions it is the second longest river in the world, after the Nile River.
The headwaters of the Apurímac River on Nevado Mismi had been considered for nearly a century as the Amazon's most distant source, until a 2014 study found it to be the headwaters of the Mantaro River on the Cordillera Rumi Cruz in Peru. The Mantaro and Apurímac join, and with other tributaries form the Ucayali River, which in turn meets the Marañón River upstream of Iquitos, Peru, to form what countries other than Brazil consider to be the main stem of the Amazon. Brazilians call this section the Solimões River above its confluence with the Rio Negro to form what Brazilians call the Amazon at the Meeting of Waters () at Manaus, the largest city on the river.
At an average discharge of about —approximately , greater than the next seven largest independent rivers combined—the Amazon represents 20% of the global riverine discharge to the ocean. The Amazon basin is the largest drainage basin in the world, with an area of approximately . The portion of the river's drainage basin in Brazil alone is larger than any other river's basin. The Amazon enters Brazil with only one-fifth of the flow it finally discharges into the Atlantic Ocean, yet already has a greater flow at this point than the discharge of any other river.
The Amazon was initially known by Europeans as the Marañón, and the Peruvian part of the river is still known by that name today. It later became known as Rio Amazonas in Spanish and Portuguese, and Amazon River in English.
The name Rio Amazonas was given after native warriors attacked a 16th-century expedition by Francisco de Orellana. The warriors were led by women, reminding de Orellana of the Amazon warriors, a tribe of women warriors related to Iranian Scythians and Sarmatians mentioned in Greek mythology.
The word Amazon itself may be derived from the Iranian compound *ha-maz-an- "(one) fighting together" or ethnonym "*ha-mazan-" "warriors", a word attested indirectly through a derivation, a denominal verb in Hesychius of Alexandria's gloss (""": 'to make war' in Persian"), where it appears together with the Indo-Iranian root "*kar-" "make" (from which Sanskrit "karma" is also derived).
During what many archaeologists called the "formative stage", Amazonian societies were deeply involved in the emergence of South America's highland agrarian systems. The trade with Andean civilizations in the terrains of the headwaters in the Andes formed an essential contribution to the social and religious development of higher-altitude civilizations like the Muisca and Incas. Early human settlements were typically based on low-lying hills or mounds.
Shell mounds were the earliest evidence of habitation; they represent piles of human refuse and are mainly dated between 7500 and 4000 years BP. They are associated with ceramic age cultures; no preceramic shell mounds have been documented so far by archaeologists. Artificial earth platforms for entire villages are the second type of mounds. They are best represented by the Marajoara culture. Figurative mounds are the most recent types of occupation.
There is ample evidence that the areas surrounding the Amazon River were home to complex and large-scale indigenous societies, mainly chiefdoms who developed towns and cities. Archaeologists estimate that by the time the Spanish conquistador De Orellana traveled across the Amazon in 1541, more than 3 million indigenous people lived around the Amazon. These pre-Columbian settlements created highly developed civilizations. For instance, pre-Columbian indigenous people on the island of Marajó may have developed social stratification and supported a population of 100,000 people. To achieve this level of development, the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest altered the forest's ecology by selective cultivation and the use of fire. Scientists argue that by burning areas of the forest repetitiously, the indigenous people caused the soil to become richer in nutrients. This created dark soil areas known as "terra preta de índio" ("Indian dark earth"). Because of the terra preta, indigenous communities were able to make land fertile and thus sustainable for the large-scale agriculture needed to support their large populations and complex social structures. Further research has hypothesized that this practice began around 11,000 years ago. Some say that its effects on forest ecology and regional climate explain the otherwise inexplicable band of lower rainfall through the Amazon basin.
Many indigenous tribes engaged in constant warfare. James Stuart Olson wrote: "The Munduruku expansion dislocated and displaced the Kawahíb, breaking the tribe down into much smaller groups ... [Munduruku] first came to the attention of Europeans in 1770 when they began a series of widespread attacks on Brazilian settlements along the Amazon River."
In March 1500, Spanish conquistador Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was the first documented European to sail up the Amazon River. Pinzón called the stream "Río Santa María del Mar Dulce", later shortened to "Mar Dulce", literally, "sweet sea", because of its freshwater pushing out into the ocean. Another Spanish explorer, Francisco de Orellana, was the first European to travel from the origins of the upstream river basins, situated in the Andes, to the mouth of the river. In this journey, Orellana baptized some of the affluents of the Amazonas like Rio Negro, Napo and Jurua.
Gonzalo Pizarro set off in 1541 to explore east of Quito into the South American interior in search of "El Dorado", the "city of gold" and La Canela, the "valley of cinnamon". He was accompanied by his second-in-command Francisco de Orellana. After , the Coca River joined the Napo River (at a point now known as Puerto Francisco de Orellana); the party stopped for a few weeks to build a boat just upriver from this confluence. They continued downriver through an uninhabited area, where they could not find food. Orellana offered and was ordered to follow the Napo River, then known as "Río de la Canela" ("Cinnamon River") and return with food for the party. Based on intelligence received from a captive native chief named Delicola, they expected to find food within a few days downriver by ascending another river to the north.
De Orellana took about 57 men, the boat, and some canoes and left Pizarro's troops on 26 December 1541. However, De Orellana missed the confluence (probably with the Aguarico) where he was searching supplies for his men. By the time he and his men reached another village, many of them were sick from hunger and eating "noxious plants", and near death. Seven men died in that village. His men threatened to mutiny if the expedition turned back to attempt to rejoin Pizarro, the party being over 100 leagues downstream at this point. He accepted to change the purpose of the expedition to discover new lands in the name of the king of Spain, and the men built a larger boat in which to navigate downstream. After a journey of 600 km down the Napo River they reached a further major confluence, at a point near modern Iquitos, and then followed the upper Amazon, now known as the Solimões, for a further to its confluence with the Rio Negro (near modern Manaus), which they reached on 3 June 1542.
Regarding the initial mission of finding cinnamon, Pizarro reported to the king that they had found cinnamon trees, but that they could not be profitably harvested. True cinnamon ("Cinnamomum Verum") is not native to South America. Other related cinnamon-containing plants (of the family "Lauraceae") are fairly common in that part of the Amazon and Pizarro probably saw some of these. The expedition reached the mouth of the Amazon on 24 August 1542, demonstrating the practical navigability of the Great River.
In 1560 another Spanish conquistador, Lope de Aguirre, may have made the second descent of the Amazon. Historians are uncertain whether the river he descended was the Amazon or the Orinoco River, which runs more or less parallel to the Amazon further north.
Portuguese explorer Pedro Teixeira was the first European to travel up the entire river. He arrived in Quito in 1637, and returned via the same route.
From 1648 to 1652, Portuguese Brazilian "bandeirante" António Raposo Tavares led an expedition from São Paulo overland to the mouth of the Amazon, investigating many of its tributaries, including the Rio Negro, and covering a distance of more than .
In what is currently Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, several colonial and religious settlements were established along the banks of primary rivers and tributaries for trade, slaving and evangelization among the indigenous peoples of the vast rainforest, such as the Urarina. In the late 1600s Czech Jesuit Father Samuel Fritz, an apostle of the Omagus established some forty mission villages. Fritz proposed that the Marañón River must be the source of the Amazon, noting on his 1707 map that the Marañón "has its source on the southern shore of a lake that is called Lauricocha, near Huánuco." Fritz reasoned that the Marañón is the largest river branch one encounters when journeying upstream, and lies farther to the west than any other tributary of the Amazon. For most of the 18th–19th centuries and into the 20th century, the Marañón was generally considered the source of the Amazon.
Early scientific, zoological and botanical exploration of the Amazon River and basin took place from the 18th century through the first half of the 19th century.
The Cabanagem revolt (1835–1840) was directed against the white ruling class. It is estimated that from 30 to 40% of the population of Grão-Pará, estimated at 100,000 people, died.
The total population of the Brazilian portion of the Amazon basin in 1850 was perhaps 300,000, of whom about two-thirds were Europeans and slaves, the slaves amounting to about 25,000. The Brazilian Amazon's principal commercial city, Pará (now Belém), had from 10,000 to 12,000 inhabitants, including slaves. The town of Manáos, now Manaus, at the mouth of the Rio Negro, had a population between 1,000 and 1,500. All the remaining villages, as far up as Tabatinga, on the Brazilian frontier of Peru, were relatively small.
On 6 September 1850, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil sanctioned a law authorizing steam navigation on the Amazon and gave the Viscount of Mauá (Irineu Evangelista de Sousa) the task of putting it into effect. He organised the "Companhia de Navegação e Comércio do Amazonas" in Rio de Janeiro in 1852; in the following year it commenced operations with four small steamers, the "Monarca" ('Monarch'), the "Cametá", the "Marajó" and the "Rio Negro".
At first, navigation was principally confined to the main river; and even in 1857 a modification of the government contract only obliged the company to a monthly service between Pará and Manaus, with steamers of 200 tons cargo capacity, a second line to make six round voyages a year between Manaus and Tabatinga, and a third, two trips a month between Pará and Cametá. This was the first step in opening up the vast interior.
The success of the venture called attention to the opportunities for economic exploitation of the Amazon, and a second company soon opened commerce on the Madeira, Purús, and Negro; a third established a line between Pará and Manaus, and a fourth found it profitable to navigate some of the smaller streams. In that same period, the Amazonas Company was increasing its fleet. Meanwhile, private individuals were building and running small steam craft of their own on the main river as well as on many of its tributaries.
On 31 July 1867 the government of Brazil, constantly pressed by the maritime powers and by the countries encircling the upper Amazon basin, especially Peru, decreed the opening of the Amazon to all countries, but they limited this to certain defined points: Tabatinga – on the Amazon; Cametá – on the Tocantins; Santarém – on the Tapajós; Borba – on the Madeira, and Manaus – on the Rio Negro. The Brazilian decree took effect on 7 September 1867.
Thanks in part to the mercantile development associated with steamboat navigation coupled with the internationally driven demand for natural rubber, the Peruvian city of Iquitos became a thriving, cosmopolitan center of commerce. Foreign companies settled in Iquitos, from whence they controlled the extraction of rubber. In 1851 Iquitos had a population of 200, and by 1900 its population reached 20,000. In the 1860s, approximately 3,000 tons of rubber were being exported annually, and by 1911 annual exports had grown to 44,000 tons, representing 9.3% of Peru's exports. During the rubber boom it is estimated that diseases brought by immigrants, such as typhus and malaria, killed 40,000 native Amazonians.
The first direct foreign trade with Manaus commenced around 1874. Local trade along the river was carried on by the English successors to the Amazonas Company—the Amazon Steam Navigation Company—as well as numerous small steamboats, belonging to companies and firms engaged in the rubber trade, navigating the Negro, Madeira, Purús and many other tributaries, such as the Marañón, to ports as distant as Nauta, Peru.
By the turn of the 20th century, the exports of the Amazon basin were India-rubber, cacao beans, Brazil nuts and a few other products of minor importance, such as pelts and exotic forest produce (resins, barks, woven hammocks, prized bird feathers, live animals) and extracted goods, such as lumber and gold.
Since colonial times, the Portuguese portion of the Amazon basin has remained a land largely undeveloped by agriculture and occupied by indigenous people who survived the arrival of European diseases.
Four centuries after the European discovery of the Amazon river, the total cultivated area in its basin was probably less than , excluding the limited and crudely cultivated areas among the mountains at its extreme headwaters. This situation changed dramatically during the 20th century.
Wary of foreign exploitation of the nation's resources, Brazilian governments in the 1940s set out to develop the interior, away from the seaboard where foreigners owned large tracts of land. The original architect of this expansion was president Getúlio Vargas, with the demand for rubber from the Allied forces in World War II providing funding for the drive.
In the 1960s, economic exploitation of the Amazon basin was seen as a way to fuel the "economic miracle" occurring at the time. This resulted in the development of "Operation Amazon", an economic development project that brought large-scale agriculture and ranching to Amazonia. This was done through a combination of credit and fiscal incentives.
However, in the 1970s the government took a new approach with the National Integration Programme. A large-scale colonization program saw families from northeastern Brazil relocated to the "land without people" in the Amazon Basin. This was done in conjunction with infrastructure projects mainly the Trans-Amazonian Highway ("Transamazônica").
The Trans-Amazonian Highway's three pioneering highways were completed within ten years but never fulfilled their promise. Large portions of the Trans-Amazonian and its accessory roads, such as BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho), are derelict and impassable in the rainy season. Small towns and villages are scattered across the forest, and because its vegetation is so dense, some remote areas are still unexplored.
Many settlements grew along the road from Brasília to Belém with the highway and National Integration Programme, however, the program failed as the settlers were unequipped to live in the delicate rainforest ecosystem. This, although the government believed it could sustain millions, instead could sustain very few.
With a population of 1.9 million people in 2014, Manaus is the largest city on the Amazon. Manaus alone makes up approximately 50% of the population of the largest Brazilian state of Amazonas. The racial makeup of the city is 64% pardo (mulatto and mestizo) and 32% white.
Although the Amazon river remains undammed, around 412 dams are in operation in the Amazon's tributary rivers. From these 412 dams, 151 are constructed over six of the main tributary rivers that drain into the Amazon. Since only four percent of the Amazon's hydropower potential has been developed in countries like Brazil, more damming projects are underway and hundreds more are planned. After witnessing the negative effects of environmental degradation, sedimentation, navigation and flood control caused by the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze River, scientists are worried that constructing more dams in the Amazon will harm its biodiversity in the same way by "blocking-fish spawning runs, reducing the flows of vital oil nutrients and clearing forests". Damming the Amazon River could potentially bring about the "end of free flowing rivers" and contribute to an "ecosystem collapse" that will cause major social problems.
The most distant source of the Amazon was thought to be in the Apurímac river drainage for nearly a century. Such studies continued to be published even recently, such as in 1996, 2001, 2007, and 2008, where various authors identified the snowcapped Nevado Mismi peak, located roughly west of Lake Titicaca and southeast of Lima, as the most distant source of the river. From that point, Quebrada Carhuasanta emerges from Nevado Mismi, joins Quebrada Apacheta and soon forms Río Lloqueta which becomes Río Hornillos and eventually joins the Río Apurímac.
A 2014 study by Americans James Contos and Nicolas Tripcevich in "Area", a peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Geographical Society, however, identifies the most distant source of the Amazon as actually being in the Río Mantaro drainage. A variety of methods were used to compare the lengths of the Mantaro river vs. the Apurímac river from their most distant source points to their confluence, showing the longer length of the Mantaro. Then distances from Lago Junín to several potential source points in the uppermost Mantaro river were measured, which enabled them to determine that the Cordillera Rumi Cruz was the most distant source of water in the Mantaro basin (and therefore in the entire Amazon basin). The most accurate measurement method was direct GPS measurement obtained by kayak descent of each of the rivers from their source points to their confluence (performed by Contos). Obtaining these measurements was difficult given the class IV–V nature of each of these rivers, especially in their lower "Abyss" sections. Ultimately, they determined that the most distant point in the Mantaro drainage is nearly 80 km farther upstream compared to Mt. Mismi in the Apurímac drainage, and thus the maximal length of the Amazon river is about 80 km longer than previously thought. Contos continued downstream to the ocean and finished the first complete descent of the Amazon river from its newly identified source (finishing November 2012), a journey repeated by two groups after the news spread.
After about , the Apurímac then joins Río Mantaro to form the Ene, which joins the Perene to form the Tambo, which joins the Urubamba River to form the Ucayali. After the confluence of Apurímac and Ucayali, the river leaves Andean terrain and is surrounded by floodplain. From this point to the confluence of the Ucayali and the Marañón, some , the forested banks are just above the water and are inundated long before the river attains its maximum flood stage. The low river banks are interrupted by only a few hills, and the river enters the enormous Amazon rainforest.
Although the Ucayali–Marañón confluence is the point at which most geographers place the beginning of the Amazon River proper, in Brazil the river is known at this point as the "Solimões das Águas". The river systems and flood plains in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, whose waters drain into the "Solimões" and its tributaries, are called the "Upper Amazon".
The Amazon proper runs mostly through Brazil and Peru, and is part of the border between Colombia and Perú. It has a series of major tributaries in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, some of which flow into the Marañón and Ucayali, and others directly into the Amazon proper. These include rivers Putumayo, Caquetá, Vaupés, Guainía, Morona, Pastaza, Nucuray, Urituyacu, Chambira, Tigre, Nanay, Napo, and Huallaga.
At some points the river divides into anabranches, or multiple channels, often very long, with inland and lateral channels, all connected by a complicated system of natural canals, cutting the low, flat "igapó" lands, which are never more than above low river, into many islands.
From the town of Canaria at the great bend of the Amazon to the Negro, vast areas of land are submerged at high water, above which only the upper part of the trees of the sombre forests appear. Near the mouth of the Rio Negro to Serpa, nearly opposite the river Madeira, the banks of the Amazon are low, until approaching Manaus, they rise to become rolling hills.
The Lower Amazon begins where the darkly coloured waters of the Rio Negro meet the sandy coloured Rio Solimões (the upper Amazon), and for over these waters run side by side without mixing. At Óbidos, a bluff above the river is backed by low hills. The lower Amazon seems to have once been a gulf of the Atlantic Ocean, the waters of which washed the cliffs near Óbidos.
Only about ten percent of the Amazon's water enters downstream of Óbidos, very little of which is from the northern slope of the valley. The drainage area of the Amazon basin above Óbidos city is about , and, below, only about (around 20%), exclusive of the of the Tocantins basin. The Tocantins River enters the southern portion of the Amazon delta.
In the lower reaches of the river, the north bank consists of a series of steep, table-topped hills extending for about from opposite the mouth of the Xingu as far as Monte Alegre. These hills are cut down to a kind of terrace which lies between them and the river.
On the south bank, above the Xingu, a line of low bluffs bordering the floodplain extends nearly to Santarém in a series of gentle curves before they bend to the southwest, and, abutting upon the lower Tapajós, merge into the bluffs which form the terrace margin of the Tapajós river valley.
Belém is the major city and port at the mouth of the river at the Atlantic Ocean. The definition of where exactly the mouth of the Amazon is located, and how wide it is, is a matter of dispute, because of the area's peculiar geography. The Pará and the Amazon are connected by a series of river channels called "furos" near the town of Breves; between them lies Marajó, the world's largest combined river/sea island.
If the Pará river and the Marajó island ocean frontage are included, the Amazon estuary is some wide. In this case, the width of the mouth of the river is usually measured from Cabo Norte, the cape located straight east of Pracuúba in the Brazilian state of Amapá, to Ponta da Tijoca near the town of Curuçá, in the state of Pará.
A more conservative measurement excluding the Pará river estuary, from the mouth of the Araguari River to Ponta do Navio on the northern coast of Marajó, would still give the mouth of the Amazon a width of over . If only the river's main channel is considered, between the islands of Curuá (state of Amapá) and Jurupari (state of Pará), the width falls to about .
The plume generated by the river's discharge covers up to 1.3 million square kilometres and is responsible for muddy bottoms influencing a wide area of the tropical north Atlantic in terms of salinity, pH, light penetration, and sedimentation.
There are no bridges across the entire width of the river. This is not because the river would be too wide to bridge; for most of its length, engineers could build a bridge across the river easily. For most of its course, the river flows through the Amazon Rainforest, where there are very few roads and cities. Most of the time, the crossing can be done by a ferry. The Manaus Iranduba Bridge linking the cities of Manaus and Iranduba spans the Rio Negro, the second-largest tributary of the Amazon, just before their confluence.
While debate as to whether the Amazon or the Nile is the world's longest river has gone on for many years, the historic consensus of geographic authorities has been to regard the Amazon as the second longest river in the world, with the Nile being the longest. However, the Amazon has been reported as being anywhere between long. It is often said to be "at least" long. The Nile is reported to be anywhere from . Often it is said to be "about" long. There are many factors that can affect these measurements, such as the position of the geographical source and the mouth, the scale of measurement, and the length measuring techniques (for details see also List of rivers by length).
A study by Brazilian scientists concluded that the Amazon is actually longer than the Nile. Using Nevado Mismi, which in 2001 was labelled by the National Geographic Society as the Amazon's source, these scientists made new calculations of the Amazon's length. They calculated the Amazon's length as . Using the same techniques, they calculated the length of the Nile as , which is longer than previous estimates but still shorter than the Amazon. They made it possible by measuring the Amazon downstream to the beginning of the tidal estuary of "Canal do Sul" and then, after a sharp turn back, following tidal canals surrounding the isle of Marajó and finally including the marine waters of the "Río Pará" bay in its entire length. Guido Gelli, director of science at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), told the Brazilian TV network Globo in June 2007 that it could be considered as a fact that the Amazon was the longest river in the world. However, other geographers have had access to the same data since 2001, and a consensus has yet to emerge to support the claims of these Brazilian scientists. A peer-reviewed article, published in 2009, concluded that the Nile is longer than the Amazon by stating a length of for the Nile and for the Amazon, measured by using a combination of satellite image analysis and field investigations to the source regions.
Therefore, as of 2018 the length of both Amazon and Nile remains open to interpretation and continued debate.
The Amazon basin, the largest in the world, covers about 40% of South America, an area of approximately . It drains from west to east, from Iquitos in Peru, across Brazil to the Atlantic. It gathers its waters from 5 degrees north latitude to 20 degrees south latitude. Its most remote sources are found on the inter-Andean plateau, just a short distance from the Pacific Ocean.
The Amazon River and its tributaries are characterised by extensive forested areas that become flooded every rainy season. Every year, the river rises more than , flooding the surrounding forests, known as "várzea" ("flooded forests"). The Amazon's flooded forests are the most extensive example of this habitat type in the world. In an average dry season, of land are water-covered, while in the wet season, the flooded area of the Amazon basin rises to .
The quantity of water released by the Amazon to the Atlantic Ocean is enormous: up to in the rainy season, with an average of from 1973 to 1990. The Amazon is responsible for about 20% of the Earth's fresh water entering the ocean. The river pushes a vast plume of fresh water into the ocean. The plume is about long and between wide. The fresh water, being lighter, flows on top of the seawater, diluting the salinity and altering the colour of the ocean surface over an area up to in extent. For centuries ships have reported fresh water near the Amazon's mouth yet well out of sight of land in what otherwise seemed to be the open ocean.
The Atlantic has sufficient wave and tidal energy to carry most of the Amazon's sediments out to sea, thus the Amazon does not form a true delta. The great deltas of the world are all in relatively protected bodies of water, while the Amazon empties directly into the turbulent Atlantic.
There is a natural water union between the Amazon and the Orinoco basins, the so-called Casiquiare canal. The Casiquiare is a river distributary of the upper Orinoco, which flows southward into the Rio Negro, which in turn flows into the Amazon. The Casiquiare is the largest river on earth that links two major river systems, a so-called bifurcation.
Not all of the Amazon's tributaries flood at the same time of the year. Many branches begin flooding in November and might continue to rise until June. The rise of the Rio Negro starts in February or March and begins to recede in June. The Madeira River rises and falls two months earlier than most of the rest of the Amazon river.
The depth of the Amazon between Manacapuru and Óbidos has been calculated as between . At Manacapuru, the Amazon's water level is only about above mean sea level. More than half of the water in the Amazon downstream of Manacapuru is below sea level. In its lowermost section, the Amazon's depth averages , in some places as much as .
The main river is navigable for large ocean steamers to Manaus, upriver from the mouth. Smaller ocean vessels of and draft can reach as far as Iquitos, Peru, from the sea. Smaller riverboats can reach higher, as far as Achual Point. Beyond that, small boats frequently ascend to the Pongo de Manseriche, just above Achual Point in Peru.
Annual flooding occurs in late northern latitude winter at high tide when the incoming waters of the Atlantic are funnelled into the Amazon delta. The resulting undular tidal bore is called the "pororoca", with a leading wave that can be up to high and travel up to inland.
The Amazon River originated as a transcontinental river in the Miocene epoch between 11.8 million and 11.3 million years ago and took its present shape approximately 2.4 million years ago in the Early Pleistocene.
The proto-Amazon during the Cretaceous flowed west, as part of a proto-Amazon-Congo river system, from the interior of present-day Africa when the continents were connected, forming western Gondwana. 80 million years ago, the two continents split. Fifteen million years ago, the main tectonic uplift phase of the Andean chain started. This tectonic movement is caused by the subduction of the Nazca Plate underneath the South American Plate. The rise of the Andes and the linkage of the Brazilian and Guyana bedrock shields, blocked the river and caused the Amazon Basin to become a vast inland sea. Gradually, this inland sea became a massive swampy, freshwater lake and the marine inhabitants adapted to life in freshwater.
Eleven to ten million years ago, waters worked through the sandstone from the west and the Amazon began to flow eastward, leading to the emergence of the Amazon rainforest. During glacial periods, sea levels dropped and the great Amazon lake rapidly drained and became a river, which would eventually become the world's second largest, draining the most extensive area of rainforest on the planet.
Paralleling the Amazon River is a large aquifer, dubbed the Hamza River, the discovery of which was made public in August 2011.
More than one-third of all known species in the world live in the Amazon rainforest, a giant tropical forest and river basin with an area that stretches more than . It is the richest tropical forest in the world in terms of biodiversity. There are over 3,000 species of fish currently recognised in the Amazon basin, with more being discovered every year. In addition to the thousands of species of fish, the river supports crabs, algae, and turtles.
Along with the Orinoco, the Amazon is one of the main habitats of the "boto", also known as the Amazon river dolphin ("Inia geoffrensis"). It is the largest species of river dolphin, and it can grow to lengths of up to . The colour of its skin changes with age; young animals are gray, but become pink and then white as they mature. The dolphins use echolocation to navigate and hunt in the river's tricky depths. The "boto" is the subject of a legend in Brazil about a dolphin that turns into a man and seduces maidens by the riverside.
The tucuxi ("Sotalia fluviatilis"), also a dolphin species, is found both in the rivers of the Amazon basin and in the coastal waters of South America. The Amazonian manatee ("Trichechus inunguis"), also known as "seacow", is found in the northern Amazon River basin and its tributaries. It is a mammal and a herbivore. Its population is limited to freshwater habitats, and, unlike other manatees, it does not venture into salt water. It is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The Amazon and its tributaries are the main habitat of the giant otter ("Pteronura brasiliensis"). Sometimes known as the "river wolf," it is one of South America's top carnivores. Because of habitat destruction and hunting, its population has dramatically decreased. It is now listed on Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which effectively bans international trade.
The anaconda is found in shallow waters in the Amazon basin. One of the world's largest species of snake, the anaconda spends most of its time in the water with just its nostrils above the surface. Species of caimans, that are related to alligators and other crocodilians, also inhabit the Amazon as do varieties of turtles.
The Amazonian fish fauna is the centre of diversity for neotropical fishes. 5,600 species are currently known, and approximately fifty new species are discovered each year. The arapaima, known in Brazil as the "pirarucu", is a South American tropical freshwater fish, one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, with a length of up to . Another Amazonian freshwater fish is the arowana (or "aruanã" in Portuguese), such as the silver arowana ("Osteoglossum bicirrhosum"), which is a predator and very similar to the arapaima, but only reaches a length of . Also present in large numbers is the notorious piranha, an omnivorous fish that congregates in large schools and may attack livestock and even humans. There are approximately 30 to 60 species of piranha. However, only a few of its species are known to attack humans, most notably "Pygocentrus nattereri", the red-bellied piranha. The candirú, native to the Amazon River, is a species of parasitic fresh water catfish in the family Trichomycteridae, just one of more than 1200 species of catfish in the Amazon basin. Other catfish 'walk' overland on their ventral fins, while the kumakuma ("Brachyplatystoma filamentosum"), aka "piraiba" or "goliath catfish", can reach in length and in weight.
The electric eel ("Electrophorus electricus") and more than 100 species of electric fishes (Gymnotiformes) inhabit the Amazon basin. River stingrays (Potamotrygonidae) are also known. The bull shark ("Carcharhinus leucas") has been reported up the Amazon River at Iquitos in Peru.
Freshwater microbes are generally not very well known, even less so for a pristine ecosystem like the Amazon. Recently, metagenomics has provided answers to what kind of microbes inhabit the river. The most important microbes in the Amazon River are Actinobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria, Betaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria and Crenarchaeota.
The Amazon has over 1,100 tributaries, 12 of which are over long. Some of the more notable ones are: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1701 |
Alfred of Beverley
Alredus, or Alfred of Beverley, (fl. 1143), English chronicler, was sacristan of the church of Beverley in the first half of the twelfth century.
He wrote, apparently about the year 1143, a chronicle entitled "Annales sive Historia de gestis regum Britanniae", which begins with Brutus and carries the history of England down to 1129. Geoffrey of Monmouth and Simeon of Durham are Alfred's chief sources.
Alfred of Beverley, was a priest of Beverley, and is described in the preface to his book as "treasurer of the church of Beverley" and "Master Alfred, sacrist of the church of Beverley".
Alfred of Beverley speaks of himself as contemporary with the removal of the Flemings from the north of England to Ross in Herefordshire in 1112, and writes that he compiled his chronicle "when the church was silent, owing to the number of persons excommunicated under the decree of the council of London", an apparent reference to the council held at Mid-Lent, 1143. His attention, by his own account, was first drawn to history by the publication (before 1139) of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, and he looked forward to following up the chronicle which bears his name, and which largely depends on Geoffrey's work, with a collection of excerpts from the credible portions of the Historia Regum Britanniae, but no trace of such a work is extant.
Alfred of Beverley's chronicle is entitled "Aluredi Beverlacensis Annales sive Historia de gestis Regum Britanniæ libris ix. ad annum 1129". It is largely devoted to the fabulous history of Britain, and is mainly borrowed from Bede, Henry of Huntingdon, and Symeon of Durham, when Geoffrey of Monmouth is not laid under contribution. Alfred quotes occasionally from Suetonius, Orosius, and Nennius, and names many Roman authors whom he had consulted in vain for references to Britain. The chronicle is of no real use to the historical student, since it adds no new fact to the information to be found in well-known earlier authorities.
According to Sidney Lee (1885) the best manuscript of Alfred's "Annales" was among the Hengwrt MSS. belonging to W. W. E. Wynne, Esq., of Peniarth, Merionethshire, and had not been printed. Hearne printed the ‘Annales’ in 1716 from an inferior Bodleian MS. (Rawl. B. 200). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1702 |
Autpert Ambrose
Autpert Ambrose (Ambroise) () (ca. 730 – 784) was a Frankish Benedictine monk.
He became abbot of San Vincenzo al Volturno in South Italy in the time of Desiderius, king of the Lombards. Autpert's election as abbot caused internal dissent at St. Vicenzo, and both Pope Stephen III and Charlemagne intervened. The disagreement was based both on objections to Autpert's personality and to his Frankish origin.
He wrote a considerable number of works on the Bible and religious subjects generally. Among these are commentaries on the Apocalypse, on the Psalms, and on the Song of Solomon; "Lives of Saints Paldo, Tuto and Vaso"; "Assumption of the Virgin"; and a "Combat between the Virtues and the Vices".
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI gave a homily about him in Saint Peter's square. In this homily, Autpert's death date is given as 784 (older scholarship had given a date between 778 and 779). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1714 |
Abu Bakr
Abu Bakr Abdullah ibn Uthman (; 573 CE23 August 634 CE), was a companion and, through his daughter Aisha, a father-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, as well as the first of the Rashidun Caliphs.
Initially a rich and respected businessman, Abu Bakr later became one of the first converts to Islam and extensively contributed his wealth in support of Muhammad's work. He was among Muhammad's closest companions, accompanying him on his migration to Medina and being present at a number of his military conflicts, such as the battles of Badr and Uhud.
Following Muhammad's death in 632, Abu Bakr succeeded in the leadership of the Muslim community as the first Rashidun Caliph. During his reign, he overcame a number of uprisings, collectively known as the Ridda wars, as a result of which he was able to consolidate and expand the rule of the Muslim state over the entire Arabian peninsula. He also commanded the initial incursions into the neighbouring Sassanian and Byzantine empires, which in the years following his death, would eventually result in the Muslim conquests of Persia and the Levant. Abu Bakr died of illness after a reign of 2 years, 2 months and 14 days.
Abu Bakr's full name was Abdullah ibn Uthman ibn Amir ibn Amr ibn Ka'b ibn Sa'd ibn Taym ibn Murrah ibn Ka'b ibn Lu'ayy Ghalib ibn Fihr.
In Arabic, the name "Abd Allah" means "servant of Allah". One of his early titles, preceding his conversion to Islam, was "Ateeq", meaning "saved one". Muhammad later restated this title when he said that Abu Bakr is the "Ateeq". He was called "Al-Siddiq" (the truthful) by Muhammad after he believed him in the event of Isra and Mi'raj when other people didn't, and Ali confirmed that title several times. He was also reportedly referred to in the Quran as the "second of the two in the cave" in reference to the event of hijra, where with Muhammad he hid in the cave in Jabal Thawr from the Meccan party that was sent after them.
Abu Bakr was born in Mecca sometime in 573 CE, to a rich family in the Banu Taym tribe of the Quraysh tribal confederacy. His father's name was Uthman and given the laqab "Abu Quhafa", and his mother was Salma bint Sakhar who was given the laqab of "Umm ul-Khair".
He spent his early childhood like other Arab children of the time, among the Bedouins who called themselves "Ahl-i-Ba'eer"- the people of the camel, and developed a particular fondness for camels. In his early years he played with the camel calves and goats, and his love for camels earned him the nickname ("kunya") ""Abu Bakr"", the father of the camel's calf.
Like other children of the rich Meccan merchant families, Abu Bakr was literate and developed a fondness for poetry. He used to attend the annual fair at Ukaz, and participate in poetical symposia. He had a very good memory and had a good knowledge of the genealogy of the Arab tribes, their stories and their politics.
A story is preserved that once when he was a child, his father took him to the Kaaba, and asked him to pray before the idols. His father went away to attend to some other business, and Abu Bakr was left alone. Addressing an idol, Abu Bakr said "O my God, I am in need of beautiful clothes; bestow them on me". The idol remained indifferent. Then he addressed another idol, saying, "O God, give me some delicious food. See that I am so hungry". The idol remained cold. That exhausted the patience of young Abu Bakr. He lifted a stone, and, addressing an idol, said, "Here I am aiming a stone; if you are a god protect yourself". Abu Bakr hurled the stone at the idol and left the Kaaba. Regardless, it recorded that prior to converting to Islam, Abu Bakr practised as a "hanif" and never worshipped idols.
On his return from a business trip in Yemen, friends informed him that in his absence, Muhammad had declared himself the Messenger of God and proclaimed a new religion. The historian Al-Tabari, in his "Ta'rikh al-Tabari", quotes from Muhammad ibn Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, who said:
Other Sunni and all Shi'a Muslims maintain that the second person to publicly accept Muhammed as the Messenger of God was Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first being Muhammad's wife Khadija. Ibn Kathir, in his "Al Bidaya Wal Nihayah", disregards this. He stated that the first woman to embrace Islam was Khadijah. Zayd ibn Harithah was the first freed slave to embrace Islam. Ali ibn Abi Talib was the first child to embrace Islam, for he has not even reached the age of puberty at that time, while Abu Bakr was the first free man to embrace Islam.
His wife Qutaylah bint Abd-al-Uzza did not accept Islam and he divorced her. His other wife, Um Ruman, became a Muslim. All his children accepted Islam except Abdul-Rahman, from whom Abu Bakr disassociated himself. His conversion also brought many people to Islam. He persuaded his intimate friends to convert, and presented Islam to other friends in such a way that many of them also accepted the faith. Those who converted to Islam at the insistence of Abu Bakr were:
Abu Bakr's acceptance proved to be a milestone in Muhammad's mission. Slavery was common in Mecca, and many slaves accepted Islam. When an ordinary free man accepted Islam, despite opposition, he would enjoy the protection of his tribe. For slaves, however, there was no such protection and they commonly experienced persecution. Abu Bakr felt compassion for slaves, so he purchased eight (four men and four women) and then freed them, paying 40,000 dinar for their freedom.
The men were
The women were:
Most of the slaves liberated by Abu Bakr were either women or old and frail men. When the father of Abu Bakr asked him why he didn't liberate strong and young slaves, who could be a source of strength for him, Abu Bakr replied that he was freeing the slaves for the sake of God, and not for his own sake.
For three years after the birth of Islam, Muslims kept their faith secret. In 613, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was commanded by God to call people to Islam openly. The first public address inviting people to offer allegiance to Muhammad was delivered by Abu Bakr. In a fit of fury, the young men of the Quraysh tribe rushed at Abu Bakr and beat him till he lost consciousness. Following this incident, Abu Bakr's mother converted to Islam. Abu Bakr was persecuted many times by the Quraysh. Though Abu Bakr's beliefs would have been defended by his own clan, it would not be so for the entire Quraysh tribe.
In 617, the Quraysh enforced a boycott against the Banu Hashim. Muhammad along with his supporters from Banu Hashim, were cut off in a pass away from Mecca. All social relations with the Banu Hashim were cut off and their state was that of imprisonment. Before it many Muslims migrated to Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). Abu Bakr, feeling distressed, set out for Yemen and then to Abyssinia from there. He met a friend of his named Ad-Dughna (chief of the Qarah tribe) outside Mecca, who invited Abu Bakr to seek his protection against the Quraysh. Abu Bakr went back to Mecca, it was a relief for him, but soon due to the pressure of Quraysh, Ad-Dughna was forced to renounce his protection. Once again the Quraysh were free to persecute Abu Bakr.
In 620, Muhammad's uncle and protector, Abu Talib ibn Abd al-Muttalib, and Muhammad's wife Khadija died. Abu Bakr's daughter Aisha was engaged to Muhammad, however it was decided that the actual marriage ceremony would be held later. In 620 Abu Bakr was the first person to testify to Muhammad's Isra and Mi'raj (Night Journey).
In 622, on the invitation of the Muslims of Medina, Muhammad ordered Muslims to migrate to Medina. The migration began in batches. Ali was the last to remain in Mecca, entrusted with responsibility for settling any loans the Muslims had taken out, and famously slept in the bed of Muhammad when the Quraysh, led by Ikrima, attempted to murder Muhammad as he slept. Meanwhile, Abu Bakr accompanied Muhammad to Medina. Due to the danger posed by the Quraysh, they did not take the road, but moved in the opposite direction, taking refuge in a cave in Jabal Thawr, some five miles south of Mecca. `Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr, the son of Abu Bakr, would listen to the plans and discussions of the Quraysh, and at night he would carry the news to the fugitives in the cave. Asma bint Abi Bakr, the daughter of Abu Bakr, brought them meals every day. Aamir, a servant of Abu Bakr, would bring a flock of goats to the mouth of the cave every night, where they were milked. The Quraysh sent search parties in all directions. One party came close to the entrance to the cave, but was unable to see them. Due to this, Qur'an verse was revealed. Aisha, Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri and Abdullah ibn Abbas in interpreting this verse said that Abu Bakr was the companion who stayed with Muhammad in the cave.
After staying at the cave for three days and three nights, Abu Bakr and Muhammad proceed to Medina, staying for some time at Quba, a suburb of Medina.
In Medina, Muhammad decided to construct a mosque. A piece of land was chosen and the price of the land was paid for by Abu Bakr. The Muslims, including Abu Bakr, constructed a mosque named Al-Masjid al-Nabawi at the site. Abu Bakr was paired with Khaarij ah bin Zaid Ansari (who was from Medina) as a brother in faith. Abu Bakr's relationship with Khaarijah was most cordial, which was further strengthened when Abu Bakr married Habiba, a daughter of Khaarijah. Khaarijah bin Zaid Ansari lived at Sunh, a suburb of Medina, and Abu Bakr also settled there. After Abu Bakr's family arrived in Medina, he bought another house near Muhammad's.
While the climate of Mecca was dry, the climate of Medina was damp and because of this, most of the migrants fell sick on arrival. Abu Bakr contracted a fever for several days, during which time he was attended to by Khaarijah and his family. In Mecca, Abu Bakr was a wholesale trader in cloth and he started the same business in Medina. He opened his new store at Sunh, and from there cloth was supplied to the market at Medina. Soon his business flourished. Early in 623, Abu Bakr's daughter Aisha, who was already engaged to Muhammad, was handed over to Muhammad in a simple marriage ceremony, further strengthening relations between Abu Bakr and Muhammad.
In 624, Abu Bakr was involved in the first battle between the Muslims and the Quraysh of Mecca, known as the Battle of Badr, but did not fight, instead acting as one of the guards of Muhammad's tent. In relation to this, Ali allegedly later asked his associates as to who they thought was the bravest among men. Everyone stated that Ali was the bravest of all men. Ali then replied:
In Sunni accounts, during one such attack, two discs from Abu Bakr's shield penetrated into Muhammad's cheeks. Abu Bakr went forward with the intention of extracting these discs but Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah requested he leave the matter to him, losing his two incisors during the process. In these stories subsequently Abu Bakr, along with other companions, led Muhammad to a place of safety.
In 625, he participated in the Battle of Uhud, in which the majority of the Muslims were routed and he himself was wounded. Before the battle had begun, his son Abdul-Rahman, at that time still non-Muslim and fighting on the side of the Quraysh, came forward and threw down a challenge for a duel. Abu Bakr accepted the challenge but was stopped by Muhammad. Later, Abdul-Rahman approached his father and said to him "You were exposed to me as a target, but I turned away from you and did not kill you." To this Abu Bakr replied "However, if you had been exposed to me as a target I would not have turned away from you."
In the second phase of the battle, Khalid ibn al-Walid’s cavalry attacked the Muslims from behind, changing a Muslim victory to defeat. Many fled from the battlefield, including Abu Bakr. However, according to his own account, he was "the first to return".
In 627 he participated in the Battle of the Trench and also in the Invasion of Banu Qurayza. In the Battle of the Trench, Muhammad divided the ditch into a number of sectors and a contingent was posted to guard each sector. One of these contingents was under the command of Abu Bakr. The enemy made frequent assaults in an attempt to cross the ditch, all of which were repulsed. To commemorate this event a mosque, later known as 'Masjid-i-Siddiq', was constructed at the site where Abu Bakr had repulsed the charges of the enemy.
Abu Bakr took part in the Battle of Khaybar. Khaybar had eight fortresses, the strongest and most well-guarded of which was called Al-Qamus. Muhammad sent Abu Bakr with a group of warriors to attempt to take it, but they were unable to do so. Muhammad also sent Umar with a group of warriors, but Umar could not conquer Al-Qamus either. Some other Muslims also attempted to capture the fort, but they were unsuccessful as well. Finally, Muhammad sent Ali, who defeated the enemy leader, Marhab.
In 629 Muhammad sent 'Amr ibn al-'As to Zaat-ul-Sallasal, followed by Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah in response to a call for reinforcements. Abu Bakr and Umar commanded an army under al-Jarrah, and they attacked and defeated the enemy.
In 630, when the Muslims conquered Mecca, Abu Bakr was part of the army. Before the conquest of Mecca his father Uthman Abu Quhafa converted to Islam.
In 630, the Muslim army was ambushed by archers from the local tribes as it passed through the valley of Hunayn, some eleven miles northeast of Mecca. Taken unaware, the advance guard of the Muslim army fled in panic. There was considerable confusion, and the camels, horses and men ran into one another in an attempt to seek cover. Muhammad, however, stood firm. Only nine companions remained around him, including Abu Bakr. Under Muhammad's instruction, Abbas shouted at the top of his voice, "O Muslims, come to the Prophet of Allah". The call was heard by the Muslim soldiers and they gathered beside Muhammad. When the Muslims had gathered in sufficient number, Muhammad ordered a charge against the enemy. In the hand-to-hand fight that followed the tribes were routed and they fled to Autas.
Muhammad posted a contingent to guard the Hunayn pass and led the main army to Autas. In the confrontation at Autas the tribes could not withstand the Muslim onslaught. Believing continued resistance useless, the tribes broke camp and retired to Ta'if.
Abu Bakr was commissioned by Muhammad to lead the attack against Ta'if. The tribes shut themselves in the fort and refused to come out in the open. The Muslims employed catapults, but without tangible result. The Muslims attempted to use a testudo formation, in which a group of soldiers shielded by a cover of cowhide advanced to set fire to the gate. However, the enemy threw red hot scraps of iron on the testudo, rendering it ineffective.
The siege dragged on for two weeks, and still there was no sign of weakness in the fort. Muhammad held a council of war. Abu Bakr advised that the siege might be raised and that God make arrangements for the fall of the fort. The advice was accepted, and in February 630, the siege of Ta'if was raised and the Muslim army returned to Mecca. A few days later Malik bin Auf, the commander, came to Mecca and became a Muslim.
In 631 AD, Muhammad sent from Medina a delegation of three hundred Muslims to perform the Hajj according to the new Islamic way and appointed Abu Bakr as the leader of the delegation. The day after Abu Bakr and his party had left for the Hajj, Muhammad received a new revelation: Surah Tawbah, the ninth chapter of the Qur'an. It is related that when this revelation came, someone suggested to Muhammad that he should send news of it to Abu Bakr. Muhammad said that only a man of his house could proclaim the revelation.
Muhammad summoned Ali, and asked him to proclaim a portion of Surah Tawbah to the people on the day of sacrifice when they assembled at Mina. Ali went forth on Muhammad's slit-eared camel, and overtook Abu Bakr. When Ali joined the party, Abu Bakr wanted to know whether he had come to give orders or to convey them. Ali said that he had not come to replace Abu Bakr as Amir-ul-Hajj, and that his only mission was to convey a special message to the people on behalf of Muhammad.
At Mecca, Abu Bakr presided at the Hajj ceremony, and Ali read the proclamation on behalf of Muhammad. The main points of the proclamation were:
From the day this proclamation was made a new era dawned, and Islam alone was to be supreme in Arabia.
Abu Bakr led one military expedition, the Expedition of Abu Bakr As-Siddiq, which took place in Nejd, in July 628 (third month 7AH in the Islamic calendar). Abu Bakr led a large company in Nejd on the order of Muhammad. Many were killed and taken prisoner. The Sunni Hadith collection "Sunan Abu Dawud" mentions the event.
In 632, during the final weeks of his life, Muhammad ordered an expedition into Syria to avenge the defeat of the Muslims in the Battle of Mu'tah some years previously. Leading the campaign was Usama ibn Zayd, whose father, Muhammad's erstwhile adopted son Zayd ibn Harithah, had been killed in the earlier conflict. No more than twenty years old, inexperienced and untested, Usama's appointment was controversial, becoming especially problematic when veterans such as Abu Bakr, Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah and Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas were placed under his command. Nevertheless, the expedition was dispatched, though soon after setting off, news was received of Muhammad's death, forcing the army to return to Medina. The campaign was not reengaged until after Abu Bakr's ascension to the caliphate, at which point he chose to reaffirm Usama's command, which ultimately led to its success.
There are a number of traditions regarding Muhammad's final days which have been used to reinforce the idea of the great friendship and trust which is said to have existed between him and Abu Bakr. In one such episode, as Muhammad was nearing death, he found himself unable to lead prayers as he usually would. He instructed Abu Bakr to take his place, ignoring concerns from Aisha that her father was too emotionally delicate for the role. Abu Bakr subsequently took up the position, and when Muhammad entered the prayer hall one morning during Fajr prayers, Abu Bakr attempted to step back to let him to take up his normal place and lead. Muhammad however, allowed him to continue. In a related incident, around this time, Muhammad ascended the pulpit and addressed the congregation, saying "God has given his servant the choice between this world and that which is with God and he has chosen the latter." Abu Bakr, understanding this to mean that Muhammad did not have long to live, responded "Nay, we and our children will be your ransom." Muhammad consoled his friend and ordered that all the doors leading to the mosque be closed aside from that which led from Abu Bakr's house, "for I know no one who is a better friend to me than he."
Upon Muhammad's death, the Muslim community was unprepared for the loss of its leader and many experienced a profound shock. Umar was particularly effected, instead declaring that Muhammad had gone to consult with God and would soon return, threatening anyone who would say that Muhammad was dead. Abu Bakr, having returned to Medina, calmed Umar by showing him Muhammad's body, convincing him of his death. He then addressed those who had gathered at the mosque, saying "If anyone worships Muhammad, Muhammad is dead. If anyone worships God, God is alive, immortal", thus putting an end to any idolising impulse in the population. He then concluded with a verse from the Quran: "Muhammad is no more than an apostle, and many apostles have passed away before him."
In the immediate aftermath of the death of Muhammad, a gathering of the Ansar (natives of Medina) took place in the "Saqifah" (courtyard) of the Banu Sa'ida clan. The general belief at the time was that the purpose of the meeting was for the Ansar to decide on a new leader of the Muslim community among themselves, with the intentional exclusion of the Muhajirun (migrants from Mecca), though this has later become the subject of debate.
Nevertheless, Abu Bakr and Umar, upon learning of the meeting, became concerned of a potential coup and hastened to the gathering. Upon arriving, Abu Bakr addressed the assembled men with a warning that an attempt to elect a leader outside of Muhammad's own tribe, the Quraysh, would likely result in dissension, as only they can command the necessary respect among the community. He then took Umar and another companion, Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah, by the hand and offered them to the Ansar as potential choices. Habab ibn Mundhir, a veteran from the Battle of Badr, countered with his own suggestion that the Quraysh and the Ansar choose a leader each from among themselves, who would then rule jointly. The group grew heated upon hearing this proposal and began to argue amongst themselves. The orientalist William Muir gives the following observation of the situation:
Umar hastily took Abu Bakr's hand and swore his own allegiance to the latter, an example followed by the gathered men. The meeting broke up when a violent scuffle erupted between Umar and the chief of the Banu Sa'ida, Sa'd ibn Ubadah. This may indicate that the choice of Abu Bakr may not have been unanimous, with emotions running high as a result of the disagreement.
Abu Bakr was near-universally accepted as head of the Muslim community (under the title of Caliph) as a result of Saqifah, though he did face contention because of the rushed nature of the event. Several companions, most prominent among them being Ali ibn Abi Talib, initially refused to acknowledge his authority. Among Shi'ites, it is also argued that Ali had previously been appointed as Muhammad's heir, with the election being seen as in contravention to the latter's wishes. Abu Bakr later sent Umar to confront Ali, resulting in an altercation which may have involved violence. However, after six months the group made peace with Abu Bakr and Ali offered him his allegiance.
After assuming the office of Caliph, Abu Bakr's first address was as follows:
Abu Bakr's reign lasted for 27 months, during which he crushed the rebellion of the Arab tribes throughout the Arabian Peninsula in the successful Ridda Wars. In the last months of his rule, he sent Khalid ibn al-Walid on conquests against the Sassanid Empire in Mesopotamia and against the Byzantine Empire in Syria. This would set in motion a historical trajectory (continued later on by Umar and Uthman ibn Affan) that in just a few short decades would lead to one of the largest empires in history. He had little time to pay attention to the administration of state, though state affairs remained stable during his Caliphate. On the advice of Umar and Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah, he agreed to draw a salary from the state treasury and discontinue his cloth trade.
Troubles emerged soon after Abu Bakr's succession, with several Arab tribes launching revolts, threatening the unity and stability of the new community and state. These insurgencies and the caliphate's responses to them are collectively referred to as the Ridda wars ("Wars of Apostasy").
The opposition movements came in two forms. One type challenged the political power of the nascent caliphate as well as the religious authority of Islam with the acclamation of rival ideologies, headed by political leaders who claimed the mantle of prophethood in the manner that Muhammad had done. These rebellions include:
These leaders are all denounced in Islamic histories as "false prophets".
The second form of opposition movement was more strictly political in character. Some of the revolts of this type took the form of tax rebellions in Najd among tribes such as the Banu Fazara and Banu Tamim. Other dissenters, while initially allied to the Muslims, used Muhammad's death as an opportunity to attempt to restrict the growth of the new Islamic state. They include some of the Rabīʿa in Bahrayn, the Azd in Oman, as well as among the Kindah and Khawlan in Yemen.
Abu Bakr, likely understanding that maintaining firm control over the disparate tribes of Arabia was crucial to ensuring the survival of the state, suppressed the insurrections with military force. He dispatched Khalid ibn Walid and a body of troops to subdue the uprisings in Najd as well as that of Musaylimah, who posed the most serious threat. Concurrent to this, Shurahbil ibn Hasana and Al-Ala'a Al-Hadrami were sent to Bahrayn, while Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahl, Hudhayfah al-Bariqi and Arfaja al-Bariqi were instructed to conquer Oman. Finally, Al-Muhajir ibn Abi Umayya and Khalid ibn Asid were sent to Yemen to aid the local governor in re-establishing control. Abu Bakr also made use of diplomatic means in addition to military measures. Like Muhammad before him, he utilised marriage alliances and financial incentives to bind former enemies to the caliphate. For instance, a member of the Banu Hanifa who had sided with the Muslims was rewarded with the granting of a land estate. Similarly, a Kindah rebel named Al-Ash'ath ibn Qays, after repenting and re-joining Islam, was later given land in Medina as well as the hand of Abu Bakr's sister Umm Farwa in marriage.
At their heart, the Ridda movements were challenges to the political and religious supremacy of the Islamic state. Through his success in suppressing the insurrections, Abu Bakr had in effect continued the political consolidation which had begun under Muhammad's leadership with relatively little interruption. By wars' end, he had established an Islamic hegemony over the entirety of the Arabian peninsula.
With Arabia having united under a single centralised state with a formidable military, the region could now be viewed as a potential threat to the neighbouring Byzantine and Sasanian empires. It may be that Abu Bakr, reasoning that it was inevitable that one of these powers would launch a pre-emptive strike against the youthful caliphate, decided that it was better to deliver the first blow himself. Regardless of the caliph's motivations, in 633, small forces were dispatched into Iraq and Palestine, capturing several towns. Though the Byzantines and Sassanians were certain to retaliate, Abu Bakr had reason to be confident. The two empires were militarily exhausted after centuries of war against each other, making it likely that any forces sent to Arabia would be diminished and weakened.
A more pressing advantage though was the effectiveness of the Muslim fighters as well as their zeal, the latter of which was partially based on their certainty of the righteousness of their cause. Additionally, the general belief among the Muslims was that the community must be defended at all costs. Historian Theodor Nöldeke gives the somewhat controversial opinion that this religious fervour was intentionally used to maintain the enthusiasm and momentum of the "ummah":
Though Abu Bakr had started these initial conflicts which eventually resulted in the Islamic conquests of Persia and the Levant, he did not live to see any real fighting, instead leaving the task to his successors.
Abu Bakr was instrumental in preserving the Quran in written form. It is said that after the hard-won victory over Musaylimah in the Battle of Yamama in 632, Umar saw that some five hundred of the Muslims who had memorised the Quran had been killed. Fearing that it may become lost or corrupted, Umar requested that Abu Bakr authorise the compilation and preservation of the scriptures in written format. The caliph was initially hesitant, being quoted as saying "how can we do that which the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless and keep him, did not himself do?" He eventually relented however, and appointed Zayd ibn Thabit, who had previously served as Muhammad's secretary, for the task of gathering the scattered verses. The fragments were recovered from every quarter, including from the ribs of palm branches, scraps of leather, stone tablets and "from the hearts of men". The collected work was transcribed onto sheets and verified through comparison with Quran memorisers. The finished codex, termed the "Mus'haf", was presented to Abu Bakr, who prior to his death, bequeathed it to his successor Umar. Upon Umar's own death, the "Mus'haf" was left to his daughter Hafsa, who had been one of the wives of Muhammad. It was this volume, borrowed from Hafsa, which formed the basis of Uthman's legendary prototype, which became the definitive text of the Quran. All later editions are derived from this original.
On 23 August 634, Abu Bakr fell sick and did not recover. He developed a high fever and was confined to bed. His illness was prolonged, and when his condition worsened, he felt that his end was near. Realising this, he sent for Ali and requested him to perform his ghusl since Ali had also done it for Muhammad.
Abu Bakr felt that he should nominate his successor so that the issue should not be a cause of dissension among the Muslims after his death, though there was already controversy over Ali not having been appointed. He appointed Umar for this role after discussing the matter with some companions. Some of them favoured the nomination and others disliked it, due to the tough nature of Umar.
Abu Bakr thus dictated his last testament to Uthman ibn Affan as follows:
Umar led the funeral prayer for him and he was buried beside the grave of Muhammad.
The historian Al-Tabari, in regards to Abu Bakr's appearance, records the following interaction between Aisha and her paternal nephew, Abdullah ibn Abdul-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr:
When she was in her howdah and saw a man from among the Arabs passing by, she said, "I have not seen a man more like Abu Bakr than this one." We said to her, "Describe Abu Bakr." She said, "A slight, white man, thin-bearded and bowed. His waist wrapper would not hold but would fall down around his loins. He had a lean face, sunken eyes, a bulging forehead, and trembling knuckles."
Referencing another source, Al-Tabari further describes him as being "white mixed with yellowness, of good build, slight,
bowed, thin, tall like a male palm tree, hook-nosed, lean-faced, sunken-eyed, thin-shanked, and strong-thighed. He used to dye himself with henna and black dye."
Though the period of his caliphate covers only two years, two months and fifteen days, it included successful invasions of the two most powerful empires of the time: the Sassanid Empire and Byzantine Empire.
Abu Bakr had the distinction of being the first Caliph in the history of Islam and also the first Caliph to nominate a successor. He was the only Caliph in the history of Islam who refunded to the state treasury at the time of his death the entire amount of the allowance that he had drawn during the period of his caliphate.
He has the distinction of purchasing the land for Al-Masjid al-Nabawi.
Sunni Muslims believe that Abu Bakr is the best man of all the human beings after the prophets. They also consider Abu Bakr as one of The Ten Promised Paradise ("al-‘Ashara al-Mubashshara") whom Muhammad had testified were destined for Paradise. He is regarded as the "Successor of Allah's Messenger" ("Khalifa Rasulullah"), and first of the Rightly Guided Caliphs – i.e. Rashidun—and as the rightful successor to Muhammad. Abu Bakr had always been the closest friend and confidant of Muhammad throughout his life, being beside Muhammad at every major event. It was Abu Bakr's wisdom that Muhammad always honored. Abu Bakr is regarded among the best of Muhammad's followers; as Umar ibn Khattab stated, "If the faith of Abu Bakr was weighed against the faith of the people of the earth, the faith of Abu Bakr would outweigh the others."
The Twelver Shia (as the main branch of Shia Islam, with 85% of all Shias) believe that Ali ibn Abi Talib was supposed to assume the Caliphate, and that he had been publicly and unambiguously appointed by Muhammad as his successor at Ghadir Khumm. It is also believed that Abu Bakr and Umar conspired to take over power in the Muslim nation after Muhammad's death, in a coup d'état against Ali. The Twelver Shi'a do not believe that Abu Bakr's being with Muhammad in the cave when the two fled Mecca was a meritorious act, and, indeed, find significant criticism of Abu Bakr in the Qur'anic verse of the cave.
Most Twelver Shia criticize Abu Bakr because, after Muhammad's death, Abu Bakr refused to grant Muhammad's daughter, Fatimah, the lands of the village of Fadak which she claimed her father had given to her as a gift before his death. He refused to accept the testimony of her witnesses, so she claimed the land would still belong to her as inheritance from her deceased father. However, Abu Bakr replied by saying that Muhammad had told him that the prophets of God do not leave as inheritance any worldly possessions and on this basis he refused to give her the lands of Fadak. However, as Sayed Ali Asgher Razwy notes in his book "A Restatement of the History of Islam & Muslims", Muhammad inherited a maid servant, five camels, and ten sheep. This proves that prophets can receive inheritance, and can pass on inheritance to others as well. In addition, Shias claim that Muhammad had given Fadak to Fatimah during his lifetime, and Fadak was therefore a gift to Fatimah, not inheritance. This view has also been supported some Sunnis, such as the Abbasid ruler Al-Ma'mun.
The Twelver Shia accuse him of participating in the burning of the house of Ali and Fatima.
The Twelver Shia believe that Abu Bakr sent Khalid ibn Walid to crush those who were in favour of Ali's caliphate ("see Ridda Wars"). The Twelver Shia strongly refute the idea that Abu Bakr or Umar were instrumental in the collection or preservation of the "Qur'an", claiming that they should have accepted the copy of the book in the possession of Ali.
After the death of Abu Bakr, Ali raised Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr. The Twelver Shia view Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr as one of the companions of Ali. When Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr was killed by the Ummayads, Aisha, the wife of Muhammad and also a renowned scholar of her time, raised and taught her nephew Qasim ibn Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr. Qasim ibn Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr's mother was from Ali's family and Qasim's daughter Farwah bint al-Qasim was married to Muhammad al-Baqir and was the mother of Jafar al-Sadiq. Therefore, Qasim ibn Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr was the grandson of Abu Bakr and the grandfather of Jafar al-Sadiq. Zaydis, the largest group amongst the Shia before the Safavid Dynasty and currently the second-largest group (although its population is only about 5% of all Shia Muslims), believe that on the last hour of Zayd ibn Ali (the uncle of Jafar al-Sadiq), he was betrayed by the people in Kufa who said to him: "May God have mercy on you! What do you have to say on the matter of Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab?" Zayd ibn Ali said, "I have not heard anyone in my family renouncing them both nor saying anything but good about them...when they were entrusted with government they behaved justly with the people and acted according to the Qur'an and the Sunnah".
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Ambrose Traversari
Ambrogio Traversari, also referred to as Ambrose of Camaldoli (138620 October 1439), was an Italian monk and theologian who was a prime supporter of the papal cause in the 15th century. He is honored as a saint by the Camaldolese Order.
Traversari was born near Forlì, in the village of Portico di Romagna in 1386. At the age of 14 he entered the Camaldolese Order in the Monastery of St. Mary of the Angels in Florence, and rapidly became a leading theologian and Hellenist. In his study of Greek literature his master was Emmanuel Chrysoloras. He worked primarily as a scholar until he became prior general of the Order in 1431.
Ambrose emerged as a leading advocate of papal primacy. This attitude he showed clearly when he attended the Council of Basel as legate of Pope Eugene IV and defended the primacy of the pope, adjuring the council not to "rend asunder Christ's seamless robe". He was next sent by the pope to the Emperor Sigismund to ask his aid in the pope's efforts to end this council, which for five years had been encroaching on papal prerogatives. The pope transferred the council from Basel to Ferrara on 18 September 1437.
So strong was Ambrose's hostility to some of the delegates that he described Basel as a western Babylon. He likewise supported the pope at Ferrara and Florence, and worked hard in the attempt to reconcile the Eastern and Western Churches. But in this council, and later, in that of Florence, Ambrose, by his efforts and charity toward some poor Greek bishops, greatly helped to bring about a union of the two Churches, the decree for which, 6 July 1439, he was called on to draw up.
He died soon after. His feastday is celebrated by the Camaldolese Order on 20 November.
According to the author of his biography in the eleventh edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica": "Ambrose is interesting as typical of the new humanism which was growing up within the church. Thus while among his own colleagues he seemed merely a hypocritical and arrogant priest, in his relations with his brother humanists, such as Cosimo de' Medici, he appeared as the student of classical antiquities and especially of Greek theological authors".
His works include a treatise on the Holy Eucharist, one on the Procession of the Holy Spirit, many lives of saints, as well as a history of his term as prior general of the Camaldolese. He also translated from Greek into Latin a life of John Chrysostom (Venice, 1533); the "Spiritual Wisdom" of John Moschus; "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" of John Climacus (Venice, 1531), P.G., LXXXVIII. Between 1424 and 1433 he worked on the translation of the "Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laërtius, which came to be widely circulated in manuscript form. He also translated four books against the errors of the Greeks, by Manuel Kalekas, Patriarch of Constantinople, a Dominican friar (Ingolstadt, 1608), P.G., CLII, col. 13-661, a work known only through Ambrose's translation.
He also translated many homilies of John Chrysostom; the writings of Dionysius Areopagita (1436); Basil of Caesarea's treatise on virginity; thirty-nine discourses of Ephrem the Syrian, and many other works of the Fathers and writers of the Greek Church. Dom Mabillon's "Letters and Orations of St. Ambrose of Camaldoli" was published in Florence in 1759.
Selected works:
A number of his manuscripts remain in the library of Saint Mark in Venice.
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Ambrosians
Ambrosians are members of one of the religious brotherhoods which at various times since the 14th century have sprung up in and around Milan and also a 16th-century sect of Anabaptist Ambrosians.
Only the oldest of the Catholic Ambrosians, the Fratres S. Ambrosii ad Nemus, had anything more than a very local significance. This order is known from a bull of Pope Gregory XI addressed to the monks of the church of St Ambrose outside Milan.
Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, certainly did not found religious orders, though he took an interest in the monastic life and watched over its beginnings in his diocese, providing for the needs of a monastery outside the walls of Milan, as Saint Augustine recounts in his "Confessions". Ambrose also made successful efforts to improve the moral life of women in the Milan of his time by promoting the permanent institution of Virgins, as also of widows. His exhortations and other interventions have survived in various writings: "De virginibus", "De viduis", "De virginitate", "De institutione virginis", "De exhortatione virginitatis", and "De lapsu virginis consecratae". Ambrose was the only Father of the Church to leave behind so many writings on the subject and his attentions naturally enough led to the formation of communities which later became formal monasteries of women.
It is against this background that two religious orders or congregations—one of men and one of women, when founded in the Milan area during the 13th and 15th centuries—took Saint Ambrose as their patron and hence adopted his name.
The first of these groups was formed in a wood outside Milan by three noble Milanese, Alexander Grivelli, Antonio Petrasancta, and Albert Besuzzi, who were joined by others, including some priests. In 1375 Pope Gregory XI gave them the Rule of St Augustine, with set of constitutions. As a canonically recognized order they took the name "Fratres Sancti Ambrosii ad Nemus" and adopted a habit consisting of a brown tunic, scapular, and hood. The brethren elected a superior with the title of prior who was then instituted by the Archbishop of Milan. The priests of the congregation undertook preaching and other tasks of the ministry but were not allowed to accept charge parishes. In the liturgy they followed the Ambrosian Rite. Various monasteries were founded on these lines, but without any formal bond between them. In 1441 Pope Eugene IV merged them into one congregation called "Congregatio Sancti Ambrosii ad Nemus", made the original house the main seat, and laid down a system of government whereby a general chapter met every three years, elected the priors who stayed in office till the next chapter. There was a rector, or superior general, who was assisted by two "visitors".
Saint Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, successfully reformed their discipline, grown lax, in 1579. In 1589 Pope Sixtus V united to the Congregation of St Ambrose the monasteries of a group known as the "Brothers of the Apostles of the Poor Life" (or "Apostolini" or "Brothers of St. Barnabas"), whose houses were in the province of Genoa and in the March of Ancona. This was an order that had been founded by Giovanni Scarpa at the end of the 15th century. The union was confirmed by Pope Paul V in 1606, at which time the congregation added the name of St. Barnabas to its title, adopted new constitutions, divided its houses into four provinces, two of them, St Clement's and St Pancras's, being in Rome. Published works have survived from the pen of Ascanio Tasca and Michele Mulozzani, each of whom was superior-general, and of Zaccaria Visconti, Francesco-Maria Guazzi and Paolo Fabulotti. Although various Ambrosians were given the title of Blessed in recognition of their holiness: Antonio Gonzaga of Mantua, Filippo of Fermo, and Gerardo of Monza, the order was eventually dissolved by Pope Innocent X in 1650.
The Nuns of St Ambrose (Ambrosian Sisters) wore a habit of the same colour as the Brothers of St Ambrose, conformed to their constitutions, and followed the Ambrosian Rite, but were independent in government. Pope Sixtus IV gave the nuns canonical status in 1474. Their one monastery was on the top of Monte Varese, near Lago Maggiore, on the spot where their foundress, the Blessed Catarina Morigia (or Catherine of Palanza), had first led a solitary life. Other early nuns were the Blessed Juliana of Puriselli, Benedetta Bimia, and Lucia Alciata. The nuns were esteemed by St Charles Borromeo.
Another group of cloistered "Nuns of St Ambrose", also called the Annunciatae (Italian: "Annunziate") of Lombardy or "Sisters of St Marcellina", were founded in 1408 by three young women of Pavia, Dorothea Morosini, Eleonora Contarini, and Veronica Duodi. Their houses, scattered throughout Lombardy and Venetia, were united into a congregation by St Pius V, under the Rule of St Augustine with a mother-house, residence of the prioress general, at Pavia. One of the nuns in this group was Saint Catharine Fieschi Adorno, who died on September 14, 1510.
In some sense also "Ambrosians" are the members of a diocesan religious society founded by St Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan. All priests or destined to become priests, they took a simple vow of obedience to their bishop. The model for this was a society that already existed at Brescia, under the name of "Priests of Peace". In August 1578 the new society was inaugurated, being entrusted with the church of the Holy Sepulchre and given the name of "Oblates of St. Ambrose." They later received the approbation of Gregory XIII. St Charles died in 1584. These Oblates were dispersed by Napoleon I in 1810, while another group called the Oblates of Our Lady of Rho escaped this fate. In 1848 they were reorganized and given the name of "Oblates of St. Charles" and reassigned the house of the Holy Sepulchre. In the course of the 19th century similar groups were founded in a number of countries, including the "Oblates of St Charles", established in London by Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1717 |
Ambrosius Aurelianus
Ambrosius Aurelianus (; Anglicised as Ambrose Aurelian and called Aurelius Ambrosius in the "Historia Regum Britanniae" and elsewhere) was a war leader of the Romano-British who won an important battle against the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century, according to Gildas. He also appeared independently in the legends of the Britons, beginning with the 9th-century "Historia Brittonum". Eventually he was transformed into the uncle of King Arthur, the brother of Arthur's father Uther Pendragon, as a ruler who precedes and predeceases them both. He also appears as a young prophet who meets the tyrant Vortigern; in this guise, he was later transformed into the wizard Merlin.
Ambrosius Aurelianus is one of the few people that Gildas identifies by name in his sermon "De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae", and the only one named from the 5th century. "De Excidio" is considered the oldest extant British document about the so-called Arthurian period of Sub-Roman Britain. Following the destructive assault of the Saxons, the survivors gather together under the leadership of Ambrosius, who is described as:
Some basic information on Ambrosius can be deduced from the brief passage: Ambrosius was possibly of high birth and very likely a Christian (Gildas says that he won his battles "with God's help"). Ambrosius' parents were slain by the Saxons and he was among the few survivors of their initial invasion.
According to Gildas, Ambrosius organised the survivors into an armed force and achieved the first military victory over the Saxon invaders. However, this victory was not decisive: "Sometimes the Saxons and sometimes the citizens [meaning the Romano-British inhabitants] were victorious." Due to Gildas' description of him, Ambrosius is one of the figures called the Last of the Romans.
Two points in Gildas' description have attracted much scholarly commentary. The first is what Gildas meant by saying Ambrosius' family "had worn the purple". Roman emperors and male Patricians wore clothes with a purple band to denote their class so the reference to purple may be to an aristocratic heritage. Roman military tribunes ("tribuni militum"), senior officers in Roman legions, wore a similar purple band so the reference may be to a family background of military leadership. The tradition was old, as the togas and pallia of already ancient senators and tribunes were trimmed with the purple band. In the church, "the purple" is a euphemism for blood and therefore "wearing the purple" may be a reference to martyrdom or a bishop's robe. In addition, in the later Roman Empire both Roman consuls and governors of consular rank also wore clothes with a purple fringe. The "Notitia Dignitatum", a Roman catalogue of official posts, lists four or five provincial governors in Roman Britain and two of them were of consular rank. One was the governor of Maxima Caesariensis and the other that of Valentia. The parent who wore the purple may well have been one of these governors, whose names were not recorded.
It has been suggested by historian Alex Woolf that Ambrosius may have been related to the 5th-century Romano-British usurpers Marcus or Gratian – Woolf expresses a preference based on nomenclature for Marcus. Frank D. Reno, an Arthurian scholar, has instead argued that the name "Aurelianus" indicates the possible descent of Ambrosius from the Roman emperor Lucius Domitius Aurelianus (Aurelian, reigned 270–275). Aurelian's military campaigns included the conquest of the Gallic Empire. N. J. Higham suggests that Ambrosius may have been distantly related to imperial families of the late Roman Empire, such as the Theodosian dynasty. Branches of this particular dynasty were known to be active in western Roman provinces like Hispania.
Mike Ashley instead focuses on the name "Ambrosius" And its possible connection to Saint Ambrosius, a fourth-century Bishop of Milan, who also served as consular governor in areas of Roman Italy. The father of the Bishop is sometimes claimed to be a fourth century Praetorian prefect of Gaul named Aurelius Ambrosius, whose areas included Britain, though some modern scholars doubt that Saint Ambrosius was related to this man (instead identifying his father with an official named Uranius mentioned in an extract from the Theodosian Code). Ashley suggests that Ambrosius Aurelianus was related to the two Aurelii Ambrosii. Tim Venning points out that the name "Aurelianus" could be the result of a Roman adoption. When a boy was adopted into a new gens (clan), he received the family names of his new family, plus an additional cognomen indicating his descent from his original gens/family. The additional cognomen often had the form "-anus". When Gaius Octavius from gens Octavia was adopted into the Julii Caesares family, his new name became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. In this case, Ambrosius may have been a member of gens Aurelia who was adopted by another gens/family. His original name Aurelius became Aurelianus.
The second question is the meaning of the word "avita": Gildas could have meant "ancestors", or intended it to mean more specifically "grandfather" – thus indicating Ambrosius lived about a generation before the Battle of Badon. Lack of information prevents sure answers to these questions.
N. J. Higham wrote a book on Gildas and the literary tropes that he used. He has suggested that Gildas may have had considerable motive for drawing attention to Ambrosius. He was not attempting to write a historical biography of the man, according to Higham, but setting him as an example to his contemporaries. It was essential to the philosophy of Gildas that Briton leaders who achieved victory over the barbarians were only able to do so because of divine aid. And only those who had superior Christian virtues were deserving of this aid. Ambrosius Aurelianus was apparently known for at least one such victory over the barbarians. To fit him into his worldview, Gildas was almost required to feature the former warrior as a man of exceptional virtues and obedience to God. He was made to fit Gildas' version of a model leader.
Higham also suggests that the Roman lineage of Ambrosius was highlighted for a reason. Gildas was apparently intentionally connecting him with the legitimate authority and military virtues of the Romans. He was also contrasting him with the subsequent Briton rulers whose reigns lacked in such legitimacy.
Gildas is a primary source for the Battle of Badon, yet he never mentions the names of the combatants. Therefore, we cannot know if Ambrosius Aurelianus or his successors took part in the battle. The names of the Saxon leaders in the battle are also not recorded.
The identities of Ambrosius' descendants are unknown, since Gildas never identifies them by name. It is safe to assume that they were Gildas' contemporaries and known to the author. Higham suggests that they were prominent figures of the time. Their lineage and identities were probably sufficiently familiar to his intended audience that they did not have to be named. The work portrays Ambrosius' descendants as inferior to their ancestor as part of his criticism on rulers of his time, according to Higham. Those criticised were likely aware that the vitriol was intended for them, but probably would not challenge a work offering such a glowing report of their illustrious ancestor.
Mike Ashley suggests that the descendants of Ambrosius could include other people named by Gildas. He favours the inclusion in this category of one Aurelius Caninus ("Aurelius the dog-like"), whom Gildas accuses of parricide, fornication, adultery, and warmongering. His name "Aurelius" suggests Romano-British descent. The insulting nickname "Caninus" was probably invented by Gildas himself, who similarly insults other contemporary rulers. Due to the name used by Gildas, there are theories that this ruler was actually named Conan/Cynan/Kenan. Some identify him with Cynan Garwyn, a 6th-century King of Powys, though it is uncertain if he was a contemporary of Gildas or lived one or two generations following him. Another theory is that this ruler did not reign in Britain but in Brittany. Caninus, in this view, might be Conomor ("Great Dog"). Conomor is considered a likelier contemporary of Gildas. Conomor was likely from Domnonée, an area of Brittany controlled by British immigrants from Dumnonia. He might be remembered in British legend as Mark of Cornwall.
Gildas primarily features the Saxons as barbarian raiders; their invasions involved a slow and difficult process of military conquest. By AD 500, possibly the time described by Gildas, Anglo-Saxons controlled the Isle of Wight, Kent, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and coastal areas of Northumberland and Yorkshire. The rest of the former Roman Britain was still under the control of the local Britons. Gildas also mentions depopulation of cities and this probably reflects historical facts. Londinium, once a major city, was completely abandoned during the 5th century.
Bede follows Gildas' account of Ambrosius in his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People", but in his "Chronica Majora" he dates Ambrosius' victory to the reign of the Emperor Zeno (474–491).
Bede's treatment of the 5th century history of Great Britain is not particularly valuable as a source. Until about the year 418, Bede could choose between several historical sources and often followed the writings of Orosius. Following the end of Orosius' history, Bede apparently lacked other available sources and relied extensively on Gildas. Entries from this period tend to be close paraphrases of Gildas' account with mostly stylistic changes. Bede's account of Ambrosius Aurelianus has been translated as following:
Bede does not mention the descendants of Ambrosius Aurelianus, nor their supposed degeneracy.
The "Historia Brittonum", attributed to Nennius, preserves several snippets of lore about Ambrosius. Despite the traditional attribution, the authorship of the work and the period of its writing are open questions for modern historians. There are several extant manuscript versions of the work, varying in details. The most important ones have been dated to between the 9th and the 11th century. Some modern scholars think it unlikely that the work was composed by a single writer or compiler, suggesting that it may have taken centuries to reach its final form, though this theory is not conclusive.
In Chapter 31, we are told that Vortigern ruled in fear of Ambrosius. This is the first mention of Ambrosius in the work. According to Frank D. Reno, this would indicate that Ambrosius' influence was formidable, since Vortigern considered him more of a threat than northern invaders and attempts to restore Roman rule in Britain. The chapter relates events following the end of Roman rule in Britain and preceding Vortigern's alliance with the Saxons.
The most significant appearance of Ambrosius is the story about Ambrosius, Vortigern, and the two dragons beneath Dinas Emrys, "Fortress of Ambrosius" in Chapters 40–42. In this account, Ambrosius is still an adolescent but has supernatural powers. He intimidates Vortigern and the royal magicians. When it is revealed that Ambrosius is the son of a Roman consul, Vortigern is convinced to cede to the younger man the castle of Dinas Emrys and all the kingdoms in the western part of Britain. Vortigern then retreats to the north, in an area called Gwynessi. This story was later retold with more detail by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his fictionalised "Historia Regum Britanniae", conflating the personage of Ambrosius with the Welsh tradition of Myrddin the visionary, known for oracular utterances that foretold the coming victories of the native Celtic inhabitants of Britain over the Saxons and the Normans. Geoffrey also introduces him into the "Historia" under the name Aurelius Ambrosius as one of three sons of Constantine III, along with Constans II and Uther Pendragon.
In Chapter 48, Ambrosius Aurelianus is described as "king among all the kings of the British nation". The chapter records that Pascent, the son of Vortigern, was granted rule over the regions of Buellt and Gwrtheyrnion by Ambrosius. Finally, in Chapter 66, various events are dated from a Battle of Guoloph (often identified with Wallop, ESE of Amesbury near Salisbury), which is said to have been between Ambrosius and Vitolinus. The author dates this battle as taking place 12 years from the reign of Vortigern.
It is not clear how these various traditions about Ambrosius relate to each other, or whether they come from the same tradition; it is very possible that these references are to different men with the same name. Frank D. Reno points out that the works call all these men "Ambrosius"/"Emrys". The cognomen "Aurelianus" is never used. The "Historia Brittonum" dates the battle of Guoloph to "the twelfth year of Vortigern", by which the year 437 seems to be meant. This is perhaps a generation before the battle that Gildas says was commanded by Ambrosius Aurelianus.
The text never identifies who Ambrosius's father is, just gives his title as a Roman consul. When an adolescent Ambrosius speaks of his father, there is no suggestion that this father is deceased. The boy is not identified as an orphan. The exact age of Ambrosius is not given in his one encounter with Vortigern. Frank D. Reno suggests that he might be as young as 13 years old, barely a teenager.
It is impossible to know to what degree Ambrosius actually wielded political power, and over what area. Ambrosius and Vortigern are shown as being in conflict in the "Historia Brittonum", and some historians have suspected that this preserves a historical core of the existence of two parties in opposition to one another, one headed by Ambrosius and the other by Vortigern. J. N. L. Myres built upon this suspicion and speculated that belief in Pelagianism reflected an actively provincial outlook in Britain and that Vortigern represented the Pelagian party, while Ambrosius led the Catholic one. Subsequent historians accepted Myers' speculation as fact, creating a narrative of events in 5th century Britain with various degrees of elaborate detail. Yet a simpler alternative interpretation of the conflict between these two figures is that the "Historia Brittonum" is preserving traditions hostile to the purported descendants of Vortigern, who at this time were a ruling house in Powys. This interpretation is supported by the negative character of all of the stories retold about Vortigern in the "Historia Brittonum", which include his alleged practice of incest.
The identity is somewhat obscure of Ambrosius' last mentioned enemy Vitalinus. Various manuscripts of the "Historia" and translations render his name "Guitolin", "Guitolini", "Guitholini", and "Vitalinus". He is mentioned in chapter 49 as one of four sons of Gloiu and co-founder of the city of Gloucester. No other background information is given. There are theories that Gloiu is also the father of Vortigern, but the genealogy is obscure and no supporting primary text can be found. There have been further attempts to identify Vitalinus with a pro-Vortigern or anti-Roman faction in Britain, opposed to the rise of the Romano-British Ambrosius. However, this is rendered problematic since Vitalinus seems to also have a Romano-British name. The traditional view of pro-Roman and pro-Briton factions active in this period might oversimplify a more complex situation.
Ambrosius appears briefly in the "Gesta Regum Anglorum" ("Deeds of the Kings of the English") by William of Malmesbury. Despite its name, the work attempted to reconstruct British history in general by drawing together the varying accounts of Gildas, Bede, Nennius, and various chroniclers. The work features Ambrosius as the apparent employer of Arthur. The relative passage has been translated as following:
William swiftly shifts attention from Ambrosius to Arthur, and proceeds to narrate Arthur's supposed victory in the Battle of Badon. The narrative is probably the first to connect Ambrosius and Arthur. William had to reconcile the accounts of Gildas and Bede who implied that Ambrosius was connected to the battle, and that of Nennius which clearly stated that it was Arthur who was connected to the battle. He solved the apparent discrepancy by connecting both of them to it. Ambrosius as the king of the Britons and Arthur as his most prominent general and true victor of the battle.
Ambrosius Aurelianus appears in later pseudo-chronicle tradition beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britanniae" with the slightly garbled name "Aurelius Ambrosius", now presented as son of a King Constantine. King Constantine's eldest son Constans is murdered at Vortigern's instigation, and the two remaining sons (Ambrosius and Uther, still very young) are quickly hustled into exile in Brittany. (This does not fit with Gildas' account, in which Ambrosius' family perished in the turmoil of the Saxon uprisings.) Later, the two brothers return from exile with a large army when Vortigern's power has faded. They destroy Vortigern and become friends with Merlin. They go on to defeat the Saxon leader Hengist in two battles at Maisbeli (probably Ballifield, near Sheffield) and Cunengeburg. Hengist is executed and Ambrosius becomes king of Britain. However, he is poisoned by his enemies, and Uther succeeds him. The text identifies the poisoner as Eopa.
Judgements tend to vary wildly of the value of Geoffrey as both a historian and a literary storyteller. He has been praised for giving us detailed information about an otherwise obscure period and possibly preserving information from lost sources, and condemned for an excessive use of artistic licence and possibly inventing stories wholecloth.
Geoffrey changed the word "Aurelianus" to "Aurelius", which is the name of a Roman gens. Geoffrey retains the story of Emrys and the dragons from Nennius, but identifies the figure with Merlin. Merlin is Geoffrey's version of a historical figure known as Myrddin Wyllt. Myrddin is only mentioned once in the "Annales Cambriae", at an entry dated to 573. The name of Merlin is given in Latin as Ambrosius Merlinus. "Merlinus" may have been intended as the agnomen of a Roman or Romano-British individual like Ambrosius.
Elements of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the traditional warrior king, are used by Geoffrey for other characters. Ambrosius' supposed supernatural powers are passed to Merlin. Geoffrey's Aurelius Ambrosius rises to the throne but dies early, passing the throne to a previously unknown brother called Uther Pendragon. The role of warrior king is shared by Uther and his son Arthur.
Geoffrey also uses the character Gloiu, father of Vitalinus/Vitolinus, derived from Nennius. He names this character as a son of Claudius and appointed by his father as Duke of the Welsh. His predecessor as Duke is called Arvirargus. Assuming that Claudius and Arvirargus are supposed to be contemporaries, then this Claudius is the Roman emperor Claudius I (reigned 41–54). It seems unlikely that Claudius would have living grandsons in the 5th century, four centuries following his death. Reno suggests that Claudius II (reigned 268–270) would be a more likely "Claudius" to have living descendants in the 5th century.
Geoffrey for the first time gives a genealogy of Ambrosius. He is supposedly a paternal nephew of , King of Brittany, son of Constantine and an unnamed Briton noblewoman, adoptive grandson (on his mother's side) of Guthelinus/Vitalinus, Bishop of London, younger brother of Constans and older brother of Uther Pendragon. Ambrosius and Uther are supposedly raised by their adoptive maternal grandfather Guthelinus/Vitalinus. It is not explicitly covered in Geoffrey's narrative, but this genealogy makes Constantine and his children descendants of Conan Meriadoc, legendary founder of the line of Kings of Brittany. Conan is also featured in the "Historia Regum Britanniae", where he is appointed king by Roman emperor Magnus Maximus (reigned 383–388).
Constantine's reign is placed by Geoffrey as following the Groans of the Britons mentioned by Gildas. Constantine is reported killed by a Pict and his reign is followed by a brief succession crisis. Candidates for the throne included all three sons of Constantine, but there were problems for their eventual rise to the throne. Constans was a monk, and Ambrosius and Uther were underage and still in their cradle. The crisis is resolved when Vortigern places Constans on the throne, and then serves as his chief adviser and power behind the throne. When Constans is killed by the Picts serving as bodyguards of Vortigern, Vortigern feigns anguish and has the killers executed. Ambrosius is still underage and Vortigern rises to the throne.
The chronology offered by Geoffrey for the early life of Ambrosius contradicts Gildas and Nennius, and is also internally inconsistent. The Groans of the Britons involves an appeal by the Britons to Roman consul "Agitius". This person has been identified with Flavius Aetius (d. 454), magister militum ("master of soldiers") of the Western Roman Empire and consul of the year 446. The Groans are generally dated to the 440s and 450s, preceding the death of Aetius. If Geoffrey's Constantine rose to the throne immediately following the Groans, this would place his reign in this period. Geoffrey gives a 10-year reign for Constantine and his marriage lasts just as long. However the eldest son Constans is clearly older than 10 years by the time his father dies. He is already an adult candidate of the throne and has had time to follow a monastic career. Even assuming there is a time gap between the death of Constantine and the adulthood of Constans, his younger brothers
have not aged at all in the narrative.
Geoffrey's narrative has an underage Ambrosius, if not a literal infant, in the 460s. Accounts deriving from Gildas and Nennius place Ambrosius in the prime of his life in the same decade. Most telling is that Geoffrey has Vortigern rising to the throne in the 460s. Nennius places the rise of Vortigern in the year 425, and Vortigern is entirely absent in chronologies of the 460s. Suggesting that he was deceased by that time.
Geoffrey's narrative includes as a major character Hengist, as leader of the Saxons. He is featured as the father of Queen Rowena and father-in-law of Vortigern. Other Saxon characters in the narrative tend to receive less attention by the writer, but their names tend to correspond to Anglo-Saxons known from other sources. Henginst's supposed son Octa is apparently Octa of Kent, a 6th-century ruler variously connected to Hengist as a son or descendant. The other son, Ebissa, is more difficult to identify. He might correspond to kinsmen of Hengist variously identified as "Ossa", "Oisc", and "Aesc". A minor Saxon character called "Cherdic" is probably Cerdic of Wessex, though elsewhere Geoffrey calls the same king "Cheldric". He actually may appear under three different names in the narrative, since Geoffrey elsewhere calls the interpreter of Hengist "Ceretic", a variant of the same name.
Geoffrey, in the last chapters featuring Vortigern, has the king served by magicians. This detail derives from Nennius, though Nennius was talking about Vortigern's "wise men". They may not have been magic users but advisers. Vortigern's encounter with Emrys/Merlin takes place in this part of the narrative. Merlin warns Vortigern that Ambrosius and Uther have already sailed for Britain and are soon to arrive, apparently to claim his throne. Ambrosius soon arrives at the head of the army and is crowned king. He besieges Vortigern at the castle of "Genoreu", which is identified with Nennius' "Cair Guorthigirn" ("Fort Vortigern") and the hillfort at Little Doward. Ambrosius burns the castle down and Vortigern dies with it.
Having killed Vortigern, Ambrosius next turns his attention to Hengist. Despite the fact that no earlier military actions of Ambrosius are recorded, the Saxons have already heard of his bravery and battle prowess. They immediately retreat beyond the Humber. Hengist soon amasses a massive army to face Ambrosius. His army counts 200,000 men and Ambrosius' only 10,000 men. He marches south and the first battle between the two armies takes place in Maisbeli, where Ambrosius emerges the victor. It is unclear what location Geoffrey had in mind. Maisbeli translates to "the field of Beli", and could be related to the Beli Mawr of Welsh legend and/or the Celtic god Belenus. Alternatively it could be a field where the Beltane festival was celebrated. Geoffrey could derive the name from a similar-sounding toponym. For example, Meicen of the Hen Ogledd ("Old North"), traditionally identified with Hatfield.
Following his defeat, Hengist retreats towards Cunungeburg. Geoffrey probably had in mind Conisbrough, not far from Hatfield. Ambrosius leads his army against the new position of the Saxons. The second battle is more evenly fought, and Hengist has a chance to achieve victory. However, Ambrosius receives reinforcements from Brittany and the tide of the battle turns in favour of the Britons. Hengist himself is captured by his old enemy Eldol, Consul of Gloucester and decapitated. Soon after the battle, the surviving Saxon leaders Octa and Eosa submit themselves to Ambrosius' rule. He pardons them and grants them an area near Scotland. The area is not named, but Geoffrey could be basing this on Bernicia, a real Ango-Saxon kingdom covering areas in the modern borders of Scotland and England.
Geoffrey closely connects the deaths of Vortigern and Hengist, which are elsewhere poorly recorded. Vortigern historically died in the 450s, and various dates for the death of Hengist have been proposed, between the 450s and the 480s. Octa of Kent, the supposed son and heir of Hengist, was still alive in the 6th century and seems to belong to a later historical era than his father. The ruling family of the Kingdom of Kent were called the Oiscingas, a term identifying them as descendants of Oisc of Kent, not of Hengist. In effect, none of them was likely a literal son of Hengist and their relation to Hengist may have been a later invention. Geoffrey did not invent the connection, but his sources here were likely legendary in nature.
Following his victories and the end of the wars, Ambrosius organises the burial of killed nobles at Kaercaradduc. Geoffrey identifies this otherwise unknown location with Caer-Caradog (Salisbury). Ambrosius wants a permanent memorial for the slain and assigns the task to Merlin. The result is the so-called Giants' Ring. Its location in the vicinity of Salisbury has led to its identification with Stonehenge, though Geoffrey never uses that term. Stonehenge is closer to Amesbury than Salisbury. The ring formation of the monument could equally apply to Avebury, the largest stone circle in Europe.
In Welsh legend and texts, Ambrosius appears as "Emrys Wledig" (Emperor Ambrose). The term "Wledig" is a title used by senior royal and military commanders who have achieved notable success. The term is mostly used for famous figures such as Cunedda, though a few obscure figures have been given the title.
In Robert de Boron's "Merlin" he is called simply "Pendragon" and his younger brother is named "Uter", which he changes to "Uterpendragon" after the death of the elder sibling. This is probably a confusion that entered oral tradition from Wace's "Roman de Brut". Wace usually only refers to "li roi" ("the king") without naming him, and someone has taken an early mention of Uther's epithet "Pendragon" as the name of his brother.
Léon Fleuriot has suggested Ambrosius is identical to Riothamus, a Brythonic leader who fought a major battle against the Goths in France around the year 470. Fleuriot argues that Ambrosius led the Britons in the battle, in which he was defeated and forced to retreat to Burgundy. Fleuriot proposed that he then returned to Britain to continue the war against the Saxons.
It has been suggested that the place-name Amesbury in Wiltshire might preserve the name of Ambrosius, and that perhaps Amesbury was the seat of his power base in the later fifth century. Scholars such as Shimon Applebaum have found a number of place names through the Midland dialect regions of Britain that incorporate the "ambre-" element; examples include Ombersley in Worcestershire, Ambrosden in Oxfordshire, Amberley in Herefordshire, Amberley in Gloucestershire, and Amberley in West Sussex. These scholars have claimed that this element represents an Old English word "amor", the name of a woodland bird. However, Amesbury in Wiltshire is in a different dialect region and does not easily fit into the pattern of the Midland dialect place names.
"In "Stargate SG-1", Ambrosius and Arthur are one and the same. Merlin was an Ancient, fleeing from Atlantis and later Ascends, then comes back in order to build the Sangraal, or Holy Grail, to defeat the Ori. Daniel Jackson also comments that it would mean that Ambrosius was 74 at the Battle of Mount Badon. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1719 |
Ammon
Ammon (; ) was an ancient Semitic-speaking nation occupying the east of the Jordan River, between the torrent valleys of Arnon and Jabbok, in present-day Jordan. The chief city of the country was "Rabbah" or "Rabbath Ammon", site of the modern city of Amman, Jordan's capital. Milcom and Molech (who may be one and the same) are named in the Hebrew Bible as the gods of Ammon. The people of this kingdom are called "Children of Ammon" or "Ammonites".
The Ammonites occupied the northern Central Trans-Jordanian Plateau from the latter part of the second millennium BC to at least the second century CE.
Ammon maintained its independence from the Neo-Assyrian Empire through tribute to the Assyrian king, at a time when nearby kingdoms were being raided or conquered. The Kurkh Monolith lists the Ammonite king Baasha ben Ruhubi's army as fighting alongside Ahab of Israel and Syrian allies against Shalmaneser III at the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC, possibly as vassals of Hadadezer, the Aramaean king of Damascus. In 734 BC the Ammonite king Sanipu was a vassal of Tiglath-Pileser III, and Sanipu's successor Pudu-ilu held the same position under Sennacherib and Esarhaddon. An Assyrian tribute-list exists from this period, showing that Ammon paid one-fifth as much tribute as Judah did.
Somewhat later, the Ammonite king Amminadab I was among the tributaries who suffered in the course of the great Arabian campaign of Assurbanipal. Other kings attested to in contemporary sources are Barachel (attested to in several contemporary seals) and Hissalel, the latter of whom reigned about 620 BCE. Hissalel is mentioned in an inscription on a bottle found at Tel Siran, Jordan along with his son, King Amminadab II, who reigned around 600 BCE.
Archaeology and history indicate that Ammon flourished during the Neo-Babylonian Empire period. This contradicts the view, dominant for decades, that Transjordan was either destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II, or suffered a rapid decline following Judah's destruction by that king. Newer evidence suggests that Ammon enjoyed continuity from the Neo-Babylonian to the Persian period.
Little mention is made of the Ammonites through the Persian and early Hellenistic periods. Their name appears, however, during the time of the Maccabees. The Ammonites, with some of the neighboring tribes, did their utmost to resist and check the revival of the Jewish power under Judas Maccabaeus. The Hasmonean dynast Hyrcanus founded Qasr Al Abd, and was a descendant of the Seleucid Tobiad dynasty of Tobiah, who is mentioned by Nehemiah as an Ammonite (ii. 19) from the east-Jordanian district.
The last notice of the Ammonites is in Justin Martyr's "Dialogue with Trypho" (§ 119), in the second century, where it is affirmed that they were still a numerous people.
The first mention of the Ammonites in the Bible is in . It is stated there that they descended from Ben-Ammi, a son of Lot through with his younger daughter who plotted with her sister to intoxicate Lot and in his inebriated state, have relations to become pregnant. Ben-Ammi literally means ""son of my people"". After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the daughters of Lot wanted to have a child and carried out a plot to intoxicate him and had relations, resulting in Ammon and his half brother, Moab, being conceived and born. This narrative has traditionally been considered literal fact; but is now generally interpreted as recording a gross popular irony by which the Israelites expressed their loathing of the morality of the Moabites and Ammonites. It has been doubted, however, whether the Israelites would have directed such irony to Lot himself.
The Ammonites settled to the east of the Jordan, invading the Rephaim lands east of Jordan, between the Jabbok and Arnon, dispossessing them and dwelling in their place. Their territory originally comprising all from the Jordan to the wilderness, and from the River Jabbok south to the River Arnon. It was accounted a land of giants; and that giants formerly dwelt in it, whom the Ammonites called Zamzummim.
Shortly before the Israelite Exodus, the Amorites west of Jordan, under King Sihon, invaded and occupied a large portion of the territory of Moab and Ammon. The Ammonites were driven from the rich lands near the Jordan and retreated to the mountains and valleys to the east. The invasion of the Amorites created a wedge and separated the two kingdoms of Ammon and Moab.
Throughout the Bible, the Ammonites and the Israelites are portrayed as mutual antagonists. During the Exodus, the Israelites were prohibited by the Ammonites from passing through their lands. The Ammonites soon allied themselves with Eglon of Moab in attacking Israel.
The Ammonites maintained their claim to part of Transjordan, after it was occupied by the Israelites who obtained it from Sihon. During the days of Jephthah, the Ammonites occupied the lands east of the River Jordan and started to invade Israelite lands west of the river. Jephthah became the leader in resisting these incursions.
The constant harassment of the Israelite communities east of the Jordan by the Ammonites was the impetus behind the unification of the tribes under Saul. King Nahash of Ammon (990 BC) lay siege to Jabesh-Gilead. This eventually led to an alliance with Saul. Under his command, the Israelites relieved the siege and defeated the Ammonite king, eventually resulting in the formation of the Israelite kingdom.
During the reign of King David, the Ammonites humiliated David's messengers, and hired the Aramean armies to attack Israel. This eventually ended in a war and a year-long siege of Rabbah, the capital of Ammon. The war ended with all the Ammonite cities being conquered and plundered, and the inhabitants being killed or put to forced labor at David's command.
According to both and , Naamah was an Ammonite. She was the only wife of King Solomon to be mentioned by name in the Tanakh as having borne a child. She was the mother of Solomon's successor, Rehoboam.
When the Arameans of Damascus city-state deprived the Kingdom of Israel of their possessions east of the Jordan, the Ammonites became allies of Ben-hadad, and a contingent of 1,000 of them served as allies of Syria in the great battle of the Arameans and Assyrians at Qarqar in 854 BC in the reign of Shalmaneser III.
The Ammonites, Moabites and Meunim formed a coalition against Jehoshaphat of Judah. The coalition later was thrown to confusion, with the armies slaughtering one another. They were subdued and paid tribute to Jotham.
After submitting to Tiglath-Pileser III they were generally tributary to the Neo-Assyrian Empire, but had joined in the general uprising that took place under Sennacherib; but they submitted and they became tributary in the reign of Esar-haddon. Their hostility to Judah is shown in their joining the Chaldeans to destroy it (). Their cruelty is denounced by the prophet Amos
(), and their destruction (with their return in the future) by Jeremiah (); Ezekiel (); and Zephaniah (). Their murder of Gedaliah (; ) was a dastardly act. They may have regained their old territory when Tiglath-pileser carried off the Israelites East of the Jordan into captivity (; ).
Tobiah the Ammonite united with Sanballat to oppose Nehemiah (), and their opposition to the Jews did not cease with the establishment of the latter in Judea.
The Ammonites presented a serious problem to the Pharisees because many marriages between Israelite men and Ammonite (and Moabite) women had taken place in the days of Nehemiah. The men had married women of the various nations without conversion, which made the children not Jewish. They also joined the Syrians in their wars with the Maccabees and were defeated by Judas.
The Ammonites, still numerous in the south of Palestine in the second Christian century according to Justin Martyr ("Dialogus cum Tryphone," ch. cxix.), presented a serious problem to the Pharisaic scribes because of the fact that many marriages with Ammonite and Moabite wives had taken place in the days of Nehemiah (Neh. xiii. 23). Still later, it is not improbable that when Judas Maccabeus had inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Ammonites, Jewish warriors took Ammonite women as wives, and their sons, sword in hand, claimed recognition as Jews notwithstanding the law (Deut. xxiii. 4) that "an Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord." Such a condition or a similar incident is reflected in the story told in the Talmud (Yeb. 76b, 77a; Ruth R. to ii. 5) that in the days of King Saul, the legitimacy of David's claim to royalty was disputed on account of his descent from Ruth, the Moabite; whereupon Ithra, the Israelite (II Sam. xvii. 25; compare I Chron. ii. 17), girt with his sword, strode like an Ishmaelite into the schoolhouse of Jesse, declaring upon the authority of Samuel, the prophet, and his bet din (court of justice), that the law excluding the Ammonite and Moabite from the Jewish congregation referred only to the men—who alone had sinned in not meeting Israel with bread and water—and not to the women. The story reflects actual conditions in pre-Talmudic times, conditions that led to the fixed rule stated in the Mishnah (Yeb. viii. 3): "Ammonite and Moabite men are excluded from the Jewish community for all time; their women are admissible."
The fact that Rehoboam, the son of King Solomon, was born of an Ammonite woman (I Kings, xiv. 21-31) also made it difficult to maintain the Messianic claims of the house of David; but it was adduced as an illustration of divine Providence which selected the "two doves," Ruth, the Moabite, and Naamah, the Ammonitess, for honorable distinction (B. Ḳ. 38b). Ruth's kindness as noted in the Book of Ruth by Boaz is seen in the Jewish Tradition as in rare contradistinction to the peoples of Moab (where Ruth comes from) and Amon in general, who were noted by the Torah for their distinct "lack" of kindness. Deut. 23:5: "Because they [the peoples of Amon and Moab] did not greet you with bread and water on the way when you left Egypt, and because he [the people of Moab] hired Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim against you, to curse you." Rashi notes regarding Israel's travels on the way: "when you were in [a state of] extreme exhaustion."
Baalis, king of the Ammonites, envious of the Jewish colony's prosperity, or jealous of the might of the Babylonian king, instigated Ishmael, son of Nathaniel, "of the royal seed," to make an end of the Judean rule in Palestine, Ishmael, being an unscrupulous character, permitted himself to become the tool of the Ammonite king in order to realize his own ambition to become the ruler of the deserted land. Information of this conspiracy reached Gedaliah through Johanan, son of Kareah, and Johanan undertook to slay Ishmael before he had had time to carry out his evil design; but the governor disbelieved the report, and forbade Johanan to lay hands upon the conspirator. Ishmael and his ten companions were royally entertained at Gedaliah's table. In the midst of the festivities Ishmael slew the unsuspecting Gedaliah, the Chaldean garrison stationed in Mizpah, and all the Jews that were with him, casting their bodies into the pit of Asa (Josephus, "Ant." x. 9, § 4). The Rabbis condemn the overconfidence of Gedaliah, holding him responsible for the death of his followers (Niddah 61a; comp. Jer. xli. 9). Ishmael captured many of the inhabitants of Mizpah, as well as "the daughters of the king" entrusted to Gedaliah's care by the Babylonian general, and fled to Ammon. Johanan and his followers, however, on receiving the sad tidings, immediately pursued the murderers, overtaking them at the lake of Gibeon. The captives were rescued, but Ishmael and eight of his men escaped to the land of Ammon. The plan of Baalis thus succeeded, for the Jewish refugees, fearing lest the Babylonian king should hold them responsible for the murder, never returned to their native land. In spite of the exhortations of Jeremiah they fled to Egypt, joined by the remnant of the Jews that had survived, together with Jeremiah and Baruch (Jer. xliii. 6). The rule of Gedaliah lasted, according to tradition, only two months, although Grätz argues that it continued more than four years.
The few Ammonite names that have been preserved also include Nahash and Hanun, both from the Bible. The Ammonites' language is believed to be in the Canaanite family, closely related to Hebrew and Moabite. Ammonite may have incorporated certain Aramaic influences, including the use of "‘bd", instead of commoner Biblical Hebrew "‘śh", for "work". The only other notable difference with Biblical Hebrew is the sporadic retention of feminine singular "-t" (e.g., "’šħt" "cistern", but "‘lyh" "high (fem.)".)
The economy, for the most part, was based on agriculture and herding. Most people lived in small villages surrounded by farms and pastures. Like its sister-kingdom of Moab, Ammon was the source of numerous natural resources, including sandstone and limestone. It had a productive agricultural sector and occupied a vital place along the King's Highway, the ancient trade route connecting Egypt with Mesopotamia, Syria, and Asia Minor. As with the Edomites and Moabites, trade along this route gave them considerable revenue. Circa 950 BCE Ammon showed rising prosperity, due to agriculture and trade, and built a series of fortresses. Its capital was located in what is now the Citadel of Amman.
In 1972, during the excavations of a site called Tell Siran in north-west Amman, an inscription on a bronze bottle of about 10 cm tall was found. Scientific investigation has showed that the inscription dates back to 600 BC, and later concluded that it was a lyric poem written in Ammonite language. The poem talks about a drinking song, roughly translated to:
Attribution: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1722 |
Amphipolis
Amphipolis (; ) is a municipality in the Serres regional unit of Greece. The seat of the municipality is Rodolivos. It was an ancient Greek polis (city), and later a Roman city, whose large remains can still be seen.
Amphipolis, an Athenian colony, was the seat of the battle between the Spartans and Athenians in 422 BC, and also the place where Alexander the Great prepared for campaigns leading to his invasion of Asia. Alexander's three finest admirals, Nearchus, Androsthenes and Laomedon, resided in Amphipolis, which is also the place where, after Alexander's death, his wife Roxana and their small son Alexander IV were exiled and later murdered.
Excavations in and around the city have revealed important buildings, ancient walls and tombs. The finds are displayed at the archaeological museum of Amphipolis. At the nearby vast Kasta burial mound, an ancient Macedonian tomb has recently been revealed. The Lion of Amphipolis monument nearby is a popular destination for visitors.
It was located within the region of Edonis.
Throughout the 5th century BC, Athens sought to consolidate its control over Thrace, which was strategically important because of its primary materials (the gold and silver of the Pangaion hills and the dense forests essential for naval construction), and the sea routes vital for Athens' supply of grain from Scythia. After a first unsuccessful attempt at colonisation in 497 BC by the Milesian Tyrant Histiaeus, the Athenians founded a first colony at Ennea-Hodoi (‘Nine Ways’) in 465 BC, but these first ten thousand colonists were massacred by the Thracians. A second attempt took place in 437 BC on the same site under the guidance of Hagnon, son of Nicias, which was successful. The city and its first walls date from this time.
The new settlement took the name of Amphipolis (literally, "around the city"), a name which is the subject of much debate about its etymology. Thucydides claims the name comes from the fact that the Strymon River flows "around the city" on two sides; however a note in the "Suda" (also given in the lexicon of Photius) offers a different explanation apparently given by Marsyas, son of Periander: that a large proportion of the population lived "around the city". However, a more probable explanation is the one given by Julius Pollux: that the name indicates the vicinity of an isthmus.
Amphipolis became the main power base of the Athenians in Thrace and, consequently, a target of choice for their Spartan adversaries. The Athenian population remained very much in the minority in the city. For this reason Amphipolis remained an independent city and an ally of the Athenians, rather than a colony or member of the Athens-led Delian League. However, in 424 BC the Spartan general Brasidas easily took control of the city.
A rescue expedition led by the Athenian general, and later historian, Thucydides had to settle for securing Eion and could not retake Amphipolis, a failure for which Thucydides was sentenced to exile. A new Athenian force under the command of Cleon failed once more in 422 BC during the Battle of Amphipolis at which both Cleon and Brasidas lost their lives. Brasidas survived long enough to hear of the defeat of the Athenians and was buried at Amphipolis with impressive pomp. From then on he was regarded as the founder of the city
and honoured with yearly games and sacrifices.
The city itself kept its independence until the reign of king Philip II () despite several Athenian attacks, notably because of the government of Callistratus of Aphidnae. In 357 BC, Philip succeeded where the Athenians had failed and conquered the city, thereby removing the obstacle which Amphipolis presented to Macedonian control over Thrace. According to the historian Theopompus, this conquest came to be the object of a secret accord between Athens and Philip II, who would return the city in exchange for the fortified town of Pydna, but the Macedonian king betrayed the accord, refusing to cede Amphipolis and laying siege to Pydna as well.
The city was not immediately incorporated into the Macedonian kingdom, and for some time preserved its institutions and a certain degree of autonomy. The border of Macedonia was not moved further east; however, Philip sent a number of Macedonian governors to Amphipolis, and in many respects the city was effectively "Macedonianized". Nomenclature, the calendar and the currency (the gold stater, created by Philip to capitalise on the gold reserves of the Pangaion hills, replaced the Amphipolitan drachma) were all replaced by Macedonian equivalents. In the reign of Alexander the Great, Amphipolis was an important naval base, and the birthplace of three of the most famous Macedonian admirals: Nearchus, Androsthenes and Laomedon, whose burial place is most likely marked by the famous lion of Amphipolis.
The importance of the city in this period is shown by Alexander the Great's decision that it was one of the six cities at which large luxurious temples costing 1,500 talents were built. Alexander prepared for campaigns here against Thrace in 335 BC and his army and fleet assembled near the port before the invasion of Asia. The port was also used as naval base during his campaigns in Asia. After Alexander's death, his wife Roxana and their young son Alexander IV were exiled by Cassander and later murdered here.
Throughout Macedonian sovereignty Amphipolis was a strong fortress of great strategic and economic importance, as shown by inscriptions. Amphipolis became one of the main stops on the Macedonian royal road (as testified by a border stone found between Philippi and Amphipolis giving the distance to the latter), and later on the "Via Egnatia", the principal Roman road which crossed the southern Balkans. Apart from the ramparts of the lower town, the gymnasium and a set of well-preserved frescoes from a wealthy villa are the only artifacts from this period that remain visible. Though little is known of the layout of the town, modern knowledge of its institutions is in considerably better shape thanks to a rich epigraphic documentation, including a military ordinance of Philip V and an ephebarchic law from the gymnasium.
After the final victory of Rome over Macedonia in the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC, Amphipolis became the capital of one of the four mini-republics, or "merides", which were created by the Romans out of the kingdom of the Antigonids which succeeded Alexander's empire in Macedon. These "merides" were gradually incorporated into the Roman client state, and later province, of Thracia. According to the "Acts of the Apostles", the apostles Paul and Silas passed through Amphipolis in the early AD 50s, on their journey between Philippi and Thessalonica; where hence they proselytized to the Greeks, including Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.
During the period of Late Antiquity, Amphipolis benefited from the increasing economic prosperity of Macedonia, as is evidenced by the large number of Christian churches that were built. Significantly however, these churches were built within a restricted area of the town, sheltered by the walls of the acropolis. This has been taken as evidence that the large fortified perimeter of the ancient town was no longer defendable, and that the population of the city had considerably diminished.
Nevertheless, the number, size and quality of the churches constructed between the 5th and 6th centuries are impressive. Four basilicas adorned with rich mosaic floors and elaborate architectural sculptures (such as the ram-headed column capitals – see picture) have been excavated, as well as a church with a hexagonal central plan which evokes that of the basilica of St Vitalis in Ravenna. It is difficult to find reasons for such municipal extravagance in such a small town. One possible explanation provided by the historian André Boulanger is that an increasing ‘willingness’ on the part of the wealthy upper classes in the late Roman period to spend money on local gentrification projects (which he terms "euergetism", from the Greek verb ; meaning 'I do good') was exploited by the local church to its advantage, which led to a mass gentrification of the urban centre and of the agricultural riches of the city's territory. Amphipolis was also a diocese under the metropolitan see of Thessalonica – the Bishop of Amphipolis is first mentioned in 533. The bishopric is today listed by the Catholic Church as a titular see.
The Slavic invasions of the late 6th century gradually encroached on the back-country Amphipolitan lifestyle and led to the decline of the town, during which period its inhabitants retreated to the area around the acropolis. The ramparts were maintained to a certain extent, thanks to materials plundered from the monuments of the lower city, and the large unused cisterns of the upper city were occupied by small houses and the workshops of artisans. Around the middle of the 7th century, a further reduction of the inhabited area of the city was followed by an increase in the fortification of the town, with the construction of a new rampart with pentagonal towers cutting through the middle of the remaining monuments. The acropolis, the Roman baths, and especially the episcopal basilica were crossed by this wall.
The city was probably abandoned in the eighth century, as the last bishop was attested at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. Its inhabitants probably moved to the neighbouring site of ancient Eion, port of Amphipolis, which had been rebuilt and refortified in the Byzantine period under the name “Chrysopolis”. This small port continued to enjoy some prosperity, before being abandoned during the Ottoman period. The last recorded sign of activity in the region of Amphipolis was the construction of a fortified tower to the north in 1367 by the "megas primikerios" John and the "stratopedarches" Alexios to protect the land that they had given to the monastery of Pantokrator on Mount Athos.
The site was discovered and described by many travellers and archaeologists during the 19th century, including E. Cousinéry (1831) (engraver), Leon Heuzey (1861), and P. Perdrizet (1894–1899). However, excavations did not truly begin until after the Second World War. The Greek Archaeological Society under D. Lazaridis excavated in 1972 and 1985, uncovering a necropolis, the city wall (see photograph), the basilicas, and the acropolis. Further excavations have since uncovered the river bridge, the gymnasium, Greek and Roman villas and numerous tombs etc.
Parts of the lion monument and tombs were discovered during World War I by Bulgarian and British troops whilst digging trenches in the area. In 1934, M. Feyel, of the École française d'Athènes (EfA), led an epigraphical mission to the site and uncovered further remains of the lion monument (a reconstruction was given in the "Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique", a publication of the EfA which is available on line).
The silver ossuary containing the cremated remains of Brasidas and a gold crown (see image) was found in a tomb in pride of place under the Agora.
In 2012 Greek archaeologists unearthed a large tomb within the Kasta Hill, the biggest burial mound in Greece, northeast of Amphipolis. The large size of the tumulus indicates the prominence of the burials made there. The perimeter wall of the tumulus is long, and is made of limestone covered with marble.
The tomb comprises three chambers separated by walls. There are two sphinxes just outside the entrance to the tomb. Two of the columns supporting the roof in the first section are in the form of Caryatids, in the 4th century BC style. The excavation revealed a pebble mosaic showing allegorically the abduction of Persephone by Hades, but the persons are Philip and Olympias of Macedon, directly behind the Caryatids and in front of the Macedonian marble door leading to the "third" chamber. Hades' chariot is drawn by two white horses and led to the underworld by Hermes. The mosaic verifies the Macedonian character of the tomb. As the head of one of the sphinxes was found inside the tomb behind the broken door, it is clear that there were intruders, probably in antiquity.
The identity of the burial remains unknown and the excavation is continuing. Dr. Katerina Peristeri, the archaeologist heading the excavation of the tomb, dates the tomb to the late 4th century BC, the period after the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC).
In November 2017, the Greek Minister of Culture, Lydia Koniordou, announced that the grave should be accessible to the public in about three years. The financing for the necessary construction project should amount to around €2.8 million. €1.5 million is to be spent by the Region of Central Macedonia, €1.3 million is to be taken from the INTERREG Fund of the European Union. In the course of this measure, building materials of the grave site, which were later used by the Romans elsewhere, will be rebuilt in their original location. The work should begin in 2018 or 2019 and last for around one year.
The municipality Amfipoli was formed at the 2011 local government reform by the merger of the following four former municipalities, that became municipal units:
The municipality has an area of 411.773 km2, the municipal unit 152.088 km2. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1727 |
Anacharsis
Anacharsis (; ) was a Scythian philosopher; he travelled from his homeland on the northern shores of the ancient Iran, to Athens, in the early 6th century BC, and made a great impression as a forthright and outspoken barbarian, that is, a non-Greek speaker. He very well could have been a forerunner of the Cynics, in part because of his strong, but playful, "parrhesia". None of his works have survived.
Anacharsis the son of Gnurus, a Scythian chief, was half Greek and from a mixed Hellenic culture, apparently in the region of the Cimmerian Bosporus. He left his native country to travel in pursuit of knowledge, and came to Athens about 589 BC, at a time when Solon was occupied with his legislative measures.
According to the story recounted by Hermippus, Anacharsis arrived at the house of Solon and said, "I have traveled here from afar to make you my friend." Solon replied, "It's better to make friends at home." Thereupon the Scythian replied, "Then it is necessary for you, being at home, to make friends with me." Solon laughed and accepted him as his friend.
Anacharsis cultivated the outsider's knack of seeing the illogic in familiar things. For example, Plutarch remarks that he "expressed his wonder at the fact that in Greece wise men spoke and fools decided." His conversation was droll and frank, and Solon and the Athenians took to him as a sage and philosopher. His rough and free discourse became proverbial among Athenians as 'Scythian discourse'.
Anacharsis was the first foreigner (metic) who received the privileges of Athenian citizenship. He was reckoned by some ancient authors as one of the Seven Sages of Greece, and it is said that he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Great Goddess, a privilege denied to those who did not speak fluent Greek.
According to Herodotus, when Anacharsis returned to the Scythians he was killed by his own brother for his Greek ways and especially for the impious attempt to sacrifice to the Mother Goddess Cybele, whose cult was unwelcome among the Scythians.
None of the works ascribed to him in ancient times, if indeed they were written by him, have survived. He was said to have written a book comparing the laws of the Scythians with the laws of the Greeks, as well as work on the art of war. All that remains of his thought is what later tradition ascribes to him. He became famous for the simplicity of his way of living and his acute observations on the institutions and customs of the Greeks. He exhorted moderation in everything, saying that the vine bears three clusters of grapes: the first wine, pleasure; the second, drunkenness; the third, disgust. So he became a kind of emblem to the Athenians, who inscribed on his statues: 'Restrain your tongues, your appetites, your passions.'
There are ten extant letters ascribed to him, one of which is also quoted by Cicero:
Greetings from Anacharsis to Hanno: My clothing is a Scythian cloak, my shoes are the hard soles of my feet, my bed is the earth, my food is only seasoned by hunger - and I eat nothing but milk and cheese and meat. Come and visit me, and you will find me at peace. You want to give me something. But give it to your fellow-citizens instead, or let the immortal gods have it.
All of the letters are spurious. The first nine probably date from the 3rd century BC, they are usually included among the "Cynic epistles", and reflect how the Cynic philosophers viewed him as prefiguring many of their ideas; the tenth letter is quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, it is addressed to Croesus, the proverbially rich king of Lydia, it too is fictitious:
Anacharsis to Croesus: O king of the Lydians, I am come to the country of the Greeks, in order to become acquainted with their customs and institutions; but I have no need of gold, and shall be quite contented if I return to Scythia a better man than I left it. However I will come to Sardis, as I think it very desirable to become a friend of yours.
Strabo makes him the (probably legendary) inventor of the anchor with two flukes, and others made him the inventor of the potter's wheel.
Having been informed that Solon was employed to draw up a code of laws for the Athenians, Anacharsis described his occupation, saying:
"Solon showed Anacharsis some laws that he was drafting for the Athenians. Anacharsis laughed at Solon for imagining that the dishonesty and greed of the Athenians could be restrained by written laws. Such laws, said Anacharsis, are like spiderwebs: they catch the weak and poor, but the rich can rip right through them." (Plutarch, Solon, https://www.ahistoryofgreece.com/biography/solon.htm)
In 1788 Jean Jacques Barthelemy (1716–95), a highly esteemed classical scholar and Jesuit, published "The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece" about a young Scythian descended from Anacharsis. The 4-volume work was an imaginary travel journal, one of the first historical novels, which Klemperer called "the encyclopedia of the new cult of the antique" in the late 18th century. It affected the growth of philhellenism in France at the time. The book went through many editions, was reprinted in the United States and translated into German and other languages. It later inspired European sympathy for the Greek struggle for independence and spawned sequels and imitations through the 19th century. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1732 |
Ānanda
Ānanda (5th4th century BCE) was the primary attendant of the Buddha and one of his ten principal disciples. Among the Buddha's many disciples, Ānanda stood out for having the best memory. Most of the texts of the early Buddhist "Sutta-Piṭaka" (Pāli; ) are attributed to his recollection of the Buddha's teachings during the First Buddhist Council. For that reason, he is known as the Treasurer of the Dhamma, with "Dhamma" () referring to the Buddha's teaching. In Early Buddhist Texts, Ānanda was the first cousin of the Buddha. Although the early texts do not agree on many parts of Ānanda's early life, they do agree that Ānanda was ordained as a monk and that Puṇṇa Mantāniputta () became his teacher. Twenty years in the Buddha's ministry, Ānanda became the attendant of the Buddha, when the Buddha selected him for this task. Ānanda performed his duties with great devotion and care, and acted as an intermediary between the Buddha and the laypeople, as well as the "saṅgha" (). He accompanied the Buddha for the rest of his life, acting not only as an assistant, but also a secretary and a mouthpiece.
Scholars are skeptical about the historicity of many events in Ānanda's life, especially the First Council, and consensus about this has yet to be established. A traditional account can be drawn from early texts, commentaries, and post-canonical chronicles. Ānanda had an important role in establishing the order of "bhikkhunīs" (), when he requested the Buddha on behalf of the latter's foster-mother Mahāpajāpati Gotamī () to allow her to be ordained. Ānanda also accompanied the Buddha in the last year of his life, and therefore was witness to many tenets and principles that the Buddha conveyed before his death, including the well-known principle that the Buddhist community should take his teaching and discipline as their refuge, and that he would not appoint a new leader. The final period of the Buddha's life also shows that Ānanda was very much attached to the Buddha's person, and he saw the Buddha's passing with great sorrow.
Shortly after the Buddha's death, the First Council was convened, and Ānanda managed to attain enlightenment just before the council started, which was a requirement. He had a historical role during the council as the living memory of the Buddha, reciting many of the Buddha's discourses and checking them for accuracy. During the same council, however, he was chastised by Mahākassapa () and the rest of the "saṅgha" for allowing women to be ordained and failing to understand or respect the Buddha at several crucial moments. Ānanda continued to teach until the end of his life, passing on his spiritual heritage to his pupils Sāṇavāsī () and Majjhantika (), among others, who later assumed leading roles in the Second and Third Councils. Ānanda died 20 years after the Buddha, and "stūpas" (monuments) were erected at the river where he died.
Ānanda is one of the most loved figures in Buddhism. He was known for his memory, erudition and compassion, and was often praised by the Buddha for these matters. He functioned as a foil to the Buddha, however, in that he still had worldly attachments and was not yet enlightened, as opposed to the Buddha. In the Sanskrit textual traditions, Ānanda is considered the patriarch of the Dhamma who stood in a spiritual lineage, receiving the teaching from Mahākassapa and passing them on to his own pupils. Ānanda has been honored by "bhikkhunīs" since early medieval times for his merits in establishing the nun's order. In recent times, the composer Richard Wagner and Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore were inspired by stories about Ānanda in their work.
The word "ānanda" means 'bliss, joy' in Pāli and in Sanskrit. Pāli commentaries explain that when Ānanda was born, his relatives were joyous about this. Texts from the Mūlasarvāstivāda tradition, however, state that since Ānanda was born on the day of the Buddha's enlightenment, there was great rejoicing in the cityhence the name.
According to the texts, in a previous life, Ānanda made an aspiration to become a Buddha's attendant. He made this aspiration in the time of a previous Buddha called Padumuttara, many eons (, ) before the present age. He met the attendant of Padumuttara Buddha and aspired to be like him in a future life. After having done many good deeds, he made his resolution known to the Padumuttara Buddha, who confirmed that his wish will come true in a future life. After having been born and reborn throughout many lifetimes, and doing many good deeds, he was born as Ānanda in the time of the current Buddha Gotama.
Ānanda was born in the same time period as the Buddha (formerly Prince Siddhattha), which scholars place at 5th4th centuries BCE. Tradition says that Ānanda was the first cousin of the Buddha, his father being the brother of Suddhodana (), the Buddha's father. In the Pāli and Mūlasarvāstivāda textual traditions, his father was Amitodana (), but the "Mahāvastu" states that his father was Śuklodanaboth are brothers of Suddhodana. The Mahāvastu also mentions that Ānanda's mother's name was Mṛgī (Sanskrit; lit. 'little deer'; Pāli is unknown). The Pāli tradition has it that Ānanda was born on the same day as Prince Siddhatta (), but texts from the Mūlasarvāstivāda and subsequent Mahāyāna traditions state Ānanda was born at the same time the Buddha attained enlightenment (when Prince Siddhattha was 35 years old), and was therefore much younger than the Buddha. The latter tradition is corroborated by several instances in the Early Buddhist Texts, in which Ānanda appears younger than the Buddha, such as the passage in which the Buddha explained to Ānanda how old age was affecting him in body and mind. It is also corroborated by a verse in the Pāli text called "Theragāthā", in which Ānanda stated he was a "learner" for twenty-five years, after which he attended to the Buddha for another twenty-five years.
Following the Pāli, Mahīśasaka and Dharmaguptaka textual traditions, Ānanda became a monk in the second year of the Buddha's ministry, during the Buddha's visit to Kapilavatthu (). He was ordained by the Buddha himself, together with many other princes of the Buddha's clan (, ), in the mango grove called Anupiya, part of Malla territory. According to a text from the Mahāsaṅghika tradition, King Suddhodana wanted the Buddha to have more followers of the "khattiya" caste (), and less from the brahmin (priest) caste. He therefore ordered that any "khattiya" who had a brother follow the Buddha as a monk, or had his brother do so. Ānanda used this opportunity, and asked his brother Devadatta to stay at home, so that he could leave for the monkhood. The later timeline from the Mūlasarvāstivāda texts and the Pāli "Theragāthā", however, have Ānanda ordain much later, about twenty-five years before the Buddha's deathin other words, twenty years in the Buddha's ministry. Some Sanskrit sources have him ordain even later. The Mūlasarvāstivāda texts on monastic discipline (Pāli and ) relate that soothsayers predicted Ānanda would be the Buddha's attendant. In order to prevent Ānanda from leaving the palace to ordain, his father brought him to Vesālī () during the Buddha's visit to Kapilavatthu, but later the Buddha met and taught Ānanda nonetheless. On a similar note, the Mahāvastu relates, however, that Mṛgī was initially opposed to Ānanda joining the holy life, because his brother Devadatta had already ordained and left the palace. Ānanda responded to his mother's resistance by moving to Videha () and lived there, taking a vow of silence. This led him to gain the epithet Videhamuni (), meaning 'the silent wise one from Videha'. When Ānanda did become ordained, his father had him ordain in Kapilavatthu in the Nigrodhārāma monastery () with much ceremony, Ānanda's preceptor (; ) being a certain Daśabāla Kāśyapa.
According to the Pāli tradition, Ānanda's first teachers were Belaṭṭhasīsa and Puṇṇa Mantāniputta. It was Puṇṇa's teaching that led Ānanda to attain the stage of "sotāpanna" (), an attainment preceding that of enlightenment. Ānanda later expressed his debt to Puṇṇa. Another important figure in the life of Ānanda was Sāriputta (), one of the Buddha's main disciples. Sāriputta often taught Ānanda about the finer points of Buddhist doctrine; they were in the habit of sharing things with one another, and their relationship is described as a good friendship. In some Mūlasarvāstivāda texts, an attendant of Ānanda is also mentioned who helped motivate Ānanda when he was banned from the First Buddhist Council. He was a "Vajjiputta" (), i.e. someone who originated from the Vajji confederacy. According to later texts, an enlightened monk also called Vajjiputta () had an important role in Ānanda's life. He listened to a teaching of Ānanda and realized that Ānanda was not enlightened yet. Vajjiputta encouraged Ānanda to talk less to laypeople and deepen his meditation practice by retreating in the forest, advice that very much affected Ānanda.
In the first twenty years of the Buddha's ministry, the Buddha had several personal attendants. However, after these twenty years, when the Buddha was aged 55, the Buddha announced that he had need for a permanent attendant. The Buddha had been growing older, and his previous attendants had not done their job very well. Initially, several of the Buddha's foremost disciples responded to his request, but the Buddha did not accept them. All the while Ānanda remained quiet. When he was asked why, he said that the Buddha would know best whom to choose, upon which the Buddha responded by choosing Ānanda. Ānanda agreed to take on the position, on the condition that he did not receive any material benefits from the Buddha. Accepting such benefits would open him up to criticism that he chose the position because of ulterior motives. He also requested that the Buddha allow him to accept invitations on his behalf, allow him to ask questions about his doctrine, and repeat any teaching that the Buddha had taught in Ānanda's absence. These requests would help people trust Ānanda and show that the Buddha was sympathetic to his attendant. Furthermore, Ānanda considered these the real advantages of being an attendant, which is why he requested them.
The Buddha agreed to Ānanda's conditions, and Ānanda became the Buddha's attendant, accompanying the Buddha on most of his wanderings. Ānanda took care of the Buddha's daily practical needs, by doing things such as bringing water and cleaning the Buddha's dwelling place. He is depicted as observant and devoted, even guarding the dwelling place at night. Ānanda takes the part of interlocutor in many of the recorded dialogues. He tended the Buddha for a total of 25 years, a duty which entailed much work. His relationship with the Buddha is depicted as warm and trusting: when the Buddha grew ill, Ānanda had a sympathetic illness; when the Buddha grew older, Ānanda kept taking care of him with devotion.
Ānanda sometimes literally risked his life for his teacher. At one time, the rebellious monk Devadatta tried to kill the Buddha by having a drunk and wild elephant released in the Buddha's presence. Ānanda stepped in front of the Buddha to protect him. When the Buddha told him to move, he refused, although normally he always obeyed the Buddha. Through a supernatural accomplishment (; ) the Buddha then moved Ānanda aside and subdued the elephant, by touching it and speaking to it with loving-kindness.
Ānanda often acted as an intermediary and secretary, passing on messages from the Buddha, informing the Buddha of news, invitations, or the needs of lay people, and advising lay people who wanted to provide gifts to the "saṅgha". At one time, Mahāpajāpatī, the Buddha's foster-mother, requested to offer robes for personal use for the Buddha. She said that even though she had raised the Buddha in his youth, she never gave anything in person to the young prince; she now wished to do so. The Buddha initially insisted that she give the robe to the community as a whole rather than to be attached to his person. However, Ānanda interceded and mediated, suggesting that the Buddha had better accept the robe. Eventually the Buddha did, but not without pointing out to Ānanda that good deeds like giving should always be done for the sake of the action itself, not for the sake of the person.
The texts say that the Buddha sometimes asked Ānanda to substitute for him as teacher, and was often praised by the Buddha for his teachings. Ānanda was often given important teaching roles, such as regularly teaching Queen Mallikā, Queen Sāmāvatī, () and other people from the ruling class. Once Ānanda taught a number of King Udena ()'s concubines. They were so impressed by Ānanda's teaching, that they gave him five hundred robes, which Ānanda accepted. Having heard about this, King Udena criticized Ānanda for being greedy; Ānanda responded by explaining how every single robe was carefully used, reused and recycled by the monastic community, prompting the king to offer another five hundred robes. Ānanda also had a role in the Buddha's visit to Vesālī. In this story, the Buddha taught the well-known text "Ratana Sutta" to Ānanda, which Ānanda then recited in Vesālī, ridding the city from illness, drought and evil spirits in the process. Another well-known passage in which the Buddha taught Ānanda is the passage about spiritual friendship (). In this passage, Ānanda stated that spiritual friendship is half of the holy life; the Buddha corrected Ānanda, stating that such friendship is the entire holy life. In summary, Ānanda worked as an assistant, intermediary and a mouthpiece, helping the Buddha in many ways, and learning his teachings in the process.
Ānanda was attractive in appearance. A Pāli account related that a "bhikkhunī" (nun) became enamored with Ānanda, and pretended to be ill to have Ānanda visit her. When she realized the error of her ways, she confessed her mistakes to Ānanda. Other accounts relate that a low-caste woman called Prakṛti (also known in China as ) fell in love with Ānanda, and persuaded her mother Mātaṅgī to use a black magic spell to enchant him. This succeeded, and Ānanda was lured into her house, but came to his senses and called upon the help of the Buddha. The Buddha then taught Prakṛti to reflect on the repulsive qualities of the human body, and eventually Prakṛti was ordained as a "bhikkhunī", giving up her attachment for Ānanda. In an East Asian version of the story in the "Śūraṃgamasūtra", the Buddha sent Mañjuśrī to help Ānanda, who used recitation to counter the magic charm. The Buddha then continued by teaching Ānanda and other listeners about the Buddha nature.
In the role of mediator between the Buddha and the lay communities, Ānanda sometimes made suggestions to the Buddha for amendments in the monastic discipline. Most importantly, the early texts attribute the inclusion of women in the early "saṅgha" (monastic order) to Ānanda. Fifteen years after the Buddha's enlightenment, his foster mother Mahāpajāpatī came to see him to ask him to be ordained as the first Buddhist "bhikkhunī". Initially, the Buddha refused this. Five years later, Mahāpajāpatī came to request the Buddha again, this time with a following of other Sākiya women, including the Buddha's former wife Yasodharā (). They had walked , looked dirty, tired and depressed, and Ānanda felt pity for them. Ānanda therefore confirmed with the Buddha whether women could become enlightened as well. Although the Buddha conceded this, he did not allow the Sākiya women to be ordained yet. Ānanda then discussed with the Buddha how Mahāpajāpatī took care of him during his childhood, after the death of his real mother. Ānanda also mentioned that previous Buddhas had also ordained "bhikkhunīs". In the end, the Buddha allowed the Sākiya women to be ordained, being the start of the "bhikkhunī" order. Ānanda had Mahāpajāpati ordained by her acceptance of a set of rules, set by the Buddha. These came to be known as the "garudhamma", and they describe the subordinate relation of the "bhikkhunī" community to that of the "bhikkhus" or monks. Scholar of Asian religions Reiko Ohnuma argues that the debt the Buddha had toward his foster-mother Mahāpajāpati may have been the main reason for his concessions with regard to the establishment of a "bhikkhunī" order.
Many scholars interpret this account to mean that the Buddha was reluctant in allowing women to be ordained, and that Ānanda successfully persuaded the Buddha to change his mind. For example, Indologist and translator I.B. Horner wrote that "this is the only instance of his [the Buddha] being over-persuaded in argument". However, some scholars interpret the Buddha's initial refusal rather as a test of resolve, following a widespread pattern in the Pāli Canon and in monastic procedure of repeating a request three times before final acceptance. Some also argue that the Buddha was believed by Buddhists to be omniscient, and therefore is unlikely to have been depicted as changing his mind. Other scholars argue that other passages in the texts indicate the Buddha intended all along to establish a "bhikkhunī" order. Regardless, during the acceptance of women into the monastic order, the Buddha told Ānanda that the Buddha's Dispensation would last shorter because of this. At the time, the Buddhist monastic order consisted of wandering celibate males, without many monastic institutions. Allowing women to join the Buddhist celibate life might have led to dissension, as well as temptation between the sexes. The "garudhamma", however, were meant to fix these problems, and prevent the dispensation from being curtailed.
There are some chronological discrepancies in the traditional account of the setting up of the "bhikkhunī" order. According to the Pāli and Mahīśasaka textual traditions, the "bhikkhunī" order was set up five years after the Buddha's enlightenment, but, according to most textual traditions, Ānanda only became attendant twenty years after the Buddha's enlightenment. Furthermore, Mahāpajāpati was the Buddha's foster mother, and must therefore have been considerably older than him. However, after the "bhikkhunī" order was established, Mahāpajāpati still had many audiences with the Buddha, as reported in Pāli and Chinese Early Buddhist Texts. Because of this and other reasons, it could be inferred that establishment of the "bhikkhunī" order actually took place "early" in the Buddha's ministry. If this is the case, Ānanda's role in establishing the order becomes less likely. Some scholars therefore interpret the names in the account, such as "Ānanda" and "Mahāpajāpati", as symbols, representing groups rather than specific individuals.
According to the texts, Ānanda's role in founding the "bhikkhunī" order made him popular with the "bhikkhunī" community. Ānanda often taught "bhikkhunīs", often encouraged women to ordain, and when he was criticized by the monk Mahākassapa, several "bhikkhunīs" tried to defend him. According to Indologist Oskar von Hinüber, Ānanda's pro-"bhikkhunī" attitude may well be the reason why there was frequent discussion between Ānanda and Mahākassapa, eventually leading Mahākasapa to charge Ānanda with several offenses during the First Buddhist Council. Von Hinüber further argues that the establishment of the "bhikkhunī" order may have well been initiated by Ānanda the Buddha's death, and the introduction of Mahāpajāpati as the person requesting to do so is merely a literary device to connect the ordination of women with the person of the Buddha, through his foster mother. Von Hinüber concludes this based on several patterns in the early texts, including the apparent distance between the Buddha and the "bhikkhunī" order, and the frequent discussions and differences of opinion that take place between Ānanda and Mahākassapa. Some scholars have seen merits in von Hinüber's argument with regard to the pro- and anti-factions, but as of 2017, no definitive evidence has been found for the theory of establishment of the "bhikkhuni" order after the Buddha's death. Buddhist studies scholar Bhikkhu Anālayo has responded to most of von Hinuber's arguments, writing: "Besides requiring too many assumptions, this hypothesis conflicts with nearly 'all the evidence preserved in the texts together'", arguing that it was monastic discipline that created a distance between the Buddha and the "bhikkhunīs", and even so, there were many places in the early texts where the Buddha did address "bhikkhunīs" directly.
Despite his long association with and close proximity to the Buddha, the texts describe that Ānanda had not become enlightened yet. Because of that, a fellow monk Udāyī () ridiculed Ānanda. However, the Buddha reprimanded Udāyī in response, saying that Ānanda would certainly be enlightened in this life.
The Pāli "Mahā-parinibbāna Sutta" related the last year-long trip the Buddha took with Ānanda from Rājagaha () to the small town of Kusināra () before the Buddha died there. Before reaching Kusināra, the Buddha spent the retreat during the monsoon (, ) in Veḷugāma (), getting out of the Vesālī area which suffered from famine. Here, the eighty-year old Buddha expressed his wish to speak to the "saṅgha" once more. The Buddha had grown seriously ill in Vesālī, much to the concern of some of his disciples. Ānanda understood that the Buddha wished to leave final instructions before his death. The Buddha stated, however, that he had already taught everything needed, without withholding anything secret as a teacher with a "closed fist" would. He also impressed upon Ānanda that he did not think the "saṅgha" should be reliant too much on a leader, not even himself. He then continued with the well-known statement to take his teaching as a refuge, and oneself as a refuge, without relying on any other refuge, also after he would be gone. Bareau argued that this is one of the most ancient parts of the text, found in slight variation in five early textual traditions:
The same text contains an account in which the Buddha, at numerous occasions, gave a hint that he could prolong his life to a full eon through a supernatural accomplishment, but this was a power that he would have to be to exercise. Ānanda was distracted, however, and did not take the hint. Later, Ānanda did make the request, but the Buddha replied that it was already too late, as he would die soon. Māra, the Buddhist personification of evil, had visited the Buddha, and the Buddha had decided to die in three months. When Ānanda heard this, he wept. The Buddha consoled him, however, pointing out that Ānanda had been a great attendant, being sensitive to the needs of different people. If he was earnest in his efforts, he would attain enlightenment soon. He then pointed out to Ānanda that all conditioned things are impermanent: all people must die.
In the final days of the Buddha's life, the Buddha traveled to Kusināra. The Buddha had Ānanda prepare a place for lying down between two sal trees, the same type of tree under which the mother of the Buddha gave birth. The Buddha then had Ānanda invite the Malla clan from Kusināra to pay their final respects. Having returned, Ānanda asked the Buddha what should be done with his body after his death, and he replied that it should be cremated, giving detailed instructions on how this should be done. Since the Buddha prohibited Ānanda from being involved himself, but rather had him instruct the Mallas to perform the rituals, these instructions have by many scholars been interpreted as a prohibition that monastics should not be involved in funerals or worship of "stūpas" (structures with relics). Buddhist studies scholar Gregory Schopen has pointed out, however, that this prohibition only held for Ānanda, and only with regard to the Buddha's funeral ceremony. It has also been shown that the instructions on the funeral are quite late in origin, in both composition and insertion into the text, and are not found in parallel texts, apart from the "Mahāparinibbāna Sutta". Ānanda then continued by asking how devotees should honor the Buddha after his death. The Buddha responded by listing four important places in his life that people could pay their respects to, which later became the four main places of Buddhist pilgrimage. Before the Buddha died, Ānanda recommended the Buddha to move to a more meaningful city instead, but the Buddha pointed out that the town was once a great capital. Ānanda then asked who will be next teacher after the Buddha would be gone, but the Buddha replied that his teaching and discipline would be the teacher instead. This meant that decisions should be made by reaching consensus within the "saṅgha", and more generally, that now the time had come for the Buddhist monastics and devotees to take the Buddhist texts as authority, now that the Buddha was dying.
The Buddha gave several instructions before his death, including a directive that his former charioteer Channa () be shunned by his fellow monks, to humble his pride. In his final moments, the Buddha asked if anyone had any questions they wished to pose to him, as a final chance to allay any doubts. When no-one responded, Ānanda expressed joy that all of the Buddha's disciples present had attained a level beyond doubts about the Buddha's teaching. However, the Buddha pointed out that Ānanda spoke out of faith and not out of meditative insighta final reproach. The Buddha added that, of all the five hundred monks that are surrounding him now, even the "latest" or "most backward" () had attained the initial stage of "sotapanna". Meant as an encouragement, the Buddha was referring to Ānanda. During the Buddha's "final Nirvana", Anuruddha was able to use his meditative powers to understand which stages the Buddha underwent before attaining final Nirvana. However, Ānanda was unable to do so, indicating his lesser spiritual maturity. After the Buddha's death, Ānanda recited several verses, expressing a sense of urgency (), deeply moved by the events and their bearing: "Terrible was the quaking, men's hair stood on end, / When the all-accomplished Buddha passed away."
Shortly after the council, Ānanda brought the message with regard to the Buddha's directive to Channa personally. Channa was humbled and changed his ways, attained enlightenment, and the penalty was withdrawn by the "saṅgha". Ānanda traveled to Sāvatthī (), where he was met with a sad populace, who he consoled with teachings on impermanence. After that, Ānanda went to the quarters of the Buddha and went through the motions of the routine he formerly performed when the Buddha was still alive, such as preparing water and cleaning the quarters. He then saluted and talked to the quarters as though the Buddha was still there. The Pāli commentaries state that Ānanda did this out of devotion, but also because he was "not yet free from the passions".
According to the texts, the First Buddhist Council was held in Rājagaha. In the first "vassa" after the Buddha had died, the presiding monk Mahākassapa () called upon Ānanda to recite the discourses he had heard, as a representative on this council. There was a rule issued that only enlightened disciples ("arahants") were allowed to attend the council, to prevent mental afflictions from clouding the disciples' memories. Ānanda had, however, not attained enlightenment yet, in contrast with the rest of the council, consisting of 499 "arahants". Mahākassapa therefore did not allow Ānanda to attend yet. Although he knew that Ānanda's presence in the council was required, he did not want to be biased by allowing an exception to the rule. The Mūlasarvāstivāda tradition adds that Mahākassapa initially allowed Ānanda to join as a sort of servant assisting during the council, but then was forced to remove him when the disciple Anuruddha saw that Ānanda was not yet enlightened.
Ānanda felt humiliated, but was prompted to focus his efforts to reach enlightenment before the council started. The Mūlasarvāstivāda texts add that he felt motivated when he remembered the Buddha's words that he should be his own refuge, and when he was consoled and advised by Anuruddha and Vajjiputta, the latter being his attendant. On the night before the event, he tried hard to attain enlightenment. After a while, Ānanda took a break and decided to lie down for a rest. He then attained enlightenment right there, right then, halfway between standing and lying down. Thus, Ānanda was known as the disciple who attained awakening "in none of the four traditional poses" (walking, standing, sitting, or lying down). The next morning, to prove his enlightenment, Ānanda performed a supernatural accomplishment by diving into the earth and appearing on his seat at the council (or, according to some sources, by flying through the air). Scholars such as Buddhologist André Bareau and scholar of religion Ellison Banks Findly have been skeptical about many details in this account, including the number of participants on the council, and the account of Ānanda's enlightenment just before the council. Regardless, today, the story of Ānanda's struggle on the evening before the council is still told among Buddhists as a piece of advice in the practice of meditation: neither to give up, nor to interpret the practice too rigidly.
The First Council began when Ānanda was consulted to recite the discourses and to determine which were authentic and which were not. Mahākassapa asked of each discourse that Ānanda listed where, when, and to whom it was given, and at the end of this, the assembly agreed that Ānanda's memories and recitations were correct, after which the discourse collection (, ) was considered finalized and closed. Ānanda therefore played a crucial role in this council, and texts claim he remembered 84,000 teaching topics, among which 82,000 taught by the Buddha and another 2,000 taught by disciples. Many early Buddhist discourses started with the words "Thus have I heard" (, ), which according to most Buddhist traditions, were Ānanda's words, indicating that he, as the person reporting the text (), had first-hand experience and did not add anything to it. Thus, the discourses Ānanda remembered later became the collection of discourses of the Canon, and according to the Haimavāta, Dharmaguptaka and Sarvāstivāda textual traditions (and implicitly, post-canonical Pāli chronicles), the collection of Abhidhamma ("Abhidhamma Piṭaka") as well. Scholar of religion Ronald Davidson notes, however, that this is not preceded by any account of Ānanda learning Abhidhamma. According to some later Mahāyāna accounts, Ānanda also assisted in reciting Mahāyāna texts, held in a different place in Rājagaha, but in the same time period. The Pāli commentaries state that after the council, when the tasks for recitation and memorizing the texts were divided, Ānanda and his pupils were given the task to remember the Dīgha Nikāya.
During the same council, Ānanda was charged for an offense by members of the "saṅgha" for having enabled women to join the monastic order. Besides this, he was charged for having forgotten to request the Buddha to specify which offenses of monastic discipline could be disregarded; for having stepped on the Buddha's robe; for having allowed women to honor the Buddha's body after his death, which was not properly dressed, and during which his body was sullied by their tears; and for having failed to ask the Buddha to continue to live on. Ānanda did not acknowledge these as offenses, but he conceded to do a formal confession anyway, "... in faith of the opinion of the venerable elder monks"Ānanda wanted to prevent disruption in the "saṅgha". With regard to having women ordained, Ānanda answered that he had done this with great effort, because Mahāpajāpati was the Buddha's foster-mother who had long provided for him. With regard to not requesting the Buddha to continue to live, many textual traditions have Ānanda respond by saying he was distracted by Māra, though one early Chinese text has Ānanda reply he did not request the Buddha to prolong his life, for fear that this would interfere with the next Buddha Maitreya's ministry.
According to the Pāli tradition, the charges were laid after Ānanda had become enlightened and done all the recitations; but the Mūlasarvāstivāda tradition has it that the charges were laid before Ānanda became enlightened and started the recitations. In this version, when Ānanda heard that he was banned from the council, he objected that he had not done anything that went against the teaching and discipline of the Buddha. Mahākassapa then listed seven charges to counter Ānanda's objection. The charges were similar to the five given in Pāli. Other textual traditions list slightly different charges, amounting to a combined total of eleven charges, some of which are only mentioned in one or two textual traditions. Considering that an enlightened disciple was seen to have overcome all faults, it seems more likely that the charges were laid before Ānanda's attainment than after.
Indologists von Hinüber and Jean Przyluski argue that the account of Ānanda being charged with offenses during the council indicate tensions between competing early Buddhist schools, i.e. schools that emphasized the discourses (, ) and schools that emphasized monastic discipline. These differences have affected the scriptures of each tradition: e.g. the Pāli and Mahīśāsaka textual traditions portray a Mahākassapa that is more critical of Ānanda than that the Sarvāstivāda tradition depicts him, reflecting a preference for discipline above discourse on the part of the former traditions, and a preference for discourse for the latter. Another example is the recitations during the First Council. The Pāli texts state that Upāli, the person who was responsible for the recitation of the monastic discipline, recited Ānanda does: again, monastic discipline above discourse. Analyzing six recensions of different textual traditions of the "Mahāparinibbāna Sutta" extensively, Bareau distinguished two layers in the text, an older and a newer one, the former belonging to the compilers that emphasized discourse, the latter to the ones that emphasized discipline; the former emphasizing the figure of Ānanda, the latter Mahākassapa. He further argued that the passage on Māra obstructing the Buddha was inserted in the fourth century BCE, and that Ānanda was blamed for Māra's doing by inserting the passage of Ānanda's forgetfulness in the third century BCE. The passage in which the Buddha was ill and reminded Ānanda to be his own refuge, on the other hand, Bareau regarded as very ancient, pre-dating the passages blaming Māra and Ānanda. In conclusion, Bareau, Przyluski and Horner argued that the offenses Ānanda were charged with were a later interpolation. Findly disagrees, however, because the account in the texts of monastic discipline fits in with the "Mahāparinibbāna Sutta" and with Ānanda's character as generally depicted in the texts.
Tradition states that the First Council lasted for seven months. Scholars doubt, however, whether the entire canon was really recited during the First Council, because the early texts contain different accounts on important subjects such as meditation. It may be, though, that early versions were recited of what is now known as the "Vinaya-piṭaka" and "Sutta-piṭaka". Nevertheless, many scholars, from the late 19th century onward, have considered the historicity of the First Council improbable. Some scholars, such as orientalists Louis de La Vallée-Poussin and D.P. Minayeff, thought there must have been assemblies after the Buddha's death, but considered only the main characters and some events before or after the First Council historical. Other scholars, such as Bareau and Indologist Hermann Oldenberg, considered it likely that the account of the First Council was written after the Second Council, and based on that of the Second, since there were not any major problems to solve after the Buddha's death, or any other need to organize the First Council. Much material in the accounts, and even more so in the more developed later accounts, deal with Ānanda as the unsullied intermediary who passes on the legitimate teaching of the Buddha. On the other hand, archaeologist Louis Finot, Indologist E. E. Obermiller and to some extent Indologist Nalinaksha Dutt thought the account of the First Council was authentic, because of the correspondences between the Pāli texts and the Sanskrit traditions. Indologist Richard Gombrich, following Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali's arguments, states that "it makes good sense to believe ... that large parts of the Pali Canon do preserve for us the "Buddha-vacana", 'the Buddha's words', transmitted to us via his disciple Ānanda and the First Council".
Ānanda was recognized as one of the most important disciples of the Buddha. In the lists of the disciples given in the "Aṅguttara Nikāya" and "Saṃyutta Nikāya", each of the disciples is declared to be foremost in some quality. Ānanda is mentioned more often than any other disciple: he is named foremost in conduct, in attention to others, in power of memory, in erudition and in resoluteness. Ānanda was the subject of a sermon of praise delivered by the Buddha just before the Buddha's death, as described in the "Mahāparinibbāna Sutta": it is a sermon about a man who is kindly, unselfish, popular, and thoughtful toward others. In the texts he is depicted as compassionate in his relations with lay people, a compassion he learnt from the Buddha. The Buddha relays that both monastics and lay people were pleased to see Ānanda, and were pleased to hear him recite and teach the Buddha's teaching. Moreover, Ānanda was known for his organizational skills, assisting the Buddha with secretary-like duties. In many ways, Ānanda did not only serve the personal needs of the Buddha, but also the needs of the still young, growing institute of the "saṅgha".
Moreover, because of his ability to remember the many teachings of the Buddha, he is described as foremost in "having heard much" (, , ). Ānanda was known for his exceptional memory, which is essential in helping him to remember the Buddha's teachings. He also taught other disciples to memorize Buddhist doctrine. For these reasons, Ānanda became known as the "Treasurer of the Dhamma" (, ), "Dhamma" () referring to the doctrine of the Buddha. Being the person who had accompanied the Buddha throughout a great part of his life, Ānanda was in many ways the living memory of the Buddha, without which the "saṅgha" would be much worse off. Besides his memory skills, Ānanda also stood out in that, as the Buddha's cousin, he dared to ask the Buddha direct questions. For example, after the death of Mahāvira and the depicted subsequent conflicts among the Jain community, Ānanda asked the Buddha how such problems could be prevented after the Buddha's death. However, Findly argues that Ānanda's duty to memorize the Buddha's teachings accurately and without distortion, was "both a gift and a burden". Ānanda was able to remember many discourses verbatim, but this also went hand-in-hand with a habit of not reflecting on those teachings, being afraid that reflection might distort the teachings as he heard them. At multiple occasions, Ānanda was warned by other disciples that he should spend less time on conversing to lay people, and more time on his own practice. Even though Ānanda regularly practiced meditation for long hours, he was less experienced in meditative concentration than other leading disciples. Thus, judgment of Ānanda's character depends on whether one judges his accomplishments as a monk or his accomplishments as an attendant, and person memorizing the discourses.
From a literary and pedagogical point of view, Ānanda often functioned as a kind of foil in the texts, being an unenlightened disciple attending to an enlightened Buddha. Because the run-of the-mill person could identify with Ānanda, the Buddha could through Ānanda convey his teachings to the mass easily. Ānanda's character was in many ways a contradiction to that of the Buddha: being unenlightened and someone who made mistakes. At the same time, however, he was completely devoted to service to the Buddha. The Buddha is depicted in the early texts as both a father and a teacher to Ānanda, stern but compassionate. Ānanda was very fond of and attached to the Buddha, willing to give his life for him. He mourned the deaths of both the Buddha and Sāriputta, with whom he enjoyed a close friendship: in both cases Ānanda was very shocked. Ānanda's faith in the Buddha, however, constituted more of a faith in a person, especially the Buddha's person, as opposed to faith in the Buddha's teaching. This is a pattern which comes back in the accounts which lead to the offenses Ānanda was charged with during the First Council. Moreover, Ānanda's weaknesses described in the texts were that he was sometimes slow-witted and lacked mindfulness, which became noticeable because of his role as attendant to the Buddha: this involved minor matters like deportment, but also more important matters, such as ordaining a man with no future as a pupil, or disturbing the Buddha at the wrong time. For example, one time Mahākassapa chastised Ānanda in strong words, criticizing the fact that Ānanda was travelling with a large following of young monks who appeared untrained and who had built up a bad reputation. In another episode described in a Sarvāstivāda text, Ānanda is the only disciple who was willing to teach psychic powers to Devadatta, who later would use these in an attempt to destroy the Buddha. According to a Mahīśāsaka text, however, when Devadatta had turned against the Buddha, Ānanda was not persuaded by him, and voted against him in a formal meeting. Ānanda's late spiritual growth is much discussed in Buddhist texts, and the general conclusion is that Ānanda was slower than other disciples due to his worldly attachments and his attachment to the person of the Buddha, both of which were rooted in his mediating work between the Buddha and the lay communities.
After the Buddha's death, some sources say Ānanda stayed mostly in the West of India, in the area of Kosambī (), where he taught most of his pupils. Other sources say he stayed in the monastery at Veḷuvana (). Several pupils of Ānanda became well-known in their own right. According to post-canonical Sanskrit sources such as the Divyavadāna and the Aśokavadāna, before the Buddha's death, the Buddha confided to Ānanda that the latter's student Majjhantika () would travel to Udyāna, Kashmir, to bring the teaching of the Buddha there. Mahākassapa made a prediction that later would come true that another of Ānanda's future pupils, Sāṇavāsī (), would make many gifts to the "saṅgha" at Mathurā, during a feast held from profits of successful business. After this event, Ānanda would successfully persuade Sāṇavāsī to become ordained and be his pupil. Ānanda later persuaded Sāṇavāsī by pointing out that the latter had now made many material gifts, but had not given "the gift of the Dhamma". When asked for explanation, Ānanda replied that Sāṇavāsī would give the gift of Dhamma by becoming ordained as a monk, which was reason enough for Sāṇavāsī to make the decision to get ordained.
Though no Early Buddhist Text provides a date for Ānanda's death, according to the Chinese pilgrim monk Faxian (337422 CE), Ānanda went on to live 120 years. Following the later timeline, however, Ānanda may have lived to 7585 years. Buddhist studies scholar L. S. Cousins dated Ānanda's death twenty years after the Buddha's.
Ānanda was teaching till the end of his life. According to Mūlasarvāstivāda sources, Ānanda heard a young monk recite a verse incorrectly, and advised him. When the monk reported this to his teacher, the latter objected that "Ānanda has grown old and his memory is impaired ..." This prompted Ānanda to attain final Nirvana. He passed on the "custody of the [Buddha's] doctrine" to his pupil Sāṇavāsī and left for the river Ganges. However, according to Pāli sources, when Ānanda was about to die, he decided to spend his final moments in Vesālī instead, and traveled to the river Rohīni. The Mūlasarvāstivāda version expands and says that before reaching the river, he met with a seer called Majjhantika (following the prediction earlier) and five hundred of his followers, who converted to Buddhism. Some sources add that Ānanda passed the Buddha's message on to him. When Ānanda was crossing the river, he was followed by King Ajāsattu (), who wanted to witness his death and was interested in his remains as relics. Ānanda had once promised Ajāsattu that he would let him know when he would die, and accordingly, Ānanda had informed him. On the other side of the river, however, a group of Licchavis from Vesālī awaited him for the same reason. In the Pāli, there were also two parties interested, but the two parties were the Sākiyan and the Koliyan clans instead. Ānanda realized that his death on either side of the river could anger one of the parties involved. Through a supernatural accomplishment, he therefore surged into the air to levitate and meditate in mid-air, making his body go up in fire, with his relics landing on both banks of the river, or in some versions of the account, splitting in four parts. In this way, Ānanda had pleased all the parties involved. In some other versions of the account, including the Mūlasarvāstivāda version, his death took place on a barge in the middle of the river, however, instead of in mid-air. The remains were divided in two, following the wishes of Ānanda.
Majjhantika later successfully carried out the mission following the Buddha's prediction. The latter's pupil Upagupta was described to be the teacher of King Aśoka (3rd century BCE). Together with four or five other pupils of Ānanda, Sāṇavāsī and Majjhantika formed the majority of the Second Council, with Majjhantika being Ānanda's last pupil. Post-canonical Pāli sources add that Sāṇavāsī had a leading role in the Third Buddhist Council as well. Although little is historically certain, Cousins thought it likely at least one of the leading figures on the Second Council was a pupil of Ānanda, as nearly all the textual traditions mention a connection with Ānanda.
Ajāsattu is said to have built a "stūpa" on top of the Ānanda's relics, at the river Rohīni, or according to some sources, the Ganges; the Licchavis had also built a "stūpa" at their side of the river. The Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang (60264 CE) later visited "stūpas" on both sides of the river Rohīni. Faxian also reported having visited "stūpas" dedicated to Ānanda at the river Rohīni, but also in Mathurā. Moreover, according to the Mūlasarvāstivāda version of the Saṃyukta Āgama, King Aśoka visited and made the most lavish offerings he ever made to a "stūpa": He explained to his ministers that he did this because "[t]he body of the Tathāgata is the body of dharma(s), pure in nature. He [Ānanda] was able to retain it/them all; for this reason the offerings [to him] surpass [all others]""body of dharma" here referred to the Buddha's teachings as a whole.
In Early Buddhist Texts, Ānanda had reached final Nirvana and would no longer be reborn. But, in contrast with the early texts, according to the Mahāyāna Lotus Sūtra, Ānanda would be born as a Buddha in the future. He would accomplish this slower than the present Buddha, Gotama Buddha, had accomplished this, because Ānanda aspired to becoming a Buddha by applying "great learning". Because of this long trajectory and great efforts, however, his enlightenment would be extraordinary and with great splendor.
Ānanda is depicted as an eloquent speaker, who often taught about the self and about meditation. There are numerous Buddhist texts attributed to Ānanda, including the "Atthakanāgara Sutta", about meditation methods to attain Nirvana; a version of the "Bhaddekaratta Sutta" (, ), about living in the present moment; the "Sekha Sutta", about the higher training of a disciple of the Buddha; the "Subha Suttanta", about the practices the Buddha inspired others to follow. In the "Gopaka-Mogallānasutta", a conversation took place between Ānanda, the brahmin Gopaka-Mogallāna and the minister Vassakara, the latter being the highest official of the Magadha region. During this conversation, which occurred shortly after the Buddha's death, Vassakara asked whether it was decided yet who would succeed the Buddha. Ānanda replied that no such successor had been appointed, but that the Buddhist community took the Buddha's teaching and discipline as a refuge instead. Furthermore, the "saṅgha" did not have the Buddha as a master anymore, but they would honor those monks who were virtuous and trustworthy. Besides these "suttas", a section of the "Theragāthā" is attributed to Ānanda. Even in the texts attributed to the Buddha himself, Ānanda is sometimes depicted giving a name to a particular text, or suggesting a simile to the Buddha to use in his teachings.
In East Asian Buddhism, Ānanda is considered on of the ten principal disciples. In many Indian Sanskrit and East Asian texts, Ānanda is considered the second patriarch of the lineage which transmitted the teaching of the Buddha, with Mahākassapa being the first and Majjhantika or Saṇavāsī being the third. There is an account dating back from the Sarvāstivāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda textual traditions which states that before Mahākassapa died, he bestowed the Buddha's teaching on Ānanda as a formal passing on of authority, telling Ānanda to pass the teaching on to Ānanda's pupil Saṇavāsī. Later, just before Ānanda died, he did as Mahākassapa had told him to. Buddhist studies scholars Akira Hirakawa and Bibhuti Baruah have expressed skepticism about the teacherstudent relationship between Mahākassapa and Ānanda, arguing that there was discord between the two, as indicated in the early texts. Regardless, it is clear from the texts that a relationship of transmission of teachings is meant, as opposed to an "upajjhāya"student relationship in a lineage of ordination: no source indicates Mahākassapa was Ānanda's "upajjhāya". In Mahāyāna iconography, Ānanda is often depicted flanking the Buddha at the right side, together with Mahākassapa at the left. In Theravāda iconography, however, Ānanda is usually not depicted in this manner, and the motif of transmission of the Dhamma through a list of patriarchs is not found in Pāli sources.
Because Ānanda was instrumental in founding the "bhikkhunī" community, he has been honored by "bhikkhunīs" for this throughout Buddhist history. The earliest traces of this can be found in the writings of Faxian and Xuan Zang, who reported that "bhikkhunīs" made offerings to a "stūpa" in Ānanda's honor during celebrations and observance days. On a similar note, in 5th6th-century China and 10th-century Japan, Buddhist texts were composed recommending women to uphold the semi-monastic eight precepts in honor and gratitude of Ānanda. In Japan, this was done through the format of a penance ritual called "keka" (). By the 13th century, in Japan a cult-like interest for Ānanda had developed in a number of convents, in which images and "stūpas" were used and ceremonies were held in his honor. Presently, opinion among scholars is divided as to whether Ānanda's cult among "bhikkhunīs" was an expression of their dependence on male monastic tradition, or the opposite, an expression of their legitimacy and independence.
Pāli Vinaya texts attribute the design of the Buddhist monk's robe to Ānanda. As Buddhism prospered, more laypeople started to donate expensive cloth for robes, which put the monks at risk for theft. To decrease its commercial value, monks therefore cut up the cloth offered, before they sew a robe from it. The Buddha asked Ānanda to think of a model for a Buddhist robe, made from small pieces of cloth. Ānanda designed a standard robe model, based on the rice fields of Magadha, which were divided in sections by banks of earth. Another tradition that is connected to Ānanda is "paritta" recitation. Theravāda Buddhists explain that the custom of sprinkling water during "paritta" chanting originates in Ānanda's visit to Vesālī, when he recited the "Ratana Sutta" and sprinkled water from his alms bowl. A third tradition sometimes attributed to Ānanda is the use of Bodhi trees in Buddhism. It is described in the text "Kāliṅgabodhi Jātaka" that Ānanda planted a Bodhi tree as a symbol of the Buddha's enlightenment, to give people the chance to pay their respects to the Buddha. This tree and shrine came to be known as the Ānanda Bodhi Tree, said to have grown from a seed from the original Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha is depicted to have attained enlightenment. Many of this type of Bodhi Tree shrines in Southeast Asia were erected following this example. Presently, the Ānanda Bodhi Tree is sometimes identified with a tree at the ruins of Jetavana, Sāvatthi, based on the records of Faxian.
Between 1856 and 1858 Richard Wagner wrote a draft for an opera libretto based on the legend about Ānanda and the low-caste girl Prakṛti. He left only a fragmentary prose sketch of a work to be called "Die Sieger", but the topic inspired his later opera "Parsifal". Furthermore, the draft was used by composer Jonathan Harvey in his 2007 opera Wagner Dream. In Wagner's version of the legend, which he based on orientalist Eugène Burnouf's translations, the magical spell of Prakṛti's mother does not work on Ānanda, and Prakṛti turns to the Buddha to explain her desires for Ānanda. The Buddha replies that a union between Prakṛti and Ānanda is possible, but Prakṛti must agree to the Buddha's conditions. Prakṛti agrees, and it is revealed that the Buddha means something else than she does: he asks Prakṛti to ordain as a "bhikkhunī", and live the celibate life as a kind of sister to Ānanda. At first, Prakṛti weeps in dismay, but after the Buddha explains that her current situation is a result of karma from her previous life, she understands and rejoices in the life of a "bhikkhunī". Apart from the spiritual themes, Wagner also addresses the faults of the caste system by having the Buddha criticize it.
Drawing from Schopenhauer's philosophy, Wagner contrasts desire-driven salvation and true spiritual salvation: by seeking deliverance through the person she loves, Prakṛti only affirms her "will to live" (), which is blocking her from attaining deliverance. By being ordained as a "bhikkhunī" she strives for her spiritual salvation instead. Thus, the early Buddhist account of Mahāpajāpati's ordination is replaced by that of Prakṛti. According to Wagner, by allowing Prakṛti to become ordained, the Buddha also completes his own aim in life: "[H]e regards his existence in the world, whose aim was to benefit all beings, as completed, since he had become able to offer deliverancewithout mediationalso to woman."
The same legend of Ānanda and Prakṛti was made into a short prose play by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, called "Chandalika". "Chandalika" deals with the themes of spiritual conflict, caste and social equality, and contains a strong critique of Indian society. Just like in the traditional account, Prakṛti falls in love with Ānanda, after he gives her self-esteem by accepting a gift of water from her. Prakṛti's mother casts a spell to enchant Ānanda. In Tagore's play, however, Prakṛti later regrets what she has done and has the spell revoked. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1735 |
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras (; , "Anaxagoras", "lord of the assembly"; BC) was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae at a time when Asia Minor was under the control of the Persian Empire, Anaxagoras came to Athens. According to Diogenes Laërtius and Plutarch, in later life he was charged with impiety and went into exile in Lampsacus; the charges may have been political, owing to his association with Pericles, if they were not fabricated by later ancient biographers.
Responding to the claims of Parmenides on the impossibility of change, Anaxagoras described the world as a mixture of primary imperishable ingredients, where material variation was never caused by an absolute presence of a particular ingredient, but rather by its relative preponderance over the other ingredients; in his words, "each one is... most manifestly those things of which there are the most in it". He introduced the concept of "Nous" (Cosmic Mind) as an ordering force, which moved and separated out the original mixture, which was homogeneous, or nearly so.
He also gave a number of novel scientific accounts of natural phenomena. He deduced a correct explanation for eclipses and described the Sun as a fiery mass larger than the Peloponnese, as well as attempting to explain rainbows and meteors.
Anaxagoras is believed to have enjoyed some wealth and political influence in his native town of Clazomenae. However, he supposedly surrendered this out of a fear that they would hinder his search for knowledge. The Roman author Valerius Maximus preserves a different tradition: Anaxagoras, coming home from a long voyage, found his property in ruin, and said: "If this had not perished, I would have"—a sentence described by Valerius as being "possessed of sought-after wisdom!"
Anaxagoras was a Greek citizen of the Persian Empire and had served in the Persian army; he may have been a member of the Persian regiments that entered mainland Greece during the Greco-Persian Wars. Though this remains uncertain, "it would certainly explain why he came to Athens in the year of Salamis, 480/79 B.C." Anaxagoras is said to have remained in Athens for thirty years. Pericles learned to love and admire him, and the poet Euripides derived from him an enthusiasm for science and humanity.
Anaxagoras brought philosophy and the spirit of scientific inquiry from Ionia to Athens. His observations of the celestial bodies and the fall of meteorites led him to form new theories of the universal order, and to prediction of the impact of meteorites. Plutarch says "Anaxagoras is said to have predicted that if the heavenly bodies should be loosened by some slip or shake, one of them might be torn away, and might plunge and fall down to earth". According to Pliny he was credited with predicting the fall of the meteorite in 467. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the Sun, which he described as a mass of blazing metal, larger than the Peloponnese; his theories about eclipses, the Sun and Moon may well have been based on observations of the eclipse of 463 BCE, which was visible in Greece. He was the first to explain that the Moon shines due to reflected light from the Sun. He also said that the Moon had mountains and believed that it was inhabited. The heavenly bodies, he asserted, were masses of stone torn from the Earth and ignited by rapid rotation. He was the first to give a correct explanation of eclipses, and was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories, including the claims that the Sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the Moon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones. He thought the Earth was flat and floated supported by 'strong' air under it and disturbances in this air sometimes caused earthquakes. These speculations made him vulnerable in Athens to a charge of impiety. Diogenes Laërtius reports the story that he was prosecuted by Cleon for impiety, but Plutarch says that Pericles sent his former tutor, Anaxagoras, to Lampsacus for his own safety after the Athenians began to blame him for the Peloponnesian war.
The charges against Anaxagoras may have stemmed from his denial of the existence of a solar or lunar deity. According to Laërtius, Pericles spoke in defense of Anaxagoras at his trial, . Even so, Anaxagoras was forced to retire from Athens to Lampsacus in Troad (433). He died there in around the year 428. Citizens of Lampsacus erected an altar to Mind and Truth in his memory, and observed the anniversary of his death for many years. They placed over his grave the following inscription: Here Anaxagoras, who in his quest of truth scaled heaven itself, is laid to rest.
Anaxagoras wrote a book of philosophy, but only fragments of the first part of this have survived, through preservation in work of Simplicius of Cilicia in the 6th century AD.
According to Anaxagoras all things have existed in some way from the beginning, but originally they existed in infinitesimally small fragments of themselves, endless in number and inextricably combined throughout the universe. All things existed in this mass, but in a confused and indistinguishable form. There was an infinite number of homogeneous parts () as well as heterogeneous ones.
The work of arrangement, the segregation of like from unlike and the summation of the whole into totals of the same name, was the work of Mind or Reason (). Mind is no less unlimited than the chaotic mass, but it stood pure and independent, a thing of finer texture, alike in all its manifestations and everywhere the same. This subtle agent, possessed of all knowledge and power, is especially seen ruling in all the forms of life. Its first appearance, and the only manifestation of it which Anaxagoras describes, is Motion. It gave distinctness and reality to the aggregates of like parts.
Decrease and growth represent a new aggregation () and disruption (). However, the original intermixture of things is never wholly overcome. Each thing contains in itself parts of other things or heterogeneous elements, and is what it is, only on account of the preponderance of certain homogeneous parts which constitute its character. Out of this process arise the things we see in this world.
Anaxagoras is mentioned by Socrates during his trial in Plato's "Apology". In the Phaedo, Plato portrays Socrates saying of Anaxagoras that as a young man: 'I eagerly acquired his books and read them as quickly as I could'.
In a quote which begins Nathanael West's first book "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" (1931), Marcel Proust's character Bergotte says, "After all, my dear fellow, life, Anaxagoras has said, is a journey."
Anaxagoras appears as a character in "Faust, Part II" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Anaxagoras appears as a character in "The Ionia Sanction", by Gary Corby.
Anaxagoras is referred to and admired by Cyrus Spitama, the hero and narrator of "Creation", by Gore Vidal. The book contains this passage, explaining how Anaxagoras became influential:
William H. Gass begins his novel, "The Tunnel" (1995), with a quote from Anaxagoras: "The descent to hell is the same from every place."
He is also mentioned in Seneca's Natural Questions (Book 4B, originally Book 3: On Clouds, Hail, Snow) It reads: "Why should I too allow myself the same liberty as Anaxagoras allowed himself?"
Dante Alighieri places Anaxagoras in the First Circle of Hell (Limbo) in his "Divine Comedy" ("Inferno", Canto IV, line 118).
Chapter 5 in Book II of De Docta Ignorantia (1440) by Nicholas of Cusa is dedicated to the truth of the sentence "Each thing is in each thing" which he attributes to Anaxagoras.
Footnotes
Citations | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1737 |
Anaxarchus
Anaxarchus (; ; ) was a Greek philosopher of the school of Democritus. Together with Pyrrho, he accompanied Alexander the Great into Asia. The reports of his philosophical views suggest that he was a forerunner of Pyrrhonism. Aelian writes that he was called Eudaemonicus or "Happy Man"().
Anaxarchus was born at Abdera in Thrace. He was the companion and friend of Alexander the Great in his Asiatic campaigns. According to Diogenes Laërtius, in response to Alexander's claim to have been the son of Zeus-Ammon, Anaxarchus pointed to his bleeding wound and remarked, "See the blood of a mortal, not ichor, such as flows from the veins of the immortal gods." Aelian, writes that Anaxarchus laughed at Alexander for making himself a God and said, "The hopes of our God are in a porringer of broth", when the physician prescribed a broth to Alexander.
Plutarch tells a story that at Bactra, in 327 BC in a debate with Callisthenes, he advised all to worship Alexander as a god even during his lifetime, is with greater probability attributed to the Sicilian Cleon.
When Alexander was trying to show that he is divine so that the Greeks and Macedonians would perform proskynesis to him, Anaxarchus said that Alexander could "more justly be considered a god than Dionysus or Heracles" (Arrian, 104).
Diogenes Laërtius says that Nicocreon, the tyrant of Cyprus, commanded him to be pounded to death in a mortar, and that he endured this torture with fortitude and Cicero relates the same story.
Very little is known about his philosophical views. It is thought that he represents a link between the atomism of Democritus, and the skepticism of Pyrrho.
Anaxarchus is said to have studied under Diogenes of Smyrna, whose teachings were said to be the same as those of Democritus' student Protagoras. Diogenes studied under Metrodorus of Chios, who used to declare that he knew nothing, not even the fact that he knew nothing. According to Sextus Empiricus, Anaxarchus "compared existing things to a scene-painting and supposed them to resemble the impressions experienced in sleep or madness." Anaxarchus's student Pyrrho is said to have adopted "a most noble philosophy, … taking the form of agnosticism and suspension of judgement." Anaxarchus is said to have praised Pyrrho's "indifference and sang-froid." Anaxarchus is said to have possessed "fortitude and contentment in life," which earned him the epithet "eudaimonikos" ("fortunate"), which may imply that he held the end of life to be "eudaimonia."
Plutarch reports that he told Alexander the Great that there was an infinite number of worlds, causing the latter to become dejected because he had not yet conquered even one. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1738 |
Anaximenes of Miletus
Anaximenes of Miletus (; ; ) was an Ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher active in the latter half of the 6th century BC. The details of his life are obscure because none of his work has been preserved. Anaximenes' ideas and philosophies are only known today because of comments made by Aristotle and other writers on the history of Greek philosophy.
As one of the three philosophers of the Milesian School, considered the first revolutionary thinkers of the Western world, Anaximenes is best known and identified as a younger friend or student of Anaximander, who was himself taught by Thales. Each philosopher developed a distinct cosmology without completely rejecting their teacher's view of the universe or creating major disagreement between them. Some of Anaximenes' writings apparently survived the Hellenistic Age, but no record of these documents currently exist. Much of his astronomical thought was based on Anaximander's, though he altered Anaximander's astrological ideas to better fit his own philosophical views on physics and the natural world. Like others in his school of thought, Anaximenes practiced material monism; this tendency to identify one specific underlying reality made up of a material thing is what he is principally remembered for today.
Apollodorus of Damascus noted the dates Anaximander was alive in relation to well-known historical events, and estimated Anaximenes' lifespan as having occurred during the same time period in which Cyrus the Great defeated Croesus at the Battle of Thymbra in 546 BC. Anaximenes was the last known Milesian philosopher, as Miletus was captured by the Persian army in 494 BC.
While his predecessors Thales and Anaximander proposed that the "archai" (singular: "arche", meaning the underlying material of the world) were water and the ambiguous substance "apeiron", respectively, Anaximenes asserted that "aer" (“mist”, “vapor”, “air”) was this primary substance of which all natural things are made. By rejecting his teacher's theory based on the concept of discontinuity, Anaximenes took a more empirical approach to understanding the underlying processes of genesis and change on two assumptions: (1) origination retains properties of the "apeiron", but it has an actually tangible state of existence as air that can evolve other substances, and (2) genesis and change depend on a cohesive, mechanistic process known as condensation and rarefaction. Anaximenes believed that air was infinite and divine. He was the first to use the word "pneuma" (“breath of life”) as a synonym for air. One of the only surviving quotes by Anaximenes reads: “Just as our soul...being air holds us together, so "pneuma" and air encompass [and guard] the whole world.” The analogy compared atmospheric air as the divine and human air as souls that animate people. This relation of the macroscopic and microscopic suggested Anaximenes believed there was an overarching principle that regulated all life and behavior. Essentially, he thought air was the primary substance that held the universe together. Interestingly, the Old Testament features a similar analogy to the founding of the world and creation of man, but Anaximenes did not recognize a creator of the universe and did not think of the "pneuma" as a creator to guide man.
The choice of air may seem arbitrary, but Anaximenes based his conclusion on naturally observable phenomena in the processes of rarefaction and condensation. The primary difference in the forms of air as matter was the degree of condensation and density. When air condenses it becomes visible, and according to Anaximenes, the spread-out, invisible, infinite air was condensed to wind, then formed into clouds, which condensed further to produce mist, rain, and other forms of precipitation. As the condensed air cooled, Anaximenes supposed that Earth itself was an early condensate of air—the process continued until the air was condensed enough to form solids like the Earth and ultimately stones. By contrast, Anaximenes was able to visually see how water evaporates into air and based his concept of rarefaction on this observation. According to him, any object that held light was made of fire, and fire was made from the rarefaction of air.
While other philosophers also recognized such transitions in states of matter, Anaximenes was the first to associate the qualitative change in hot/dry and cold/wet pairings with the density of a single material, effectively adding a quantitative dimension to the Milesian monistic system. He attributed condensation to cold/wet air and rarefaction to the interaction of hot/dry air. This concept was the foundation for understanding the existence of different substances, materials, and elements due to their arrangement of atoms and number of subatomic particles.
Since language and communication were very limited in his time, Anaximenes's analogies were key in explaining the uncertain through the certain. For example, he knew for certain that blowing air on his hand with his mouth wide open produced hot air, while blowing on his hand with half-closed lips produced cold air. These observations were key in his postulate that the hot air was due to rarefaction and expansion, whereas the cold air was due to condensation and compression. Although in modern times it is known that this is actually the opposite, Anaximenes was key in arriving at this conclusion. His analogies often connected parallels between man and the cosmos, insinuating that the same natural laws observable on earth applied to the heavens. Over 2000 years later, Isaac Newton proved this to be true. Throughout history, Anaximenes's observations proved helpful to uncover powerful theories, such as quantum physics and chemical properties. By the end of the Milesian philosophy era, there were many questions left unanswered; this sparked the stimulation of Pre-socratic thought to continue through many other notable philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus.
Anaximenes greatest influence is not from his theories of matter, but instead it is from how he thought about these ideas. For instance, his theory of air being the underlying substance was disproved, but when looking at his idea from a fundamental aspect, in which a substance is capable of changing forms, his theory was the first of its kind. This concept of changing of forms is fundamental to scientific thought and shows how his ideas, although not correct, were helpful in the development of modern views. In the time of Anaximenes, phenomena were usually explained with reference to religion and mythology. Anaximenes explained events like rainbows with concrete ideas instead of saying they were the work of a goddess. The explanation Anaximenes gave helped in the transition of attributing the cause of phenomena to scientific events, rather than mythology.
Many similarities to Anaximenes's theories are apparent in Plato’s theory. So much so, that some scholars have said Plato has based his theory of matter on Anaximenes's theory. In Aristotle’s view on Anaximenes, he interprets the theory as the one substance being air, and all other states of matter are different condensations of air. In Plato's interpretation of Anaximenes's theory, he considers the seven states of matter: fire, air, wind, clouds, earth and stone as different densities. Acknowledging that these seven states of matter are different densities shows how the intrinsic properties of the matter have changed, and they are actually different substances. Anaximenes supports this conclusion by his explanation using the concept of felting. Felting is a technological model used to explain condensation, in which wool turns into felt and has new properties. Just as how wind is compressed into clouds in Anaximenes's theory. Without recognizing Anaximenes's influence on Plato, and simply focusing on Anaximenes's influence on Aristotle, Anaximenes's contributions to scientific thought are not fully recognized. Aristotle interpreted Anaximenes's theory as all substance being different manifestations of air. It was Plato's interpretation of Anaximenes's theory that recognized the fundamental changes of air into other substances. And even though Anaximenes's theory was not correct, his influence is apparent in shaping Plato's theory, and it helped to shift the mindset of other thinkers into realizing that fundamental change of substances is possible.
Because Plato's theory does not recognize Anaximenes's by name, some scholars have doubted that Plato's theory was actually influenced by Anaximenes. The proponents of the influence have written that the uniqueness of Anaximenes's theory and obvious similarities to Plato's theory prove the connection. The opposing viewpoint attributes the similarities to mere coincidence. Because none of Anaximenes's work exists today, there is controversy over the amount of influence Anaximenes's had on Plato.
Having concluded that everything in the world is composed of air, Anaximenes used his theory to devise a scheme that explains the origins and nature of the earth and the surrounding celestial bodies. Air felted to create the flat disk of the earth, which he said was table-like and behaved like a leaf floating on air. Anaximenes did not think that stars were floating leaf-like bodies similar to the earth and sun; instead, he thought of stars being similar to nails that are stuck in a transparent shell. In keeping with the prevailing view of celestial bodies as balls of fire in the sky, Anaximenes proposed that the earth let out an exhalation of air that rarefied, ignited and became the stars. While the sun is similarly described as being aflame, it is not composed of rarefied air like the stars, but rather of earth like the moon; its burning comes not from its composition but rather from its rapid motion. Similarly, he considered the moon and sun to be flat and floating on streams of air. In his theory, when the sun sets it does not pass under the earth, but is merely obscured by higher parts of the earth as it circles around and becomes more distant. Anaximenes likens the motion of the sun and the other celestial bodies around the earth to the way that a cap may be turned around the head. Anaximenes believed that the sky was a dome, and day and night are caused by celestial bodies being carried North until they are no longer seen. There is evidence that suggests Anaximenes may have been the first person to distinguish between planets and fixed stars.
Anaximenes used his observations and reasoning to provide causes for other natural phenomena on the earth as well. Earthquakes, he asserted, were the result either of lack of moisture, which causes the earth to break apart because of how parched it is, or of superabundance of water, which also causes cracks in the earth. In either case the earth becomes weakened by its cracks, so that hills collapse and cause earthquakes. Lightning is similarly caused by the violent separation of clouds by the wind, creating a bright, fire-like flash. Rainbows, on the other hand, are formed when densely compressed air is touched by the rays of the sun. These examples show how Anaximenes, like the other Milesian philosophers, looked for the broader picture in nature. They sought unifying causes for diversely occurring events, rather than treating each one on a case-by-case basis, or attributing them to gods or to a personified nature.
The Anaximenes crater on the Moon is named in his honor. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1748 |
Ancus Marcius
Ancus Marcius (–617 BC ; reigned 642–617 BC) was the legendary fourth king of Rome. He was the son of Marcius (whose father, also named Marcius, had been a close friend of Numa Pompilius, who may be identified with Numa Marcius), and Pompilia (daughter of Numa Pompilius). According to Festus, Marcius had the surname of "Ancus" from his crooked arm ('ancus' signifying 'crooked' in Latin). Upon the death of the previous king, Tullus Hostilius, the Roman Senate appointed an interrex, who in turn called a session of the assembly of the people who elected the new king. He is said to have ruled by waging war as Romulus did, while also promoting peace and religion as Numa did.
Ancus Marcius was believed by the Romans to have been the namesake of the Marcii, a Plebeian family.
According to Livy, his first act as king was to order the Pontifex Maximus to copy the text concerning the performance of public ceremonies of religion from the commentaries of Numa Pompilius to be displayed to the public, so that the rites of religion should no longer be neglected or improperly performed. He reinstated the religious edicts that were created by Numa that had been removed when Tullus was king.
He waged war successfully against the Latins, and a number of them were settled on the Aventine Hill. According to Livy the war was commenced by the Latins who anticipated Ancus would follow the pious pursuit of peace adopted by his grandfather, Numa Pompilius. The Latins initially made an incursion on Roman lands. When a Roman embassy sought restitution for the damage, the Latins gave a contemptuous reply. Ancus accordingly declared war on the Latins. The declaration is notable since, according to Livy, it was the first time that the Romans had declared war by means of the rites of the fetials.
Ancus Marcius marched from Rome with a newly levied army and took the Latin town of Politorium (situated near the town of Lanuvium) by storm. Its residents were removed to settle on the Aventine Hill in Rome as new citizens, following the Roman traditions from wars with the Sabines and Albans. When the other Latins subsequently occupied the empty town of Politorium, Ancus took the town again and demolished it. The Latin villages of Tellenae and Ficana were also sacked and demolished.
The war then focused on the Latin town of Medullia. The town had a strong garrison and was well fortified. Several engagements took place outside the town and the Romans were eventually victorious. Ancus returned to Rome with a large amount of loot. More Latins were brought to Rome as citizens and were settled at the foot of the Aventine near the Palatine Hill, by the temple of Murcia.
Ancus Marcius incorporated the Janiculum into the city, fortifying it with a wall and connecting it with the city by a wooden bridge across the Tiber, the Pons Sublicius. To protect the bridge from enemy attacks, Ancus had the end that was facing the Janiculum fortified. Ancus also took over Fidenea to expand Romes influence across the Tiber
On the land side of the city he constructed the Fossa Quiritium, a ditch fortification. He also built Rome's first prison, the Mamertine prison.
He extended Roman territory to the sea, founding the port of Ostia, establishing salt-works around the port, and taking the Silva Maesia, an area of coastal forest north of the Tiber, from the Veientes.
He expanded the temple of Jupiter Feretrius to reflect these territorial successes.
According to a reconstruction of the Fasti Triumphales, Ancus Marcius celebrated at least one triumph, over the Sabines and Veientes.
Ancus Marcius is reported to have died of natural causes in the 24th year of his reign, at the age of 60. He had two sons, one of which would likely take the throne. A member of Ancus' court, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, ensured that Ancus' sons would be out of Rome so he could put together an election where he would gain the support of the Roman people
Ancus Marcius was succeeded by Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, who was ultimately assassinated by the sons of Ancus Marcius. Later, during the Republic and the Empire, the prominent Gens Marcia claimed descent from Ancus Marcius. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1749 |
Andaman Islands
The Andaman Islands form an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal between India, to the west, and Myanmar, to the north and east. Most are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands which are a Union Territory of India, while a small number in the north of the archipelago, including the Coco Islands, belong to Myanmar.
The Andaman Islands are home to the Andamanese, a group of indigenous people that includes a number of tribes, including the Jarawa and Sentinelese tribes. While some of the islands can be visited with permits, entry to others, including North Sentinel Island, is banned by law. The Sentinelese are generally hostile to visitors and have had little contact with any other people. The government protects their right to privacy.
The origin of the name Andaman is disputed and not well known.
In the 13th century, the name of Andaman appears in Chinese as "Yen-to-man" (晏陀蠻) in the book "Zhu Fan Zhi" by Zhao Rugua. In Chapter 38 of the book, "Countries in the Sea", Zhao Rugua specifies that going from Lambri (Sumatra) to Ceylon, it is an unfavourable wind which makes ships drift towards Andaman Islands.
In the 15th century, Andaman was recorded as "An-de-man mountain" (安得蛮山) during the voyages of Zheng He in the Mao Kun map of the Wu Bei Zhi.
The earliest archaeological evidence yet documented goes back some 2,200 years; however, the indications from genetic, cultural and isolation studies suggest that the islands may have been inhabited as early as the Middle Paleolithic ( around 60,000 years ago ). The indigenous Andamanese people appear to have lived on the islands in substantial isolation from that time until the late 18th century.
Rajendra Chola I (1014 to 1042 AD) took over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
In 1789, the Bengal Presidency established a naval base and penal colony on Chatham Island in the southeast bay of Great Andaman. The settlement is now known as Port Blair (after the Bombay Marine lieutenant Archibald Blair who founded it). After two years, the colony was moved to the northeast part of Great Andaman and was named Port Cornwallis after Admiral William Cornwallis. However, there was much disease and death in the penal colony and the government ceased operating it in May 1796.
In 1824, Port Cornwallis was the rendezvous of the fleet carrying the army to the First Burmese War. In the 1830s and 1840s, shipwrecked crews who landed on the Andamans were often attacked and killed by the natives and the islands had a reputation for cannibalism. The loss of the "Runnymede" and the "Briton" in 1844 during the same storm, while transporting goods and passengers between India and Australia, and the continuous attacks launched by the natives, which the survivors fought off, alarmed the British government. In 1855, the government proposed another settlement on the islands, including a convict establishment, but the Indian Rebellion of 1857 forced a delay in its construction. However, because the rebellion gave the British so many prisoners, it made the new Andaman settlement and prison urgently necessary. Construction began in November 1857 at Port Blair using inmates' labour, avoiding the vicinity of a salt swamp that seemed to have been the source of many of the earlier problems at Port Cornwallis.
17 May 1859 was another major day for Andaman. The Battle of Aberdeen was fought between the Great Andamanese tribe and the British. Today, a memorial stands in Andaman water sports complex as a tribute to the people who lost their lives. Fearing foreign invasion and with help from an escaped convict from Cellular Jail, the Great Andamanese stormed the British post, but they were outnumbered and soon suffered heavy loss of life. Later, it was identified that an escaped convict named Doodnath had changed sides and informed the British about the tribe's plans. Today, the tribe has been reduced to some 50 people, with less than 50% of them adults. The government of the Andaman Islands is making efforts to increase the headcount of this tribe.
In 1867, the ship "Nineveh" wrecked on the reef of North Sentinel Island. The 86 survivors reached the beach in the ship's boats. On the third day, they were attacked with iron-tipped spears by naked islanders. One person from the ship escaped in a boat and the others were later rescued by a British Royal Navy ship.
For some time, sickness and mortality were high, but swamp reclamation and extensive forest clearance continued. The Andaman colony became notorious with the murder of the Viceroy Richard Southwell Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo, on a visit to the settlement (8 February 1872), by a Muslim convict, a Pathan from Afghanistan, Sher Ali Afridi. In the same year, the two island groups Andaman and Nicobar, were united under a chief commissioner residing at Port Blair.
From the time of its development in 1858 under the direction of James Pattison Walker, and in response to the mutiny and rebellion of the previous year, the settlement was first and foremost a repository for political prisoners. The Cellular Jail at Port Blair, when completed in 1910, included 698 cells designed for solitary confinement; each cell measured with a single ventilation window above the floor.
The Indians imprisoned here referred to the island and its prison as "Kala Pani" ("black water"); a 1996 film set on the island took that term as its title, "Kaalapani". The number of prisoners who died in this camp is estimated to be in the thousands. Many more died of harsh treatment and the harsh living and working conditions in this camp.
The Viper Chain Gang Jail on Viper Island was reserved for troublemakers, and was also the site of hangings. In the 20th century, it became a convenient place to house prominent members of India's independence movement.
The Andaman and Nicobar islands were occupied by Japan during World War II. The islands were nominally put under the authority of the Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind (Provisional Government of Free India) headed by Subhas Chandra Bose, who visited the islands during the war, and renamed them as Shaheed (Martyr) & Swaraj (Self-rule). On 30 December 1943, during the Japanese occupation, Bose, who was allied with the Japanese, first raised the flag of Indian independence. General Loganathan, of the Indian National Army, was Governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which had been annexed to the Provisional Government. According to Werner Gruhl: "Before leaving the islands, the Japanese rounded up and executed 750 innocents."
At the close of World War II, the British government announced its intention to abolish the penal settlement. The government proposed to employ former inmates in an initiative to develop the island's fisheries, timber, and agricultural resources. In exchange, inmates would be granted return passage to the Indian mainland, or the right to settle on the islands. J H Williams, one of the Bombay Burma Company's senior officials, was dispatched to perform a timber survey of the islands using convict labor. He recorded his findings in 'The Spotted Dear' (1957).
The penal colony was eventually closed on 15 August 1947 when India gained independence. It has since served as a museum to the independence movement.
In April 1998, American photographer John S Callahan organised the first surfing project in the Andamans, starting from Phuket in Thailand with the assistance of Southeast Asia Liveaboards (SEAL), a UK owned dive charter company. With a crew of international professional surfers, they crossed the Andaman Sea on the yacht "Crescent" and cleared formalities in Port Blair. The group proceeded to Little Andaman Island, where they spent ten days surfing several spots for the first time, including Jarawa Point near Hut Bay and the long right reef point at the southwest tip of the island, named Kumari Point. The resulting article in "Surfer Magazine", "Quest for Fire" by journalist Sam George, put the Andaman Islands on the surfing map for the first time. Footage of the waves of the Andaman Islands also appeared in the film "Thicker than Water", shot by documentary filmmaker Jack Johnson, who later achieved worldwide fame as a popular musician. Callahan went on to make several more surfing projects in the Andamans, including a trip to the Nicobar Islands in 1999.
On 26 December 2004, the coast of the Andaman Islands was devastated by a tsunami following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which is the longest recorded earthquake, lasting for between 500 and 600 seconds. Strong oral traditions in the area warned of the importance of moving inland after a quake and is credited with saving many lives. In the aftermath, more than 2,000 people were confirmed dead and more than 4,000 children were orphaned or had lost one parent. At least 40,000 residents were rendered homeless and were moved to relief camps. On 11 August 2009, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck near the Andaman Islands, causing a tsunami warning to go into effect. On 30 March 2010, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck near the Andaman Islands.
In November 2018, John Allen Chau, an American missionary, traveled illegally with the help of local fishermen to the North Sentinel Island of the Andaman Islands chain group on several occasions, despite a travel ban to the island. He is reported to have been killed. A 2018 Restricted Area Permit (RAP) regime relaxed the prohibition on visiting islands in the area, but this plan was intended only to allow researchers and anthropologists, with pre-approved clearance, to visit the Sentinel islands. Chau had no such clearance and knew that his visit was illegal.
According to the immigration officials at Port Blair airport, citizens of China, Pakistan and Afghanistan are not allowed into the Andaman Islands including USA passport holders who were born in those three countries. Dated 15 Jan 2020.
The Andaman Archipelago is an oceanic continuation of the Burmese Arakan Yoma range in the North and of the Indonesian Archipelago in the South. It has 325 islands which cover an area of , with the Andaman Sea to the east between the islands and the coast of Burma. North Andaman Island is south of Burma, although a few smaller Burmese islands are closer, including the three Coco Islands.
The Ten Degree Channel separates the Andamans from the Nicobar Islands to the south. The highest point is located in North Andaman Island (Saddle Peak at ).
The subsoil of the Andaman islands consists essentially of Late Jurassic to Early Eocene ophiolites and sedimentary rocks (argillaceous and algal limestones), deformed by numerous deep faults and thrusts with ultramafic igneous intrusions. There are at least 11 mud volcanoes on the islands.
The climate is typical of tropical islands of similar latitude. It is always warm, but with sea-breezes. Rainfall is irregular, usually dry during the north-east monsoons, and very wet during the south-west monsoons.
The Middle Andamans harbour mostly moist deciduous forests. North Andamans is characterised by the wet evergreen type, with plenty of woody climbers.
The natural vegetation of the Andamans is tropical forest, with mangroves on the coast. The rainforests are similar in composition to those of the west coast of Burma. Most of the forests are evergreen, but there are areas of deciduous forest on North Andaman, Middle Andaman, Baratang and parts of South Andaman Island. The South Andaman forests have a profuse growth of epiphytic vegetation, mostly ferns and orchids.
The Andaman forests are largely unspoiled, despite logging and the demands of the fast-growing population driven by immigration from the Indian mainland. There are protected areas on Little Andaman, Narcondam, North Andaman and South Andaman, but these are mainly aimed at preserving the coast and the marine wildlife rather than the rainforests. Threats to wildlife come from introduced species including rats, dogs, cats and the elephants of Interview Island and North Andaman.
Andaman forests contain 200 or more timber producing species of trees, out of which about 30 varieties are considered to be commercial. Major commercial timber species are Gurjan ("Dipterocarpus" spp.) and Padauk ("Pterocarpus dalbergioides"). The following ornamental woods are noted for their pronounced grain formation:
Padauk wood is sturdier than teak and is widely used for furniture making.
There are burr wood and buttress root formations in Andaman Padauk. The largest piece of buttress known from Andaman was a dining table of . The largest piece of burr wood was again a dining table for eight.
The Rudraksha ("Elaeocarps sphaericus") and aromatic Dhoop-resin trees also are found here.
The Andaman Islands are home to a number of animals, many of them endemic. Andaman & Nicobar islands are home to 10% of all Indian fauna species. The islands by ratio is only 0.25% of country's geographical area, has 11,009 species, according to a publication by the Zoological Survey of India.
The island's endemic mammals include
The banded pig ("Sus scrofa vittatus"), also known as the Andaman wild boar and once thought to be an endemic subspecies, is protected by the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 (Sch I). The spotted deer ("Axis axis"), the Indian muntjac ("Muntiacus muntjak") and the sambar ("Rusa unicolor") were all introduced to the Andaman islands, though the sambar did not survive.
Interview Island (the largest wildlife sanctuary in the territory) in Middle Andaman holds a population of feral elephants, which were brought in for forest work by a timber company and released when the company went bankrupt. This population has been subject to research studies.
Endemic or near endemic birds include
The islands' many caves, such as those at Chalis Ek are nesting grounds for the edible-nest swiftlet, whose nests are prized in China for bird's nest soup.
The islands also have a number of endemic reptiles, toads and frogs, such as the Andaman cobra ("Naja sagittifera"), South Andaman krait ("Bungarus andamanensis") and Andaman water monitor ("Varanus salvator andamanensis").
There is a sanctuary from Havelock Island for saltwater crocodiles. Over the past 25 years there have been 24 crocodile attacks with four fatalities, including the death of American tourist Lauren Failla. The government has been criticised for failing to inform tourists of the crocodile sanctuary and danger, while simultaneously promoting tourism. Crocodiles are not only found within the sanctuary, but throughout the island chain in varying densities. They are habitat restricted, so the population is stable but not large. Populations occur throughout available mangrove habitat on all major islands, including a few creeks on Havelock. The species uses the ocean as a means of travel between different rivers and estuaries, thus they are not as commonly observed in open ocean. It is best to avoid swimming near mangrove areas or the mouths of creeks; swimming in the open ocean should be safe, but it is best to have a spotter around.
Most of the tribal people in Andaman and Nicobar Islands believe in a religion that can be described as a form of monotheistic Animism. The tribal people of these islands believe that Paluga is the only deity and is responsible for everything happening on Earth. The faith of the Andamanese teaches that Paluga resides on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands' Saddle Peak. People try to avoid any action that might displease Paluga. People belonging to this religion believe in the presence of souls, ghosts, and spirits. People of this religion put a lot of emphasis on dreams. They let dreams decide different courses of action in their lives.
Other religions practiced in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are, in order of size, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and Baha'i Faith.
, the population of the Andaman was 343,125, having grown from 50,000 in 1960. The bulk of the population originates from immigrants who came to the island since the colonial times, mainly of Bengali, Hindustani and Tamil backgrounds.
A small minority of the population are the Andamanese — the aboriginal inhabitants (adivasi) of the islands. When they first came into sustained contact with outside groups in the 1850s, there were an estimated 7,000 Andamanese, divided into the Great Andamanese, Jarawa, Jangil (or "Rutland Jarawa"), Onge, Sentinelese, and the Shompen of Great Nicobar Island. The Great Andamanese formed 10 tribes of 5,000 people total.
As the numbers of settlers from the mainland increased (at first mostly prisoners and involuntary indentured labourers, later purposely recruited farmers), these indigenous people lost territory and numbers in the face of punitive expeditions by British troops, land encroachment and various epidemic diseases.
Presently, there remain only approximately 400–450 indigenous Andamanese. The Jangil are extinct. Most of the Great Andamanese tribes are extinct, and the survivors, now just 52, speak mostly Bengali. The Onge are reduced to less than 100 people. Only the Jarawa and Sentinelese still maintain a steadfast independence and refuse most attempts at contact; their numbers are uncertain but estimated to be in the low hundreds.
Port Blair is the chief community on the islands, and the administrative centre of the Union Territory. The Andaman Islands form a single administrative district within the Union Territory, the Andaman district (the Nicobar Islands were separated and established as the new Nicobar district in 1974).
The islands are prominently featured in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes 1890 mystery "The Sign of the Four." The magistrate in Lady Gregory's play "Spreading the News" had formerly served in the islands.
M. M. Kaye's 1985 novel "Death in the Andamans" and Marianne Wiggins' 1989 novel "John Dollar" are set in the islands. The latter begins with an expedition from Burma to celebrate King George's birthday, but turns into a grim survival story after an earthquake and tsunami. Priyadarshan's 1996 film "Kaalapani" (Malayalam; "Sirai Chaalai" in Tamil) depicts the Indian freedom struggle and the lives of prisoners in the Cellular Jail in Port Blair. "Island's End" is a 2011 novel by Padma Venkatraman about the training of an indigenous shaman. A principal character in the novel "Six Suspects" by Vikas Swarup is from the Andaman Islands.
Brodie Moncur, the main protagonist of William Boyd's 2018 novel "Love is Blind", spends time in the Andaman Islands in the early years of the 20th century.
The only commercial airport in the islands is Veer Savarkar International Airport in Port Blair, which has scheduled services to Kolkata, Chennai, New Delhi, Bengaluru and Visakhapatnam. The airport is under the control of the Indian Navy. Prior to 2016 only daylight operations were allowed; however, since 2016 night flights have also operated. A small airstrip, about long, is located near the eastern shore of North Andaman near Diglipur.
Due to the length of the routes and the small number of airlines flying to the islands, fares have historically been relatively expensive, although cheaper for locals than visitors. Fares are high during the peak seasons of spring and winter, although fares have decreased over time due to the expansion of the civil aviation industry in India. Private flights are also allowed to land in Port Blair airport with prior permission.
There is also a ship service from Chennai, Visakhapatnam and Kolkata. The journey requires three days and two nights, and depends on weather.
Notes
Sources | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1750 |
Alexander Anderson (mathematician)
Alexander Anderson ( in Aberdeen – in Paris) was a Scottish mathematician.
He was born in Aberdeen, possibly in 1582, according to a print which suggests he was aged 35 in 1617. It is unknown where he was educated, but it is likely that he initially studied writing and philosophy (the "belles lettres") in his home city of Aberdeen.
He then went to the continent, and was a professor of mathematics in Paris by the start of the seventeenth century. There he published or edited, between the years 1612 and 1619, various geometric and algebraic tracts. He described himself as having "more wisdom than riches" in the dedication of "Vindiciae Archimedis" (1616).
He was first cousin of David Anderson of Finshaugh, a celebrated mathematician, and David Anderson's daughter was the mother of mathematician James Gregory.
He was selected by the executors of François Viète to revise and edit Viète's manuscript works. Viète died in 1603, and it is unclear if Anderson knew him, but his eminence was sufficient to attract the attention of the dead man's executors. Anderson corrected and expanded upon Viète's manuscripts, which extended known geometry to the new algebra, which used general symbols to represent quantities.
The known works of Anderson amount to six thin quarto volumes, and as the last of them was published in 1619, it is probable that the author died soon after that year, but the precise date is unknown. He wrote other works that have since been lost. From his last work it appears he wrote another piece, "A Treatise on the Mensuration of Solids," and copies of two other works, "Ex. Math." and "Stereometria Triangulorum Sphæricorum", were in the possession of Sir Alexander Hume until the after the middle of the seventeenth century.
Attribution: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1751 |
Andocides
Andocides (; , "Andokides"; c. 440 – c. 390 BC) was a logographer (speech writer) in Ancient Greece. He was one of the ten Attic orators included in the "Alexandrian Canon" compiled by Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace in the third century BC.
Andocides was the son of Leogoras, and was born in Athens around 440 BC. He belonged to the ancient Eupatrid family of the Kerykes, who traced their lineage up to Odysseus and the god Hermes.
In Andocides' youth, he seems to have been employed on various occasions as ambassador to Thessaly, Macedonia, Molossia, Thesprotia, Italy, and Sicily. And although he was frequently attacked for his political opinions, he maintained his ground until, in 415, when he became involved in the charge brought against Alcibiades for having profaned the mysteries and mutilated the Herms on the eve of the departure of the Athenian expedition against Sicily. It appeared particularly likely that Andocides was an accomplice in the latter of these crimes, which was believed to be a preliminary step towards overthrowing the democratic constitution, since the Herm standing close to his house in the phyle Aegeis was among the very few which had not been injured.
Andocides was accordingly seized and thrown into prison, but after some time recovered his freedom by a promise that he would turn informer and reveal the names of the real perpetrators of the crime; and on the suggestion of one Charmides or Timaeus, he mentioned four, all of whom were put to death. He is said to have also denounced his own father on the charge of profaning the mysteries, but to have rescued him again in the hour of danger - a charge he strenuously denied. But as Andocides was unable to clear himself from the charge, he was deprived of his rights as a citizen, and left Athens.
Andocides traveled about in various parts of Greece, and was chiefly engaged in commercial enterprise and in forming connections with powerful people. The means he employed to gain the friendship of powerful men were sometimes of the most disreputable kind; among which a service he rendered to a prince in Cyprus is mentioned in particular.
In 411, Andocides returned to Athens on the establishment of the oligarchic government of the Four Hundred, hoping that a certain service he had rendered the Athenian ships at Samos would secure him a welcome reception. But no sooner were the oligarchs informed of the return of Andocides, than their leader Peisander had him seized, and accused him of having supported the party opposed to them at Samos. During his trial, Andocides, who perceived the exasperation prevailing against him, leaped to the altar which stood in the court, and there assumed the attitude of a supplicant. This saved his life, but he was imprisoned. Soon afterwards, however, he was set free, or escaped from prison.
Andocides then went to Cyprus, where for a time he enjoyed the friendship of Evagoras; but, by some circumstance or other, he exasperated his friend, and was consigned to prison. Here again he escaped, and after the restoration of democracy in Athens and the abolition of the Four Hundred, he ventured once more to return to Athens; but as he was still suffering under a sentence of civil disenfranchisement, he endeavored by means of bribes to persuade the prytaneis to allow him to attend the assembly of the people. The latter, however, expelled him from the city. It was on this occasion, in 411, that Andocides delivered the speech still extant "On his return", on which he petitioned for permission to reside at Athens, but in vain. In his third exile, Andocides went to reside in Elis, and during the time of his absence from his native city, his house there was occupied by Cleophon, the leading demagogue.
Andocides remained in exile until after the overthrow of the tyranny of the Thirty by Thrasybulus, when the general amnesty then proclaimed made him hope that its benefit would be extended to him also. He himself says that he returned to Athens from Cyprus, where he claimed to have great influence and considerable property. Because of the general amnesty, he was allowed to remain at Athens, enjoyed peace for the next three years, and soon recovered an influential position. According to Lysias, it was scarcely ten days after his return that he brought an accusation against Archippus or Aristippus, which, however, he dropped on receiving a sum of money. During this period Andocides became a member of the boule, in which he appears to have possessed a great influence, as well as in the popular assembly. He was gymnasiarch at the Hephaestaea, was sent as architheorus to the Isthmian Games and Olympic Games, and was even entrusted with the office of keeper of the sacred treasury.
But in 400, Callias, supported by Cephisius, Agyrrhius, Meletus, and Epichares, urged the necessity of preventing Andocides from attending the assembly, as he had never been formally freed from the civil disenfranchisement. Callias also charged him with violating the laws respecting the temple at Eleusis. The orator pleaded his case in the oration still extant "on the Mysteries" (περὶ τῶν μυστηρίων), in which he argued that he had not been involved in the profanation of the mysteries or the mutilation of the herms, that he had not violated the laws of the temple at Eleusis, that anyway he had received his citizenship back as a result of the amnesty, and that Callias was really motivated by a private dispute with Andocides over inheritance. He was acquitted. After this, he again enjoyed peace until 394, he was sent as ambassador to Sparta respecting the peace to be concluded in consequence of Conon's victory off Cnidus. On his return he was accused of illegal conduct during his embassy. The speech "On the peace with the Lacedaemons" (περὶ τῆς πρὸς Λακεδαιμονίους εἰρήνης), which is still extant, refers to this affair. It was delivered in 393 (though some scholars place it in 391). Andocides was found guilty, and sent into exile for the fourth time. He never returned afterwards, and seems to have died soon after this blow.
Andocides appears to have fathered no children, since he is described at the age of 70 as being childless, although the scholiast on Aristophanes mentions Antiphon as a son of Andocides. The large fortune which he had inherited from his father, or acquired in his commercial undertakings, was greatly diminished in the latter years of his life.
As an orator Andocides does not appear to have been held in very high esteem by the ancients, as he is seldom mentioned, though Valerius Theon is said to have written a commentary on his orations. We do not hear of his having been trained in any of the sophistical schools of the time, and he had probably developed his talents in the practical school of the popular assembly. Hence his orations have no mannerism in them, and are really, as Plutarch says, simple and free from all rhetorical pomp and ornament.
Sometimes, however, his style is diffuse, and becomes tedious and obscure. The best among his orations is that on the Mysteries; but, for the history of the time, all are of the highest importance.
Besides the three orations already mentioned, which are undoubtedly genuine, there is a fourth against Alcibiades (κατὰ Ἀλκιβιάδου), said to have been delivered by Andocides during the ostracism of 415; but it is probably spurious, though it appears to contain genuine historical matter. Some scholars ascribed it to Phaeax, who took part in the ostracism, according to Plutarch. But it is more likely that it is a rhetorical exercise from the early fourth century BC, since formal speeches were not delivered during ostracisms and the accusation or defence of Alcibiades was a standing rhetorical theme. Besides these four orations we possess only a few fragments and some very vague allusions to other orations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1752 |
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in 1748. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature", published anonymously in London in 1739–40. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the "Treatise", which "fell dead-born from the press," as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his more developed ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work.
The end product of his labours was the "Enquiry". The "Enquiry" dispensed with much of the material from the "Treatise", in favor of clarifying and emphasizing its most important aspects. For example, Hume's views on personal identity do not appear. However, more vital propositions, such as Hume's argument for the role of habit in a theory of knowledge, are retained.
This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today. Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke him from his self-described "dogmatic slumber." The "Enquiry" is widely regarded as a classic in modern philosophical literature.
The argument of the "Enquiry" proceeds by a series of incremental steps, separated into chapters which logically succeed one another. After expounding his epistemology, Hume explains how to apply his principles to specific topics.
In the first section of the Enquiry, Hume provides a rough introduction to philosophy as a whole. For Hume, philosophy can be split into two general parts: natural philosophy and the philosophy of human nature (or, as he calls it, "moral philosophy"). The latter investigates both actions and thoughts. He emphasizes in this section, by way of warning, that philosophers with nuanced thoughts will likely be cast aside in favor of those whose conclusions more intuitively match popular opinion. However, he insists, precision helps art and craft of all kinds, including the craft of philosophy.
Next, Hume discusses the distinction between impressions and ideas. By "impressions", he means sensations, while by "ideas", he means memories and imaginings. According to Hume, the difference between the two is that ideas are less "vivacious" than impressions. For example, the idea of the taste of an orange is far inferior to the impression (or sensation) of actually eating one. Writing within the tradition of empiricism, he argues that impressions are the source of all ideas.
Hume accepts that ideas may be either the product of mere sensation or of the imagination working in conjunction with sensation. According to Hume, the creative faculty makes use of (at least) four mental operations that produce imaginings out of sense-impressions. These operations are "compounding" (or the addition of one idea onto another, such as a horn on a horse to create a unicorn); "transposing" (or the substitution of one part of a thing with the part from another, such as with the body of a man upon a horse to make a centaur); "augmenting" (as with the case of a giant, whose size has been augmented); and "diminishing" (as with Lilliputians, whose size has been diminished). (Hume 1974:317) In a later chapter, he also mentions the operations of "mixing", "separating", and "dividing". (Hume 1974:340)
However, Hume admits that there is one objection to his account: the problem of ""The Missing Shade of Blue"". In this thought-experiment, he asks us to imagine a man who has experienced every shade of blue except for one (see Fig. 1). He predicts that this man will be able to divine the color of this particular shade of blue, despite the fact that he has never experienced it. This seems to pose a serious problem for the empirical account, though Hume brushes it aside as an exceptional case by stating that one may experience a novel idea that itself is derived from combinations of previous impressions. (Hume 1974:319)
In this chapter, Hume discusses how thoughts tend to come in sequences, as in trains of thought. He explains that there are at least three kinds of associations between ideas: "resemblance", "contiguity" in space-time, and "cause-and-effect". He argues that there must be some "universal principle" that must account for the various sorts of connections that exist between ideas. However, he does not immediately show what this principle might be. (Hume 1974:320-321)
In the first part, Hume discusses how the objects of inquiry are either "relations of ideas" or "matters of fact", which is roughly the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. The former, he tells the reader, are proved by demonstration, while the latter are given through experience. (Hume 1974:322) In explaining how matters of fact are entirely a product of experience, he dismisses the notion that they may be arrived at through "a priori" reasoning. For Hume, every effect only follows its cause arbitrarily—they are entirely distinct from one another. (Hume 1974:324)
In part two, Hume inquires into how anyone can justifiably believe that experience yields any conclusions about the world:
He shows how a satisfying argument for the validity of experience can be based neither on demonstration (since "it implies no contradiction that the course of nature may change") nor experience (since that would be a circular argument). (Hume 1974:330-332) Here he is describing what would become known as the problem of induction.
For Hume, we assume that experience tells us something about the world because of "habit or custom", which human nature forces us to take seriously. This is also, presumably, the "principle" that organizes the connections between ideas. Indeed, one of the many famous passages of the "Enquiry" is on the topic of the incorrigibility of human custom. In Section XII, "Of the academical or sceptical philosophy", Hume will argue,
In the second part, he provides an account of beliefs. He explains that the difference between belief and fiction is that the former produces a certain feeling of confidence which the latter doesn't. (Hume 1974:340)
This short chapter begins with the notions of probability and chance. For him, "probability" means a "higher chance" of occurring, and brings about a higher degree of subjective expectation in the viewer. By "chance", he means all those particular comprehensible events which the viewer considers possible in accord with the viewer's experience. However, further experience takes these equal chances, and forces the imagination to observe that certain chances arise more frequently than others. These gentle forces upon the imagination cause the viewer to have strong beliefs in outcomes. This effect may be understood as another case of "custom or habit" taking past experience and using it to predict the future. (Hume 1974:346-348)
By "necessary connection", Hume means the power or force which necessarily ties one idea to another. He rejects the notion that any sensible qualities are necessarily conjoined, since that would mean we could know something prior to experience. Unlike his predecessors, Berkeley and Locke, Hume rejects the idea that volitions or impulses of the will may be inferred to necessarily connect to the actions they produce by way of some sense of the power of the will. He reasons that, 1. if we knew the nature of this power, then the mind-body divide would seem totally unmysterious to us; 2. if we had immediate knowledge of this mysterious power, then we would be able to intuitively explain why it is that we can control some parts of our bodies (e.g., our hands or tongues), and not others (e.g., the liver or heart); 3. we have no immediate knowledge of the powers which allow an impulse of volition to create an action (e.g., of the "muscles, and nerves, and animal spirits" which are the immediate cause of an action). (Hume 1974:353-354) He produces like arguments against the notion that we have knowledge of these powers as they affect the mind alone. (Hume 1974:355-356) He also argues in brief against the idea that causes are mere occasions of the will of some god(s), a view associated with the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. (Hume 1974:356-359)
Having dispensed with these alternative explanations, he identifies the source of our knowledge of necessary connections as arising out of "observation of constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances". In this way, people know of necessity through rigorous custom or habit, and not from any immediate knowledge of the powers of the will. (Hume 1974:361)
Here Hume tackles the problem of how liberty may be reconciled with metaphysical necessity (otherwise known as a compatibilist formulation of free will). Hume believes that all disputes on the subject have been merely verbal arguments—that is to say, arguments which are based on a lack of prior agreement on definitions. He first shows that it is clear that most events are deterministic, but human actions are more controversial. However, he thinks that these too occur out of necessity since an outside observer can see the same regularity that he would in a purely physical system. To show the compatibility of necessity and liberty, Hume defines liberty as the ability to act on the basis of one's will e.g. the capacity to will one's actions but not to will one's will. He then shows (quite briefly) how determinism and free will are compatible notions, and have no bad consequences on ethics or moral life.
Hume insists that the conclusions of the Enquiry will be very powerful if they can be shown to apply to animals and not just humans. He believed that animals were able to infer the relation between cause and effect in the same way that humans do: through learned expectations. (Hume 1974:384) He also notes that this "inferential" ability that animals have is not through reason, but custom alone. Hume concludes that there is an innate faculty of instincts which both beasts and humans share, namely, the ability to reason experimentally (through custom). Nevertheless, he admits, humans and animals differ in mental faculties in a number of ways, including: differences in memory and attention, inferential abilities, ability to make deductions in a long chain, ability to grasp ideas more or less clearly, the human capacity to worry about conflating unrelated circumstances, a sagely prudence which arrests generalizations, a capacity for a greater inner library of analogies to reason with, an ability to detach oneself and scrap one's own biases, and an ability to converse through language (and thus gain from the experience of others' testimonies). (Hume 1974:385, footnote 17.)
The next topic which Hume strives to give treatment is that of the reliability of human testimony, and of the role that testimony plays a part in epistemology. This was not an idle concern for Hume. Depending on its outcome, the entire treatment would give the epistemologist a degree of certitude in the treatment of miracles.
True to his empirical thesis, Hume tells the reader that, though testimony does have some force, it is never quite as powerful as the direct evidence of the senses. That said, he provides some reasons why we may have a basis for trust in the testimony of persons: because a) human memory can be relatively tenacious; and b) because people are inclined to tell the truth, and ashamed of telling falsities. Needless to say, these reasons are only to be trusted to the extent that they conform to experience. (Hume 1974:389)
And there are a number of reasons to be skeptical of human testimony, also based on experience. If a) testimonies conflict one another, b) there are a small number of witnesses, c) the speaker has no integrity, d) the speaker is overly hesitant or bold, or e) the speaker is known to have motives for lying, then the epistemologist has reason to be skeptical of the speaker's claims. (Hume 1974:390)
There is one final criterion that Hume thinks gives us warrant to doubt any given testimony, and that is f) if the propositions being communicated are miraculous. Hume understands a miracle to be any event which contradicts the laws of nature. He argues that the laws of nature have an overwhelming body of evidence behind them, and are so well demonstrated to everyone's experience, that any deviation from those laws necessarily flies in the face of all evidence. (Hume 1974:391-392)
Moreover, he stresses that talk of the miraculous has no surface validity, for four reasons. First, he explains that in all of history there has never been a miracle which was attested to by a wide body of disinterested experts. Second, he notes that human beings delight in a sense of wonder, and this provides a villain with an opportunity to manipulate others. Third, he thinks that those who hold onto the miraculous have tended towards barbarism. Finally, since testimonies tend to conflict with one another when it comes to the miraculous—that is, one man's religious miracle may be contradicted by another man's miracle—any testimony relating to the fantastic is self-denunciating. (Hume 1974:393-398)
Still, Hume takes care to warn that historians are generally to be trusted with confidence, so long as their reports on facts are extensive and uniform. However, he seems to suggest that historians are as fallible at interpreting the facts as the rest of humanity. Thus, if every historian were to claim that there was a solar eclipse in the year 1600, then though we might at first naively regard that as in violation of natural laws, we'd come to accept it as a fact. But if every historian were to assert that Queen Elizabeth was observed walking around happy and healthy after her funeral, and then interpreted that to mean that they had risen from the dead, then we'd have reason to appeal to natural laws in order to dispute their interpretation. (Hume 1974:400-402)
Hume continues his application of epistemology to theology by an extended discussion on heaven and hell. The brunt of this chapter allegedly narrates the opinions, not of Hume, but of one of Hume's anonymous friends, who again presents them in an imagined speech by the philosopher Epicurus. His friend argues that, though it is possible to trace a cause from an effect, it is not possible to infer unseen effects from a cause thus traced. The friend insists, then, that even though we might postulate that there is a first cause behind all things—God—we can't infer anything about the afterlife, because we don't know anything of the afterlife from experience, and we can't infer it from the existence of God. (Hume 1974:408)
Hume offers his friend an objection: if we see an unfinished building, then can't we infer that it has been created by humans with certain intentions, and that it will be finished in the future? His friend concurs, but indicates that there is a relevant disanalogy that we can't pretend to know the contents of the mind of God, while we can know the designs of other humans. Hume seems essentially persuaded by his friend's reasoning. (Hume 1974:412-414)
The first section of the last chapter is well organized as an outline of various skeptical arguments. The treatment includes the arguments of atheism, Cartesian skepticism, "light" skepticism, and rationalist critiques of empiricism. Hume shows that even light skepticism leads to crushing doubts about the world which - while they ultimately are philosophically justifiable - may only be combated through the non-philosophical adherence to custom or habit. He ends the section with his own reservations towards Cartesian and Lockean epistemologies.
In the second section he returns to the topic of hard skepticism by sharply denouncing it.
He concludes the volume by setting out the limits of knowledge once and for all. ""When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, "Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?" No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.""
The criteria Hume lists in his examination of the validity of human testimony are roughly upheld in modern social psychology, under the rubric of the communication-persuasion paradigm. Supporting literature includes: the work of social impact theory, which discusses persuasion in part through the number of persons engaging in influence; as well as studies made on the relative influence of communicator credibility in different kinds of persuasion; and examinations of the trustworthiness of the speaker.
The "custom" view of learning can in many ways be likened to associationist psychology. This point of view has been subject to severe criticism in the research of the 20th century. Still, testing on the subject has been somewhat divided. Testing on certain animals like cats have concluded that they do not possess any faculty which allow their minds to grasp an insight into cause and effect. However, it has been shown that some animals, like chimpanzees, were able to generate creative plans of action to achieve their goals, and thus would seem to have a causal insight which transcends mere custom. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1756 |
Euclidean geometry
Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to Alexandrian Greek mathematician Euclid, which he described in his textbook on geometry: the "Elements". Euclid's method consists in assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms, and deducing many other propositions (theorems) from these. Although many of Euclid's results had been stated by earlier mathematicians, Euclid was the first to show how these propositions could fit into a comprehensive deductive and logical system. The "Elements" begins with plane geometry, still taught in secondary school (high school) as the first axiomatic system and the first examples of formal proof. It goes on to the solid geometry of three dimensions. Much of the "Elements" states results of what are now called algebra and number theory, explained in geometrical language.
For more than two thousand years, the adjective "Euclidean" was unnecessary because no other sort of geometry had been conceived. Euclid's axioms seemed so intuitively obvious (with the possible exception of the parallel postulate) that any theorem proved from them was deemed true in an absolute, often metaphysical, sense. Today, however, many other self-consistent non-Euclidean geometries are known, the first ones having been discovered in the early 19th century. An implication of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is that physical space itself is not Euclidean, and Euclidean space is a good approximation for it only over short distances (relative to the strength of the gravitational field).
Euclidean geometry is an example of synthetic geometry, in that it proceeds logically from axioms describing basic properties of geometric objects such as points and lines, to propositions about those objects, all without the use of coordinates to specify those objects. This is in contrast to analytic geometry, which uses coordinates to translate geometric propositions into algebraic formulas.
The "Elements" is mainly a systematization of earlier knowledge of geometry. Its improvement over earlier treatments was rapidly recognized, with the result that there was little interest in preserving the earlier ones, and they are now nearly all lost.
There are 13 books in the "Elements":
Books I–IV and VI discuss plane geometry. Many results about plane figures are proved, for example "In any triangle two angles taken together in any manner are less than two right angles." (Book 1 proposition 17) and the Pythagorean theorem "In right angled triangles the square on the side subtending the right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle." (Book I, proposition 47)
Books V and VII–X deal with number theory, with numbers treated geometrically as lengths of line segments or areas of regions. Notions such as prime numbers and rational and irrational numbers are introduced. It is proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers.
Books XI–XIII concern solid geometry. A typical result is the 1:3 ratio between the volume of a cone and a cylinder with the same height and base. The platonic solids are constructed.
Euclidean geometry is an axiomatic system, in which all theorems ("true statements") are derived from a small number of simple axioms. Until the advent of non-Euclidean geometry, these axioms were considered to be obviously true in the physical world, so that all the theorems would be equally true. However, Euclid's reasoning from assumptions to conclusions remains valid independent of their physical reality.
Near the beginning of the first book of the "Elements", Euclid gives five postulates (axioms) for plane geometry, stated in terms of constructions (as translated by Thomas Heath):
Although Euclid only explicitly asserts the existence of the constructed objects, in his reasoning they are implicitly assumed to be unique.
The "Elements" also include the following five "common notions":
Modern scholars agree that Euclid's postulates do not provide the complete logical foundation that Euclid required for his presentation. Modern treatments use more extensive and complete sets of axioms.
To the ancients, the parallel postulate seemed less obvious than the others. They aspired to create a system of absolutely certain propositions, and to them it seemed as if the parallel line postulate required proof from simpler statements. It is now known that such a proof is impossible, since one can construct consistent systems of geometry (obeying the other axioms) in which the parallel postulate is true, and others in which it is false. Euclid himself seems to have considered it as being qualitatively different from the others, as evidenced by the organization of the "Elements": his first 28 propositions are those that can be proved without it.
Many alternative axioms can be formulated which are logically equivalent to the parallel postulate (in the context of the other axioms). For example, Playfair's axiom states:
The "at most" clause is all that is needed since it can be proved from the remaining axioms that at least one parallel line exists.
Euclidean Geometry is "constructive". Postulates 1, 2, 3, and 5 assert the existence and uniqueness of certain geometric figures, and these assertions are of a constructive nature: that is, we are not only told that certain things exist, but are also given methods for creating them with no more than a compass and an unmarked straightedge. In this sense, Euclidean geometry is more concrete than many modern axiomatic systems such as set theory, which often assert the existence of objects without saying how to construct them, or even assert the existence of objects that cannot be constructed within the theory. Strictly speaking, the lines on paper are "models" of the objects defined within the formal system, rather than instances of those objects. For example, a Euclidean straight line has no width, but any real drawn line will. Though nearly all modern mathematicians consider nonconstructive methods just as sound as constructive ones, Euclid's constructive proofs often supplanted fallacious nonconstructive ones—e.g., some of the Pythagoreans' proofs that involved irrational numbers, which usually required a statement such as "Find the greatest common measure of ..."
Euclid often used proof by contradiction. Euclidean geometry also allows the method of superposition, in which a figure is transferred to another point in space. For example, proposition I.4, side-angle-side congruence of triangles, is proved by moving one of the two triangles so that one of its sides coincides with the other triangle's equal side, and then proving that the other sides coincide as well. Some modern treatments add a sixth postulate, the rigidity of the triangle, which can be used as an alternative to superposition.
Euclidean geometry has two fundamental types of measurements: angle and distance. The angle scale is absolute, and Euclid uses the right angle as his basic unit, so that, for example, a 45-degree angle would be referred to as half of a right angle. The distance scale is relative; one arbitrarily picks a line segment with a certain nonzero length as the unit, and other distances are expressed in relation to it. Addition of distances is represented by a construction in which one line segment is copied onto the end of another line segment to extend its length, and similarly for subtraction.
Measurements of area and volume are derived from distances. For example, a rectangle with a width of 3 and a length of 4 has an area that represents the product, 12. Because this geometrical interpretation of multiplication was limited to three dimensions, there was no direct way of interpreting the product of four or more numbers, and Euclid avoided such products, although they are implied, for example in the proof of book IX, proposition 20.
Euclid refers to a pair of lines, or a pair of planar or solid figures, as "equal" (ἴσος) if their lengths, areas, or volumes are equal respectively, and similarly for angles. The stronger term "congruent" refers to the idea that an entire figure is the same size and shape as another figure. Alternatively, two figures are congruent if one can be moved on top of the other so that it matches up with it exactly. (Flipping it over is allowed.) Thus, for example, a 2x6 rectangle and a 3x4 rectangle are equal but not congruent, and the letter R is congruent to its mirror image. Figures that would be congruent except for their differing sizes are referred to as similar. Corresponding angles in a pair of similar shapes are congruent and corresponding sides are in proportion to each other.
Points are customarily named using capital letters of the alphabet. Other figures, such as lines, triangles, or circles, are named by listing a sufficient number of points to pick them out unambiguously from the relevant figure, e.g., triangle ABC would typically be a triangle with vertices at points A, B, and C.
Angles whose sum is a right angle are called complementary. Complementary angles are formed when a ray shares the same vertex and is pointed in a direction that is in between the two original rays that form the right angle. The number of rays in between the two original rays is infinite.
Angles whose sum is a straight angle are supplementary. Supplementary angles are formed when a ray shares the same vertex and is pointed in a direction that is in between the two original rays that form the straight angle (180 degree angle). The number of rays in between the two original rays is infinite.
In modern terminology, angles would normally be measured in degrees or radians.
Modern school textbooks often define separate figures called lines (infinite), rays (semi-infinite), and line segments (of finite length). Euclid, rather than discussing a ray as an object that extends to infinity in one direction, would normally use locutions such as "if the line is extended to a sufficient length," although he occasionally referred to "infinite lines". A "line" in Euclid could be either straight or curved, and he used the more specific term "straight line" when necessary.
The pons asinorum ("bridge of asses") states that "in isosceles triangles the angles at the base equal one another, and, if the equal straight lines are produced further, then the angles under the base equal one another." Its name may be attributed to its frequent role as the first real test in the "Elements" of the intelligence of the reader and as a bridge to the harder propositions that followed. It might also be so named because of the geometrical figure's resemblance to a steep bridge that only a sure-footed donkey could cross.
Triangles are congruent if they have all three sides equal (SSS), two sides and the angle between them equal (SAS), or two angles and a side equal (ASA) (Book I, propositions 4, 8, and 26). Triangles with three equal angles (AAA) are similar, but not necessarily congruent. Also, triangles with two equal sides and an adjacent angle are not necessarily equal or congruent.
The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to a straight angle (180 degrees). This causes an equilateral triangle to have three interior angles of 60 degrees. Also, it causes every triangle to have at least two acute angles and up to one obtuse or right angle.
The celebrated Pythagorean theorem (book I, proposition 47) states that in any right triangle, the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares whose sides are the two legs (the two sides that meet at a right angle).
Thales' theorem, named after Thales of Miletus states that if A, B, and C are points on a circle where the line AC is a diameter of the circle, then the angle ABC is a right angle. Cantor supposed that Thales proved his theorem by means of Euclid Book I, Prop. 32 after the manner of Euclid Book III, Prop. 31.
In modern terminology, the area of a plane figure is proportional to the square of any of its linear dimensions, formula_1, and the volume of a solid to the cube, formula_2. Euclid proved these results in various special cases such as the area of a circle and the volume of a parallelepipedal solid. Euclid determined some, but not all, of the relevant constants of proportionality. E.g., it was his successor Archimedes who proved that a sphere has 2/3 the volume of the circumscribing cylinder.
Because of Euclidean geometry's fundamental status in mathematics, it is impractical to give more than a representative sampling of applications here.
As suggested by the etymology of the word, one of the earliest reasons for interest in geometry was surveying, and certain practical results from Euclidean geometry, such as the right-angle property of the 3-4-5 triangle, were used long before they were proved formally. The fundamental types of measurements in Euclidean geometry are distances and angles, both of which can be measured directly by a surveyor. Historically, distances were often measured by chains, such as Gunter's chain, and angles using graduated circles and, later, the theodolite.
An application of Euclidean solid geometry is the determination of packing arrangements, such as the problem of finding the most efficient packing of spheres in n dimensions. This problem has applications in error detection and correction.
Geometric optics uses Euclidean geometry to analyze the focusing of light by lenses and mirrors.
Geometry is used extensively in architecture.
Geometry can be used to design origami. Some classical construction problems of geometry are impossible using compass and straightedge, but can be solved using origami.
Quite a lot of CAD (computer-aided design) and CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) is based on Euclidean geometry. Design geometry typically consists of shapes bounded by planes, cylinders, cones, tori, etc. In the present day, CAD/CAM is essential in the design of almost everything, including cars, airplanes, ships, and smartphones. A few decades ago, sophisticated draftsmen learned some fairly advanced Euclidean geometry, including things like Pascal's theorem and Brianchon's theorem. But now they don't have to, because the geometric constructions are all done by CAD programs.
Euclid believed that his axioms were self-evident statements about physical reality. Euclid's proofs depend upon assumptions perhaps not obvious in Euclid's fundamental axioms, in particular that certain movements of figures do not change their geometrical properties such as the lengths of sides and interior angles, the so-called "Euclidean motions", which include translations, reflections and rotations of figures. Taken as a physical description of space, postulate 2 (extending a line) asserts that space does not have holes or boundaries (in other words, space is homogeneous and unbounded); postulate 4 (equality of right angles) says that space is isotropic and figures may be moved to any location while maintaining congruence; and postulate 5 (the parallel postulate) that space is flat (has no intrinsic curvature).
As discussed in more detail below, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity significantly modifies this view.
The ambiguous character of the axioms as originally formulated by Euclid makes it possible for different commentators to disagree about some of their other implications for the structure of space, such as whether or not it is infinite (see below) and what its topology is. Modern, more rigorous reformulations of the system typically aim for a cleaner separation of these issues. Interpreting Euclid's axioms in the spirit of this more modern approach, axioms 1-4 are consistent with either infinite or finite space (as in elliptic geometry), and all five axioms are consistent with a variety of topologies (e.g., a plane, a cylinder, or a torus for two-dimensional Euclidean geometry).
Archimedes (c. 287 BCE – c. 212 BCE), a colorful figure about whom many historical anecdotes are recorded, is remembered along with Euclid as one of the greatest of ancient mathematicians. Although the foundations of his work were put in place by Euclid, his work, unlike Euclid's, is believed to have been entirely original. He proved equations for the volumes and areas of various figures in two and three dimensions, and enunciated the Archimedean property of finite numbers.
Apollonius of Perga (c. 262 BCE – c. 190 BCE) is mainly known for his investigation of conic sections.
René Descartes (1596–1650) developed analytic geometry, an alternative method for formalizing geometry which focused on turning geometry into algebra.
In this approach, a point on a plane is represented by its Cartesian ("x", "y") coordinates, a line is represented by its equation, and so on.
In Euclid's original approach, the Pythagorean theorem follows from Euclid's axioms. In the Cartesian approach, the axioms are the axioms of algebra, and the equation expressing the Pythagorean theorem is then a definition of one of the terms in Euclid's axioms, which are now considered theorems.
The equation
defining the distance between two points "P" = ("px", "py") and "Q" = ("qx", "qy") is then known as the "Euclidean metric", and other metrics define non-Euclidean geometries.
In terms of analytic geometry, the restriction of classical geometry to compass and straightedge constructions means a restriction to first- and second-order equations, e.g., "y" = 2"x" + 1 (a line), or "x"2 + "y"2 = 7 (a circle).
Also in the 17th century, Girard Desargues, motivated by the theory of perspective, introduced the concept of idealized points, lines, and planes at infinity. The result can be considered as a type of generalized geometry, projective geometry, but it can also be used to produce proofs in ordinary Euclidean geometry in which the number of special cases is reduced.
Geometers of the 18th century struggled to define the boundaries of the Euclidean system. Many tried in vain to prove the fifth postulate from the first four. By 1763, at least 28 different proofs had been published, but all were found incorrect.
Leading up to this period, geometers also tried to determine what constructions could be accomplished in Euclidean geometry. For example, the problem of trisecting an angle with a compass and straightedge is one that naturally occurs within the theory, since the axioms refer to constructive operations that can be carried out with those tools. However, centuries of efforts failed to find a solution to this problem, until Pierre Wantzel published a proof in 1837 that such a construction was impossible. Other constructions that were proved impossible include doubling the cube and squaring the circle. In the case of doubling the cube, the impossibility of the construction originates from the fact that the compass and straightedge method involve equations whose order is an integral power of two, while doubling a cube requires the solution of a third-order equation.
Euler discussed a generalization of Euclidean geometry called affine geometry, which retains the fifth postulate unmodified while weakening postulates three and four in a way that eliminates the notions of angle (whence right triangles become meaningless) and of equality of length of line segments in general (whence circles become meaningless) while retaining the notions of parallelism as an equivalence relation between lines, and equality of length of parallel line segments (so line segments continue to have a midpoint).
In the early 19th century, Carnot and Möbius systematically developed the use of signed angles and line segments as a way of simplifying and unifying results.
The century's most significant development in geometry occurred when, around 1830, János Bolyai and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky separately published work on non-Euclidean geometry, in which the parallel postulate is not valid. Since non-Euclidean geometry is provably relatively consistent with Euclidean geometry, the parallel postulate cannot be proved from the other postulates.
In the 19th century, it was also realized that Euclid's ten axioms and common notions do not suffice to prove all of the theorems stated in the "Elements". For example, Euclid assumed implicitly that any line contains at least two points, but this assumption cannot be proved from the other axioms, and therefore must be an axiom itself. The very first geometric proof in the "Elements," shown in the figure above, is that any line segment is part of a triangle; Euclid constructs this in the usual way, by drawing circles around both endpoints and taking their intersection as the third vertex. His axioms, however, do not guarantee that the circles actually intersect, because they do not assert the geometrical property of continuity, which in Cartesian terms is equivalent to the completeness property of the real numbers. Starting with Moritz Pasch in 1882, many improved axiomatic systems for geometry have been proposed, the best known being those of Hilbert, George Birkhoff, and Tarski.
Einstein's theory of special relativity involves a four-dimensional space-time, the Minkowski space, which is non-Euclidean. This shows that non-Euclidean geometries, which had been introduced a few years earlier for showing that the parallel postulate cannot be proved, are also useful for describing the physical world.
However, the three-dimensional "space part" of the Minkowski space remains the space of Euclidean geometry. This is not the case with general relativity, for which the geometry of the space part of space-time is not Euclidean geometry. For example, if a triangle is constructed out of three rays of light, then in general the interior angles do not add up to 180 degrees due to gravity. A relatively weak gravitational field, such as the Earth's or the sun's, is represented by a metric that is approximately, but not exactly, Euclidean. Until the 20th century, there was no technology capable of detecting the deviations from Euclidean geometry, but Einstein predicted that such deviations would exist. They were later verified by observations such as the slight bending of starlight by the Sun during a solar eclipse in 1919, and such considerations are now an integral part of the software that runs the GPS system.
Euclid sometimes distinguished explicitly between "finite lines" (e.g., Postulate 2) and "infinite lines" (book I, proposition 12). However, he typically did not make such distinctions unless they were necessary. The postulates do not explicitly refer to infinite lines, although for example some commentators interpret postulate 3, existence of a circle with any radius, as implying that space is infinite.
The notion of infinitesimal quantities had previously been discussed extensively by the Eleatic School, but nobody had been able to put them on a firm logical basis, with paradoxes such as Zeno's paradox occurring that had not been resolved to universal satisfaction. Euclid used the method of exhaustion rather than infinitesimals.
Later ancient commentators, such as Proclus (410–485 CE), treated many questions about infinity as issues demanding proof and, e.g., Proclus claimed to prove the infinite divisibility of a line, based on a proof by contradiction in which he considered the cases of even and odd numbers of points constituting it.
At the turn of the 20th century, Otto Stolz, Paul du Bois-Reymond, Giuseppe Veronese, and others produced controversial work on non-Archimedean models of Euclidean geometry, in which the distance between two points may be infinite or infinitesimal, in the Newton–Leibniz sense. Fifty years later, Abraham Robinson provided a rigorous logical foundation for Veronese's work.
One reason that the ancients treated the parallel postulate as less certain than the others is that verifying it physically would require us to inspect two lines to check that they never intersected, even at some very distant point, and this inspection could potentially take an infinite amount of time.
The modern formulation of proof by induction was not developed until the 17th century, but some later commentators consider it implicit in some of Euclid's proofs, e.g., the proof of the infinitude of primes.
Supposed paradoxes involving infinite series, such as Zeno's paradox, predated Euclid. Euclid avoided such discussions, giving, for example, the expression for the partial sums of the geometric series in IX.35 without commenting on the possibility of letting the number of terms become infinite.
Euclid frequently used the method of proof by contradiction, and therefore the traditional presentation of Euclidean geometry assumes classical logic, in which every proposition is either true or false, i.e., for any proposition P, the proposition "P or not P" is automatically true.
Placing Euclidean geometry on a solid axiomatic basis was a preoccupation of mathematicians for centuries. The role of primitive notions, or undefined concepts, was clearly put forward by Alessandro Padoa of the Peano delegation at the 1900 Paris conference:
That is, mathematics is context-independent knowledge within a hierarchical framework. As said by Bertrand Russell:
Such foundational approaches range between foundationalism and formalism.
The process of abstract axiomatization as exemplified by Hilbert's axioms reduces geometry to theorem proving or predicate logic. In contrast, the Greeks used construction postulates, and emphasized problem solving. For the Greeks, constructions are more primitive than existence propositions, and can be used to prove existence propositions, but not "vice versa". To describe problem solving adequately requires a richer system of logical concepts. The contrast in approach may be summarized:
Andrei Nicholaevich Kolmogorov proposed a problem solving basis for geometry. This work was a precursor of a modern formulation in terms of constructive type theory. This development has implications for pedagogy as well. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9417 |
Eindhoven
Eindhoven ( , ) is the fifth-largest city and a municipality of the Netherlands, located in the south of the country. It had a population of 231,469 in 2019, making it the largest city in the province of North Brabant. Eindhoven was originally located at the confluence of the Dommel and Gender.
Neighbouring cities and towns include Son en Breugel, Nuenen, Geldrop-Mierlo, Helmond, Heeze-Leende, Waalre, Veldhoven, Eersel, Oirschot and Best. The agglomeration has a population of . The metropolitan area consists of inhabitants. The city region has a population of 753,426. The Brabantse Stedenrij combined metropolitan area has about two million inhabitants.
The name may derive from the contraction of the regional words "eind" (meaning "last" or "end") and "hove" (or "hoeve", a section of some 14 hectares of land). Toponymically, "eind" occurs commonly as a prefix and postfix in local place- and streetnames. A "hove" comprised a parcel of land which a local lord might lease to private persons (such as farmers). Given that a string of such parcels existed around Woensel, the name "Eindhoven" may have originated with the meaning "last hoves on the land of Woensel".
Another explanation is that "Eind" has deriven from "Gender", a river that goes through the city.
The written history of Eindhoven started in 1232, when Duke Hendrik I of Brabant granted city rights to "Eindhoven", then a small town right on the confluence of the Dommel and Gender streams. At the time of granting of its charter, Eindhoven had approximately 170 houses enclosed by a rampart. Just outside the city walls stood a small castle. The city was also granted the right to organize a weekly market and the farmers in nearby villages were obliged to come to Eindhoven to sell their produce. Another factor in its establishment was its location on the trade route from Holland to Liège.
Around 1388, the city's fortifications were strengthened further. And between 1413 and 1420, a new castle was built within the city walls. In 1486, Eindhoven was plundered and burned by troops from Guelders.
The reconstruction of Eindhoven was finished in 1502, with a stronger rampart and a new castle. However, in 1543 it fell again, its defense works having been neglected due to poverty.
A big fire in 1554 destroyed 75% of the houses but by 1560 these had been rebuilt with the help of William I of Orange. During the Dutch Revolt, Eindhoven changed hands between the Dutch and the Spanish several times during which it was burned down by renegade Spanish soldiers, until finally in 1583 it was captured once more by Spanish troops and its city walls were demolished.
Eindhoven did not become part of the Netherlands until 1629. During the French occupation, Eindhoven suffered again with many of its houses destroyed by the invading forces. Eindhoven remained a minor city after that until the start of the industrial revolution.
The industrial revolution of the 19th century provided a major growth impulse. Canals, roads and railroads were constructed. Eindhoven was connected to the major Zuid-Willemsvaart canal through the Eindhovens Kanaal branch in 1843 and was connected by rail to Tilburg, 's-Hertogenbosch, Venlo and Belgium between 1866 and 1870. Industrial activities initially centred around tobacco and textiles and boomed with the rise of lighting and electronics giant Philips, which was founded as a light bulb manufacturing company in Eindhoven in 1891.
Industrialisation brought population growth to Eindhoven. On the establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815, Eindhoven had 2,310 inhabitants.
By 1920, the population was 47,946; by 1925 it was 63,870 and in 1935 that had ballooned to 103,030. The explosive growth of industry in the region and the subsequent housing needs of workers called for radical changes in administration, as the City of Eindhoven was still confined to its medieval moat city limits. In 1920, the five neighbouring municipalities of Woensel (to the north), Tongelre (northeast and east), Stratum (southeast), Gestel en Blaarthem (southwest) and Strijp (west), which already bore the brunt of the housing needs and related problems, were incorporated into the new Groot-Eindhoven ("Greater Eindhoven") municipality. The prefix "Groot-" was later dropped.
After the incorporation of 1920, the five former municipalities became districts of the Municipality of Eindhoven, with Eindhoven-Centrum (the City proper) forming the sixth. Since then, an additional seventh district has been formed by dividing the largest district, that of Woensel, into Woensel-Zuid and Woensel-Noord.
The early 20th century saw additions in technical industry with the advent of car and truck manufacturing company Van Doorne's Automobiel Fabriek (DAF) and the subsequent shift towards electronics and engineering, with the traditional tobacco and textile industries waning and finally disappearing in the 1970s.
A first air raid in World War II was flown by the RAF on 6 December 1942 targeting the Philips factory downtown. 148 civilians died, even though the attack was carried out on a Sunday by low-flying Mosquito bombers. Large-scale air raids, including the bombing by the Luftwaffe on 18 September 1944 during Operation Market Garden, destroyed large parts of the city. The reconstruction that followed left very little historical remains and the postwar reconstruction period saw drastic renovation plans in highrise style, some of which were implemented. At the time, there was little regard for historical heritage. During the 1960s, a new city hall was built and its neogothic predecessor (1867) demolished to make way for a planned arterial road that never materialised.
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw large-scale housing developments in the districts of Woensel-Zuid and Woensel-Noord, making Eindhoven the fifth-largest city in the Netherlands. At the start of the 21st century, a whole new housing development called Meerhoven was constructed at the site of the old airport of Welschap, west of Eindhoven. The airport itself, now called Eindhoven Airport, had moved earlier to a new location, paving the way for much needed new houses. Meerhoven is part of the Strijp district and partially lies on lands annexed from the municipality of Veldhoven.
The villages and city that make up modern Eindhoven were originally built on sandy elevations between the Dommel, Gender and Tongelreep streams. Beginning in the 19th century, the basins of the streams themselves have also been used as housing grounds, resulting in occasional floodings in the city centre. Partly to reduce flooding, the bed of the Gender stream, which flowed directly through the city centre, was dammed off and filled up after the War, and the course of the Dommel was regulated. New ecological and socio-historical insights have led to parts of the Dommel's course being restored to their original states, and plans to have the Gender flow through the centre once again.
The large-scale housing developments of the 20th century saw residential areas being built on former agricultural lands and woods, former heaths that had been turned into cultivable lands in the 19th century.
The city is currently divided into seven districts:
Eindhoven has an oceanic climate with slightly warmer summers and colder winters than the coastal parts of the Netherlands. Its all-time record is set on 25 July 2019 and set on 13 January 1968, while winter lows have dipped below during extreme cold snaps. Although frosts are frequent in winter, there is no lasting snow cover in a normal winter due to the mild daytime temperatures.
As of 2019, the population of Eindhoven consisted of 355,889 persons (according to Worldpopulationreview). Of these, 29.5% or some 63,873 people are of foreign descent. People are classified as being of foreign descent when they were born outside of the Netherlands, or when at least one of their parents was born outside of the Netherlands.
Large minority groups include:
The municipal agglomeration of Eindhoven (an administrative construct which includes only some of the surrounding towns and villages) has 327,245 inhabitants as of 1 January 2010.
The spoken language is a combination of Kempenlands (a Dutch dialect spoken in a large area east and south east of the city, including Arendonk and Lommel in Belgium) and North Meierijs (between the south of Den Bosch and into Eindhoven). Both dialects belong to the East Brabantian dialect group), which is very similar to colloquial Dutch).
Of all Eindhoven districts, the historical centre is by far the smallest in size and population, numbering only 5,419 in 2006. Woensel-Noord is the largest, having been the city's main area of expansion for several decades.
Population figures for all districts, as of 1 January 2008, ranked by size:
Eindhoven is located in the southeast of the province of North Brabant. This area is historically Roman Catholic and the population of Eindhoven was similarly mostly Catholic for a very long time until the late 1970s. However, the internationalizing influence of the university, Philips and other companies have created a more mixed population over the last few decades.
The spiritual needs of the Eindhoven population are tended to by a steadily shrinking number of churches, two mosques and one synagogue.
In research by the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad based on the police's statistical data on crime rates, Eindhoven was found to have the highest crime rate in the Netherlands for 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010. In 2011, Eindhoven has slipped down the list to number six.
In 2009, in the Eindhoven agglomeration, the following numbers of crimes were recorded:
Eindhoven has grown from a little town in 1232 to one of the biggest cities in the Netherlands with around 230,000 inhabitants in 2020. Much of its growth is due to Philips, DAF Trucks and Brabantia.
After the resurrection of the Netherlands in 1815 and the end of the Belgian Revolution, Eindhoven was a small village of some 1250 people in an economically backward and mostly agricultural area. Cheap land, cheap labor and the existence of pre-industrial homesourcing ("huisnijverheid" in Dutch) made Eindhoven an attractive area for the developing industries which were being stimulated by the government of King William I. During the 19th century, Eindhoven grew into an industrial town with factories for textile weaving, cigar manufacturing, match making and hat making. Most of these industries disappeared again after World War II, though.
In 1891, brothers Gerard and Anton Philips founded the small light bulb factory that would grow into one of the largest electronics firms in the world. Philips' presence is probably the largest single contributing factor to the major growth of Eindhoven in the 20th century. It attracted and spun off many hi-tech companies, making Eindhoven a major technology and industrial hub. In 2005, a full third of the total amount of money spent on research in the Netherlands was spent in or around Eindhoven. A quarter of the jobs in the region are in technology and ICT, with companies such as FEI Company (once Philips Electron Optics), NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors), ASML, ALTEN, Simac, Neways Electronics and the aforementioned Philips and DAF.
Eindhoven has long been a centre of cooperation between research institutes and industry. This tradition started with Philips (the NatLab was a physical expression of this) and has since expanded to large cooperative networks. The Eindhoven University of Technology hosts an incubator for technology startups and the NatLab has developed into the High Tech Campus Eindhoven. Also, TNO has opened a branch on the university campus. This tradition has also fostered inter-industry cooperation in the region; one example of this is the announcement in September 2010 of a new research lab for high-grade packaging materials, a cooperation of IPS Packaging and Thales Cryognetics.
This cooperative tradition has also developed into a different direction than the traditional technology research done at the university. Starting in 2002, the university, the Catharina hospital, Philips Medical and the University of Maastricht joined forces and started joint research into biomedical science, technology and engineering. Within Eindhoven, this research has been concentrated in a new university faculty (BioMedical Technology or BMT). This development has also made Eindhoven a biomedical technology hub within the country and its (European) region.
Prime examples of industrial heritage in Eindhoven are the renovated Witte Dame (""White Lady"") complex, a former Philips lamp factory; and the Admirant building (informally known as Bruine Heer or ""Brown Gentleman"" in reference to the Witte Dame across the street), the former Philips main offices. The Witte Dame currently houses the municipal library, the Design Academy and a selection of shops. The Admirant has been renovated into an office building for small companies. Across the street from the Witte Dame and next to the Admirant is Philips' first light bulb factory (nicknamed Roze Baby, or ""Pink Baby"", in reference to its pink colour and much smaller size when compared to the "White Lady" and "Brown Gentleman"). The small building now houses the "Centrum Kunstlicht in de Kunst" (centre artificial light in art) and the "Philips Incandescent Lamp Factory of 1891" museum.
Due to its high-tech environment, Eindhoven is part of several initiatives to develop, foster and increase a knowledge economy. Chief among these are:
As a result of these efforts, the Intelligent Community Forum named the Eindhoven metro region one of the top-21 intelligent communities in 2008 and one of the top-7 intelligent communities in 2009 and 2010. Finally, in 2011, the ICF named Eindhoven the Intelligent Community of the Year.
Eindhoven is one of the co-location centres of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). It hosts two Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs): Innoenergy (Sustainable Energy) and EIT ICT Labs (Information and Communication Technology). The co-locations are on the High Tech Campus Eindhoven.
Eindhoven, being a city with a 200,000+ population, is served by a large number of schools both at primary and secondary education levels. In addition, Eindhoven is a higher-education hub within the southern Netherlands, with several institutes of higher education that serve students from the extended region of North Brabant, Zeeland, Limburg and parts of the surrounding provinces.
Primary education is provided to the children aged 4 to 12 in Eindhoven through a large number of primary schools:
Secondary education is provided to the children aged 12 to 18 in Eindhoven through several highschools:
Special needs secondary education:
Eindhoven hosts four different public institutions for higher and adult education, as well as a number of private institutions offering courses and trainings. The public institutions hosted in Eindhoven are:
The Open University also has a study center in Eindhoven.
Among the private institutions is the Centrum voor Kunsten Eindhoven, which offers art-related courses to adults (including a DJ-education).
The municipal council is the legislative council at the municipal level in Eindhoven; its existence is mandated by the Constitution of the Netherlands. The Eindhoven city council consists of 45 elected representatives from the Eindhoven municipality. These are elected during municipal elections from candidates running in Eindhoven. Eindhoven politics consists of local branches of the national political parties and purely local parties with strictly local interests. The city council reflects this mix in its makeup.
The last three municipal elections were held on 7 March 2006, 3 March 2010 and 19 March 2014. The division of the 45 seats in the Eindhoven city council after these elections is shown below:
The executive council in Dutch municipalities is called the "College of the Mayor and Aldermen" (Dutch: "College van Burgemeester en Wethouders" or "College van B&W" for short). The mayor is appointed by the monarch, but the council of aldermen is composed as a result of the formation of a local coalition government. This coalition is formed in such a way as to be able to rely on a majority of the votes in the city council.
In May 2014, a coalition was formed between PvdA, D66, SP and GroenLinks. Together they have 26 seats in the city council. The council of aldermen consists of the following people:
The mayors of the Netherlands are not elected but appointed by the crown. Nevertheless, there has been a movement over the last few years to give the municipalities more say in who will be their mayor, which has resulted in consultative referenda being held in the larger cities to "suggest" a candidate for the post. This was also tried in Eindhoven and as a result the previous mayor was Rob van Gijzel (PvdA).
On 23 January 2008, a referendum to elect a mayor was held in Eindhoven. This referendum, the second of its kind in the Netherlands, was attended by 24.6% of the inhabitants. This was less than the required 30% needed to make a referendum binding. Nevertheless, the city council would choose the winner of the referendum as the preferred candidate. The main reason for the low attendance was that the candidates, Leen Verbeek and Rob van Gijzel, were from the same party. Rob van Gijzel won the referendum with 61.8% of the votes and was appointed the city's new mayor.
The mayor is the chairman of the Council of B&W. He also has responsibility for a number of specific posts (like the aldermen). In the previous council, mayor Van Gijzel held responsibility for the following posts:
If unavailable, the mayor is temporarily replaced by one of the aldermen.
Culturally and recreationally, Eindhoven was formed by two forces:
Eindhoven is also known as the City of Light, due to Philips originating from there and because of several projects involving lighting up buildings of the city. During Carnival, Eindhoven is rechristened "Lampegat" (Hamlet of Lamps, although for the ironic purposes of carnival the translation "Hole in the ground with lamps" is closer to the mark); this refers again to the important role of Philips in the Eindhoven community.
There are several cultural institutions in and around the city.
Eindhoven was home to the Evoluon science museum, sponsored by Philips. The Evoluon building has evolved into a conference centre.
The Eindhoven public space contains many forms of artistic expression (a book published by the Eindhoven tourist board records 550 as of 2001 and more have been added since), with high "concentrations" of them in the parks. The Stadswandelpark for instance, contains over 30 works of modern art. There are also several other works of art on permanent display throughout the city, such as "Flying Pins" (by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, who considered the location on the southern stretch of the John F. Kennedylaan to be like a bowling alley) and "Swing" (a construct on the Karel de Grotelaan, which morphs into different geometric shapes as you move around it). There are also a number of statues of famous city inhabitants, such as Jan van Hooff (by Auke Hettema, 1992) and Frits Philips (by Kees Verkade) on the Market Square. There is a statue of Anton Philips in front of the central railway station.
Eindhoven is also, to some degree, open to forms of impromptu and alternative art. For example, the Berenkuil is a freezone for graffiti artists in the city.
Strijp-S is a place for experimentiation with LED lighting, which keeps the historic connection with Philips' past. Some light art includes the project Fakkel by Har Hollands. In the underground passage to NatLab artist Daan Roosegaarde installed his project Crystal.
Strijp-S is a regular location for the light festival GLOW.
The Effenaar is a popular music venue and cultural center in Eindhoven, and is located at the Dommelstraat.
In 1992, the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips was opened as a stage for classical and popular music in Eindhoven, reviewed by critics as a concert hall with acoustics that rival the best halls in Europe. Before that, Philips sponsored the POC.
Parktheater Eindhoven is Eindhoven's stage for opera, cabaret, ballet etc. Opened in 1964, it has received over 250,000 visitors every year. With its 1,000 m2 it has one of the largest stages in the Netherlands. With a major renovation ending in 2007, the new Parktheater will receive an estimated 300,000 visitors a year.
Eindhoven's Plaza Futura is now a cinema featuring cultural movies, lectures and special cultural events.
Especially for students, Studium Generale Eindhoven organizes "socially, culturally and intellectually formative events". From within the student body, two Tunas provide entertainment from time to time at university and city events: Tuna Ciudad de Luz ("Tuna of the City of Light") and the ladies tuna La Tuniña.
The general music and theatre scene in Eindhoven (in the broadest sense) is supported by a foundation called PopEi. The purpose of this foundation is to support artistic groups with facilities, especially rehearsal stages and areas (housed in the old Philips location of Strijp-S) but also storage facilities. PopEi also provides a working environment for groups (through cafeteria facilities in Strijp-S, so groups can have real working days) and provides some logistical support for organizing events.
Eindhoven has a lively recreational scene. For going out, there are numerous bars on the Market square, Stratumseind (Stratum's End) which is the largest pub-street in the Netherlands, Dommelstraat, Wilhelmina square and throughout the rest of the city. In addition to the more culturally oriented Plaza Futura, there are three cinemas in the centre of town ("Servicebioscoop Zien", "Vue" and Pathé Eindhoven, which offers THX sound, IMAX screens and 3D movie viewing).
Eindhoven also hosts a large number of cultural and entertainment-oriented festivals. The biggest festivals in Eindhoven are:
Dominator Festival - Hardcore Music Festival (July). Run by Q-Dance and Art of dance
Eindhoven contains several parks and a lot of open, green space. Of the five largest cities in the Netherlands, it has the highest percentage of green area (encompassing about ⅓ of all public space). It is also the greenest of the five largest cities in North Brabant. The green area per house is about .
Some of the major parks in Eindhoven are the Stadswandelpark, Genneper Parken, the Philips van Lenneppark, Philips de Jongh Wandelpark and the Henri Dunantpark. There is also a green area surrounding the Karpendonkse Plas (a water area). The combination of park area, water and general atmosphere got the Ooievaarsnest neighborhood elected the "Best large-city neighborhood of the Netherlands" by the NRC Handelsblad in 1997.
The centre of town features two casinos (one branch of Holland Casino and the independent Casino4Events). At the A67 a Jack's casino is located.
There is a red light district on the Baekelandplein, as well as four brothels throughout the city. There is also a blue movie theater.
The old Philips factory complex has been transformed into a multi-purpose cultural and residential complex called Strijp-S. This includes conference and event space, space for concerts and events, art of lighting, space for sports such as BMX, bouldering, and more, a walking promenade, etc.
Eindhoven features several print media. The local newspaper, called the Eindhovens Dagblad, is a daily newspaper with over 110,000 subscribers in the Samenwerkingsverband Regio Eindhoven region. It has a national and international section, as well as a section dedicated to regional news; the editorial department is located in Eindhoven.
In addition to the newspaper, Eindhoven is served by a number of weekly door-to-door publications. Chief among these is "Groot Eindhoven" (which carries publications of the city council, as well as other articles and advertisements). Other than that there are "de Trompetter", "dé Weekendkrant" and the "ZondagsNieuws". The first two are delivered midweek, the last two are weekend publications.
There are several regional and municipal radio stations. The local radio station is Studio040, whereas Omroep Brabant and RoyaalFM provide regional radio.
Local television is provided by Studio040. Omroep Brabant broadcasts regionally from its television studio in Son.
Internet, television and telephone connectivity is available via cable television, optic fiber and ADSL.
Eindhoven Airport is the closest airport, located approximately from the town centre. The airport serves as a military air base and a civilian commercial airport. Eindhoven Airport is the second-busiest in the Netherlands (after Schiphol).
Ryanair serves London Stansted airport, Dublin, Kiev, Rome, Milan, Pisa, Bordeaux, Marseille, Glasgow, Madrid, Valencia, Stockholm, Kaunas, Malta, Sofia and Barcelona. Wizz air serves Belgrade, Brno, Bucharest-Baneasa, Budapest, Cluj-Napoca, Debrecen, Gdańsk, Katowice, Prague, Riga, Sofia, Timișoara, Vilnius, Wrocław. In the summer season, Reykjavík is served with 2 weekly flights operated by Iceland Express. Transavia services Alicante, Antalya, Bodrum, Corfu, Dalaman, Faro, Gran Canaria, Innsbruck, Málaga, Majorca, Munich, Prague, Rhodes and Salzburg, though some destinations are served only seasonally. Eindhoven Airport served more than 6.2 million passengers in 2018.
Eindhoven is a rail transport hub. Eindhoven Centraal railway station is the main station in Eindhoven. It has connections in the directions of:
Eindhoven Centraal is served by both intercity and local services while the smaller station, Eindhoven Strijp-S is only served by local trains. Towards 's-Hertogenbosch, Utrecht and Amsterdam trains run every ten minutes, on every day of the week. Eindhoven Stadion is a small station that serves Philips Stadion in the event of football matches or other special events at the stadium. It is located 900m west of the main station.
Up until World War II, a train service connected Amsterdam to Liège via Eindhoven and Valkenswaard, but the service was discontinued and the line broken up. Recently, talks have resumed to have a service to Neerpelt, Belgium via Weert.
The A2/E25 motorway from Amsterdam to Luxembourg passes Eindhoven to the west and south of the city. The A2 connects to the highway A58 to Tilburg and Breda just north of the city. Just south of Eindhoven, the A2 connects to the A67 / E34 between Antwerp and Duisburg. In 2006, the A50 was completed connecting Eindhoven to Nijmegen and Zwolle.
The public transport of Eindhoven consists of more than 20 city bus lines, which also serve neighbouring villages such as Veldhoven, Geldrop and Nuenen. Seven of these buslines (400 - 407) are marketed as high quality public transport and run with 43 electric articulated busses. Two specially built separated busways (HOV1 & HOV2) are used by lines 401 to 406. Line 401 to the airport runs almost completely on separated busways. Apart from the city lines there are some 30 regional and rush-hour lines.
Like all large Dutch cities, Eindhoven has an extensive network of bicycle paths. Since 2012, the Eindhoven bicycle path network has incorporated the Hovenring.
Eindhoven has two hospitals in three locations: the Catharina Hospital and the Máxima Medisch Centrum, which has a branch in Woensel-Zuid (the old Diaconessenhuis) and one in Veldhoven (the old Sint Joseph Hospital). These three have an extensive cooperation and have divided specialties among each other. Emergency medicine, for example, is concentrated in the MMC Veldhoven branch and the Catharina Hospital, the MMC Eindhoven branch has no emergency department. Cardiac procedures are done in the Catharina.
Catharina is also an academic and research hospital and participates in a shared research program with Philips Medical, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Maastricht University into biomedical science, technology and engineering.
Eindhoven is twinned with: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9420 |
Helsingør
Helsingør ( , ; ), classically known in English as Elsinore, is a city in eastern Denmark. Helsingør Municipality had a population of 62,686 on 1 January 2018. Helsingør and Helsingborg in Sweden together form the northern reaches of the Øresund Region, centered on Copenhagen and Malmö. The HH Ferry route connects Helsingør with Helsingborg, 4 km (2 miles) across the Øresund.
It is known for its castle Kronborg, which William Shakespeare presumably had in mind for his famous play "Hamlet."
The name "Helsingør" is derived from the word "hals" meaning "neck" or "narrow strait", referring to the narrowest point of the
"Øresund" (Øre Sound) between what is now Helsingør and Helsingborg, Sweden.
The people were mentioned as "Helsinger" (which may mean "the people of the strait") for the first time in King Valdemar the Victorious's "Liber Census Daniæ" from 1231 (not to be confused with the Helsings of Hälsingland in Sweden).
Placenames show that the Helsinger may have had their main fort at Helsingborg and a fortified landing place at Helsingør, to control the ferry route across the strait.
Helsingør as it is known today was founded in the 1420s by the Danish king Eric of Pomerania. He established the Sound Dues in 1429, meaning all foreign ships passing through the strait had to pay a toll, which constituted up to two-thirds of Denmark's state income. With this income Eric of Pomerania built the castle Krogen. The castle was expanded in the 1580s and renamed Kronborg. All ships had to stop in Helsingør to get their cargo taxed and pay a toll to the Danish Crown, but it also generated a significant trade for the town. In 1672 Helsingør had grown into the third biggest town in Denmark.
Johan Isaksson Pontanus ("Rerum Danicarum Historica", 1631) attributes a long and partially fictitious history to Helsingør.
The Sound Dues were abolished in 1857 with the Copenhagen Convention, where all naval nations agreed to pay a one-time fee.
The oldest known fortified building of Helsingør is "Flynderborg", an early medieval fortress situated on a hill just south of the medieval city.
Around 1200, the first church, Saint Olaf's Church, was built.
A number of convents once surrounded the church, but now all that remains is the church building, today the cathedral of the Diocese of Helsingør. The oldest parts of the cathedral of Helsingør date back to the 13th century and tell us that the fishing village, as Helsingør was then, had grown to a town of importance.
In World War II, Helsingør was among the most important transport points for the rescue of Denmark's Jewish population during the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler had ordered that all Danish Jews were to be arrested and deported to the concentration camps on Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year which fell on 2 October 1943. When Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a diplomatic attaché of Nazi Germany to Denmark, received word of the order on 28 September 1943, he shared it with political and Jewish community leaders. Using the name Elsinore Sewing Club (Danish: "Helsingør Syklub") as a cover for messages, the Danish population formed an underground railroad of sorts, moving Jews away from the closely watched Copenhagen docks to spots further away, especially Helsingør, just two miles across the Øresund from Helsingborg in neutral Sweden. Hundreds of civilians hid their fellow Danish citizens—Jews—in their houses, farm lofts and churches until they could board them onto Danish fishing boats, personal pleasure boats and ferry boats. Over the course of three nights, Danes had smuggled over 7,200 Jews and 680 non-Jews (gentile family members of Jews or political activists) across the Øresund, to safety in Helsingborg and Malmö in Sweden.
The car ferry line between Helsingør and Helsingborg, Scania, Sweden is the busiest in the world with more than 70 departures in each direction every day. The route is known as the HH Ferry route and has been sailed by several shipping lines throughout history. The car ferry terminal is connected to the town's main railway station. From the station, trains depart to Copenhagen every 20 minutes. Trains also depart to Hillerød and Gilleleje. There are another six stations or train stops within the city and connected suburbs. Apart from "Helsingør Station and Ferry Terminal" also "Snekkersten station", "Espergærde station", "Mordrup station" and the train stops at the line to Gilleleje, "Grønnehave", "Marienlyst" and "Højstrup".
The E47 motorway towards Copenhagen begins just outside the city limits. The town and surrounding areas also have a network of local and regional buses.
For a century the or Elsinore shipyard was a prominent landmark, which covered the whole area between the town and Kronborg Castle. It was founded in 1882. At its height in 1957, it had 3,600 employees. The last ship left the shipyard in 1983 and it closed the same year following substantial losses.
The brewery, founded in 1840, was the second brewery in Denmark to ship bottled beer, just three years after Carlsberg. The last beer was brewed at in Helsingør in 1998. Carlsberg continues to brew beer under the Wiibroe Årgangsøl label.
After the end of the industrial era, the town of Helsingør had to redefine itself, and came up with an ambitious project: Kulturhavn Kronborg, literally "Culture-harbour of Kronborg". It officially opened on 26 May 2013, intended to appeal to tourists with an interest in culture. The main attraction of Kulturhavn Kronborg is Kronborg Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Besides the historical attractions of the site, William Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" has been performed annually in its courtyard since 1937. There is a longstanding tradition of performing the play in English, and notable actors in the title role have included Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Christopher Plummer, Derek Jacobi, and in 2009 Jude Law. At the heart of Kulturhavn Kronborg lies kulturværftet or The Culture Yard, a new cultural centre and a public library located in the old . It opened in 2010. The former dry dock now houses the Danish Maritime Museum.
In the centre of the harbour basin stands the polished steel sculpture "Han" ("He") by artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset, commissioned by the City of Helsingør in 2012. It was inaugurated by then Minister of culture, Uffe Elbæk, in June 2012. It is seen as the counterpart (and even little brother) to Edvard Eriksen's world-famous "The Little Mermaid" statue in Copenhagen, and has caused both praise and protests among locals.
The Swedish city of Helsingborg lies a short distance across the Øresund from Helsingør, approximately . European route E55 joins the two cities; ferries connect the two sides.
The new Danish Maritime Museum was designed by Danish prize-winning architects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
Jørn Utzon lived in Helsingør in his youth because his father was an engineer at . Utzon designed The Kingo Houses (1956–60) and The Hammershøj Care Centre (1962) in the city. The project was completed by Birger Schmidt (1966) after Utzon moved to Sydney to work on the Sydney Opera House.
Centrum
Helsingør is twinned with: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9421 |
European route E4
European route E4 passes from north to south through Sweden from the border with Finland, with a total length of . The Finnish part lies entirely within Tornio in northern Finland, and is only long. The Swedish part traverses most of Sweden except the extreme north and the west coast region, and is commonly considered the highway backbone of Sweden, since it passes in the vicinity of many of its largest cities and through the capital Stockholm. In particular, it is the mainline road used by most vehicle traffic, both cars and lorries, between the north (Norrland) and south of Sweden or beyond.
From Haparanda on the Finnish border, it stretches south along the Gulf of Bothnia to Gävle, then on a more inland route southwards. It ends in Helsingborg in Sweden, at the port for the ferry to Helsingør in Denmark. The route intersects with European route E6 just outside Helsingborg, which continues to Trelleborg on the southern coast of Sweden.
Under the new system of European routes it was planned to have been a part of E55, but it remains in the pre-1992 designation (E4) within Sweden, because the expenses connected with re-signing this long road portion would be too great. Besides the signs along the road, there are thousands of signs, especially in cities, showing how to reach the E4 road. The road is now fully authorised as E4 by the relevant authority, not as E55.
North of Gävle the road is of mixed standard. Depending on the fashion at the time of construction it is either a single standard carriageway road, usually wide, or a 2+1 road, a wide road with two lanes in one direction and one in the other with a steel wire barrier in between, or sometimes a motorway with two lanes in each direction. North of Sundsvall, the road passes through several of the larger cities as city streets.
South of Gävle, the road becomes an almost continuous motorway, with the only non-motorway part being a long section past Ljungby, currently a 2+1 limited-access road. Upgrade to motorway standard will start in 2018. With the exception of the Ljungby bypass, the final stretch of the motorway to be opened was the road between Uppsala and Mehedeby, which was inaugurated on 17 October 2007. South of Gävle, the speed limit is on 60% and on 30% of the road. North of Gävle there are varying speed limits, with , and as the most common. The speed limits on the main roads in Sweden were changed on many stretches in October 2008, which saw the introduction of the 120 km/h limit.
The E4 is the fastest road to go from Germany/Denmark to areas north of the Arctic Circle, including places in Norway such as Tromsø or the North Cape.
The route passes through or nearby the cities
Tornio,
Haparanda,
Luleå,
Piteå,
Skellefteå,
Umeå,
Örnsköldsvik,
Härnösand,
Sundsvall,
Hudiksvall,
Söderhamn,
Gävle,
Uppsala,
Stockholm,
Södertälje,
Nyköping,
Norrköping,
Linköping,
Jönköping,
Värnamo,
Ljungby,
and Helsingborg. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9422 |
Ericsson
Ericsson had a 27% market share in the 2G/3G/4G mobile network infrastructure market in 2018.
The company was founded in 1876 by Lars Magnus Ericsson and was taken over by the Wallenberg family in 1960; today, the family, through its holding company Investor AB, owns a controlling 22.53% voting power. it is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The company employs around 95,000 people and operates in around 180 countries. Ericsson holds over 49,000 granted patents as of September 2019, including many in wireless communications. Ericsson is the inventor of Bluetooth technology.
Lars Magnus Ericsson began his association with telephones in his youth as an instrument maker. He worked for a firm that made telegraph equipment for the Swedish government agency Telegrafverket. In 1876, at the age of 30, he started a telegraph repair shop with help from his friend Carl Johan Andersson in central Stockholm and repaired foreign-made telephones. In 1878 Ericsson began making and selling his own telephone equipment. His telephones were not technically innovative. In 1878 he made an agreement to supply telephones and switchboards to Sweden's first telecommunications operating company, Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag.
As production grew in the late 1890s, and the Swedish market seemed to be reaching saturation, Ericsson expanded into foreign markets through a number of agents. The UK (Ericsson Telephones Ltd.) and Russia were early markets, where factories were later established improve the chances of gaining local contracts and to augment the output of the Swedish factory. In the UK, the National Telephone Company was a major customer; by 1897 sold 28% of its output in the UK. The Nordic countries were also Ericsson customers; they were encouraged by the growth of telephone services in Sweden.
Other countries and colonies were exposed to Ericsson products through the influence of their parent countries. These included Australia and New Zealand, which by the late 1890s were Ericsson's largest non-European markets. Mass production techniques now firmly established; telephones were losing some of their ornate finish and decoration.
Despite their successes elsewhere, Ericsson did not make significant sales into the United States. The Bell Group, Kellogg and Automatic Electric dominated the market. Ericsson eventually sold its U.S. assets. Sales in Mexico led to inroads into South American countries. South Africa and China were also generating significant sales. With his company now multinational, Lars Ericsson stepped down from the company in 1901.
Ericsson ignored the growth of automatic telephony in the United States and concentrated on manual exchange designs. Their first dial telephone was produced in 1921, although sales of the early automatic switching systems were slow until the equipment had proven itself on the world's markets. Telephones of this period had a simpler design and finish, and many of the early automatic desk telephones in Ericsson's catalogues were magneto styles with a dial on the front and appropriate changes to the electronics. Elaborate decals decorated the cases. World War I, the subsequent Great Depression, and the loss of its Russian assets after the Revolution slowed the company's development while sales to other countries fell by about half.
The acquisition of other telecommunications companies put pressure on Ericsson's finances; in 1925, Karl Fredric Wincrantz took control of the company by acquiring most of the shares. Wincrantz was partly funded by Ivar Kreuger, an international financier. The company was renamed "Telefonaktiebolaget L M Ericsson". Kreuger started showing interest in the company, being a major owner of Wincrantz holding companies.
Ericsson was saved from bankruptcy and closure with the help of banks including Stockholms Enskilda Bank (now Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken) and other Swedish investment banks controlled by the Wallenberg family, and some Swedish government backing. Marcus Wallenberg Jr. negotiated a deal with several Swedish banks to rebuild Ericsson financially. The banks gradually increased their possession of LM Ericsson "A" shares, while ITT was still the largest shareholder. In 1960, the Wallenberg family bought ITT‘s shares in Ericsson, and has since controlled the company.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the world telephone markets were being organized and stabilized by many governments. The fragmented town-by-town systems serviced by small, private companies that had evolved were integrated and offered for lease to a single company. Ericsson obtained some leases, which represented further sales of equipment to the growing networks. Ericsson got almost one-third of its sales under the control of its telephone operating companies.
Ericsson introduced the world's first fully automatic mobile telephone system, MTA, in 1956. It released one of the world's first hands-free speaker telephones in the 1960s. In 1954, it released the Ericofon. Ericsson crossbar switching equipment was used in telephone administrations in many countries. In 1983 the company introduced the ERIPAX suite of network products and services.
In the 1990s, during the emergence of the Internet, Ericsson was regarded as slow to realize its potential and falling behind in the area of IP technology. But the company had established an Internet project in 1995 called Infocom Systems to exploit opportunities leading from fixed-line telecom and IT. CEO Lars Ramqvist wrote in the 1996 annual report that in all three of its business areas – Mobile Telephones and Terminals, Mobile Systems, and Infocom Systems – "we will expand our operations as they relate to customer service and Internet Protocol (IP) access (Internet and intranet access)".
The growth of GSM, which became a "de facto" world standard, combined with Ericsson's other mobile standards, such as D-AMPS and PDC, meant that by the start of 1997, Ericsson had an estimated 40% share of the world's mobile market, with around 54 million subscribers. There were also around 188 million AXE lines in place or on order in 117 countries. Telecom and chip companies worked in the 1990s to provide Internet access over mobile telephones. Early versions such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) used packet data over the existing GSM network, in a form known as GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), but these services, known as 2.5G, were fairly rudimentary and did not achieve much mass-market success.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) had prepared the specifications for a 3G mobile service that included several technologies. Ericsson pushed hard for the WCDMA (wideband CDMA) form based on the GSM standard, and began testing it in 1996. Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo signed deals to partner with Ericsson and Nokia, who came together in 1997 to support WCDMA over rival standards. DoCoMo was the first operator with a live 3G network, using its own version of WCDMA called FOMA. Ericsson was a significant developer of the WCDMA version of GSM, while US-based chip developer Qualcomm promoted the alternative system CDMA2000, building on the popularity of CDMA in the US market. This resulted in a patent infringement lawsuit that was resolved in March 1999 when the two companies agreed to pay each other royalties for the use of their respective technologies and Ericsson purchased Qualcomm's wireless infrastructure business and some R&D resources.
Ericsson issued a profit warning in March 2001. Over the coming year, sales to operators halved. Mobile telephones became a burden; the company's telephones unit made a loss of SEK 24 million in 2000. A fire in a Philips chip factory in New Mexico in March 2000 caused severe disruption to Ericsson's phone production, dealing a "coup de grâce" to Ericsson's mobile phone hopes. Mobile phones would be spun off into a joint venture with Sony, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, in October 2001.
Ericsson launched several rounds of restructuring, refinancing and job-cutting; during 2001, staff numbers fell from 107,000 to 85,000. A further 20,000 went the next year, and 11,000 more in 2003. A new rights issue raised SEK 30 billion to keep the company afloat. The company had survived as mobile Internet started growing. With record profits, it was in better shape than many of its competitors.
The emergence of full mobile Internet began a period of growth for the global telecom industry, including Ericsson. After the launch of 3G services during 2003, people started to access the Internet using their telephones.
Ericsson was working on ways to improve WCDMA as operators were buying and rolling it out; it was the first generation of 3G access. New advances included IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and the next evolution of WCDMA, called High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA). It was initially deployed in the download version called HSDPA; the technology spread from the first test calls in the US in late 2005 to 59 commercial networks in September 2006. HSPA would provide the world's first mobile broadband.
In July 2016, Hans Vestberg stepped down as Ericsson's CEO after heading the company for six years. Jan Frykhammar, who has been working for the company since 1991 will be stepping in as interim CEO as Ericsson searches for a full-time replacement. On 16 January 2017, following Ericsson's announcement on 26 October 2016, new CEO Börje Ekholm started and interim CEO Jan Frykhammar stepped down the following day.
In June 2018, Ericsson, Inc. and Ericsson AB have agreed to pay $145,893 to settle potential civil liability for an apparent violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Sudanese Sanctions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. part 538 (SSR).1
Around 2000, companies and governments began to push for standards for mobile Internet. In May 2000, the European Commission created the Wireless Strategic Initiative, a consortium of four telecommunications suppliers in Europe – Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel (France), and Siemens AG (Germany) – to develop and test new prototypes for advanced wireless communications systems. Later that year, the consortium partners invited other companies to join them in a Wireless World Research Forum in 2001. In December 1999, Microsoft
and Ericsson announced a strategic partnership to combine the former's web browser and server software with the latter's mobile-internet technologies. In 2000, the Dot-com bubble burst with marked economic implications for Sweden. Ericsson, the world's largest producer of mobile telecommunications equipment, shed thousands of jobs, as did the country's Internet consulting firms and dot-com start-ups. In the same year, Intel, the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer, signed a $1.5 billion deal to supply flash memory to Ericsson over the next three years.
The short-lived joint venture called Ericsson Microsoft Mobile Venture AB, owned 70/30 percent by Ericsson and Microsoft, respectively, ended in October 2001 when Ericsson announced it would absorb the former joint venture and adopt a licensing agreement with Microsoft instead. The same month, Ericsson announced the launch of Sony Ericsson, a joint venture mobile telephone business, together with Sony Corporation. Sony Ericsson remained in operation until February 2012, when Sony bought out Ericsson's share; Ericsson said it wanted to focus on the global wireless market as a whole.
Lower stock prices and job losses affected many telecommunications companies in 2001. The major equipment manufacturers – Motorola (U.S.), Lucent Technologies (U.S.), Cisco Systems (U.S.), Marconi (UK), Siemens AG (Germany), Nokia (Finland), as well as Ericsson – all announced job cuts in their home countries and in subsidiaries around the world. Ericsson's workforce worldwide fell during 2001 from 107,000 to 85,000.
In September 2001, Ericsson purchased the remaining shares in EHPT from Hewlett Packard. Founded in 1993, Ericsson Hewlett Packard Telecom (EHPT) was a joint venture made up of 60% Ericsson interests and 40% Hewlett-Packard interests.
In 2002, ICT investor losses topped $2 trillion and share prices fell by 95% until August that year. More than half a million people lost their jobs in the global telecom industry over the two years. The collapse of U.S. carrier WorldCom, with more than $107 billion in assets, was the biggest in U.S. history. The sector's problems caused bankruptcies and job losses, and led to changes in the leadership of a number of major companies. Ericsson made 20,000 more staff redundant and raised about $3 billion from its shareholders. In June 2002, Infineon Technologies AG (then the sixth-largest semiconductor supplier and a subsidiary of Siemens) bought Ericsson's microelectronics unit for $400 million.
Co-operation with Hewlett-Packard did not end with EHPT; in 2003 Ericsson outsourced its IT to HP, which included Managed Services, Help Desk Support, Data Center Operations, and HP Utility Data Center. The contract was extended in 2008. There have also been a number of joint Ericsson/HP Telecoms outsourcing deals with telecoms operators including H3G and Vodafone. In October 2005, Ericsson acquired the bulk of the troubled UK telecommunications manufacturer Marconi Company, including its brand name that dates back to the creation of the original Marconi Company by the "father of radio" Guglielmo Marconi. In September 2006, Ericsson sold the greater part of its defense business Ericsson Microwave Systems, which mainly produced sensor and radar systems, to Saab AB, which renamed the company to Saab Microwave Systems.
In 2007, Ericsson acquired carrier edge-router maker Redback Networks, and then Entrisphere, a US-based company providing fiber-access technology. In September 2007, Ericsson acquired an 84% interest in German customer-care and billing software firm LHS, a stake later raised to 100%. In 2008, Ericsson sold its enterprise PBX division to Aastra Technologies, and acquired Tandberg Television, the television technology division of Norwegian company Tandberg.
In 2009, Ericsson bought the CDMA2000 and LTE business of Nortel’s carrier networks division for US$1.18 billion; Bizitek, a Turkish business support systems integrator; the Estonian manufacturing operations of electronic manufacturing company Elcoteq; and completed its acquisition of LHS. Acquisitions in 2010 included assets from the Strategy and Technology Group of inCode, a North American business and consulting-services company; Nortel's majority shareholding (50% plus one share) in LG-Nortel, a joint venture between LG Electronics and Nortel Networks providing sales, R&D and industrial capacity in South Korea, now known as Ericsson-LG; further Nortel carrier-division assets, relating from Nortel's GSM business in the United States and Canada; Optimi Corporation, a U.S.–Spanish telecommunications vendor specializing in network optimization and management; and Pride, a consulting and systems-integration company operating in Italy.
In 2011, Ericsson acquired manufacturing and research facilities, and staff from the Guangdong Nortel Telecommunication Equipment Company (GDNT) as well as Nortel's Multiservice Switch business. Ericsson acquired U.S. company Telcordia Technologies in January 2012, an operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) company. In March, Ericsson announced it was buying the broadcast-services division of Technicolor, a media broadcast technology company. In April 2012 Ericsson completed the acquisition of BelAir Networks a strong Wi-Fi network technology company.
On 3 May 2013, Ericsson announced it would divest its power cable operations to Danish company NKT Holding.On 1 Ju ly 2013, Ericsson announced it would acquire the media management company Red Bee Media, subject to regulatory approval. The acquisition was completed on 9 May 2014. In September 2013, Ericsson completed its acquisition of Microsoft's Mediaroom business and televisions services, originally announced in April the same year. The acquisition makes Ericsson the largest provider of IPTV and multi-screen services in the world, by market share; it was renamed Ericsson Mediaroom. In September 2014, Ericsson acquired majority stake in Apcera for cloud policy compliance. In October 2015, Ericsson completed the acquisition of Envivio, a software encoding company. In April 2016, Ericsson acquired Polish and Ukrainian operations of software development company Ericpol, a long-time supplier to Ericsson. Approximately 2,300 Ericpol employees joined Ericsson, bringing software development competence in radio, cloud, and IP.
On 20 June 2017, Bloomberg disclosed that Ericsson hired Morgan Stanley to explore the sale of its media businesses. The Red Bee Media business was kept in-house as an independent subsidiary company, as no suitable buyer was found, but a 51% stake of the remainder of the Media Solution division was sold to private equity firm One Equity Partners, the new company being named MediaKind. The transaction was completed on 31 January 2019. In February 2018, Ericsson acquired the location-based mobile data management platform Placecast. Ericsson has since integrated Placecast's platform and capabilities with its programmatic mobile ad subsidiary, Emodo.In May 2018, SoftBank partnered with Ericsson to trial new radio technology.
, members of the board of directors of LM Ericsson were: Leif Johansson, Jacob Wallenberg, Kristin S. Rinne, Helena Stjernholm, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Börje Ekholm, Ulf J. Johansson, Mikael Lännqvist, Zlatko Hadzic, Kjell-Åke Soting, Nora Denzel, Kristin Skogen Lund, Pehr Claesson, Karin Åberg and Roger Svensson.
With 25 locations in India that have approximately 10,000 employees, Ericsson was creating a large amount of plastic waste – 25,000 bottles a month on average. Knowing the impact of plastics on the environment, both on land and in the oceans (and specifically the Great Pacific garbage patch) Ericsson team in India was keen to find a new approach to providing clean drinking water to their staff. They reviewed the volumes, counted the cost, considered the environmental impact, and then identified a solution – a simple and straightforward water filtration process called reverse osmosis (RO).
The company identified a total of 21 suitable locations (the remaining four were too small to be cost efficient) and in February they installed 150 free-standing RO free systems, thereby removing approximately 25,000 plastic bottles a month from circulation.
Ericsson has structured its R&D in three levels depending on when products or technologies will be introduced to customers and users. Its research and development organization is part of 'Group Function Technology' and addresses several facets of network architecture: wireless access networks; radio access technologies; broadband technologies; packet technologies; multimedia technologies; services software; EMF safety and sustainability; security; and global services. The head of research since 2012 is Sara Mazur.
Group Function Technology holds research co-operations with several major universities and research institutes including: Lund University in Sweden, Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and Beijing Institute of Technology in China. Ericsson also holds research co-operations within several European research programs such as GigaWam and OASE. Ericsson holds 33,000 granted patents, and is the number-one holder of GSM/GPRS/EDGE, WCDMA/HSPA, and LTE essential patents.
Ericsson hosts a developer program called Ericsson Developer Connection designed to encourage development of applications and services. Ericsson also has an open innovation initiative for beta applications and beta API's & tools called Ericsson Labs. The company hosts several internal innovation competitions among its employees.
Ericsson's business includes technology research, development, network systems and software development, and running operations for telecom service providers. and software Ericsson offers end-to-end services for all major mobile communication standards, and has three main business units.
Business Area Networks develops network infrastructure for communication needs over mobile and fixed connections. Its products include radio base stations, radio network controllers, mobile switching centers and service application nodes. Operators use Ericsson products to migrate from 2G to 3G and, most recently, to 4G networks.
The company's network division has been described as a driver in the development of 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE and 5G technology, and the evolution towards all-IP, and it develops and deploys advanced LTE systems, but it is still developing the older GSM, WCDMA, and CDMA technologies. The company's networks portfolio also includes microwave transport, Internet Protocol (IP) networks, fixed-access services for copper and fiber, and mobile broadband modules, several levels of fixed broadband access, radio access networks from small pico cells to high-capacity macro cells and controllers for radio base stations.
Ericsson's network rollout services employ in-house capabilities, subcontractors and central resources to make changes to live networks. Services such as technology deployment, network transformation, support services and network optimization are also provided.
This unit provides core networks, Operations Support Systems such as network management and analytics, and Business Support Systems such as billing and mediation. Within the Digital Services unit, there is an m-Commerce offering, which focuses on service providers and facilitates their working with financial institutions and intermediaries. Ericsson has announced m-commerce deals with Western Union and African wireless carrier MTN.
The unit is active in 180 countries; it supplies managed services, systems integration, consulting, network rollout, design and optimization, broadcast services, learning services and support.
The company also works with television and media, public safety, and utilities. Ericsson claims to manage networks that serve more than 1 billion subscribers worldwide, and to support customer networks that serve more than 2.5 billion subscribers.
Ericsson's Broadcast Services unit was evolved into a unit called Red Bee Media, which has been spun out into a joint venture. It deals with the playout of live and pre-recorded, commercial and public service television programmes, including presentation (continuity announcements), trailers, and ancillary access services such as closed-caption subtitles, audio description and in-vision sign language interpreters. Its media management services consist of Managed Media Preparation and Managed Media Internet Delivery.
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB (Sony Ericsson) was a joint venture with Sony that merged the previous mobile telephone operations of both companies. It manufactured mobile telephones, accessories and personal computer (PC) cards. Sony Ericsson was responsible for product design and development, marketing, sales, distribution and customer services. On 16 February 2012, Sony announced it had completed the full acquisition of Sony Ericsson.
As a joint venture with Sony, Ericsson's mobile telephone production was moved into the company Sony Ericsson in 2001. The following is a list of mobile phones marketed under the brand name Ericsson.
Ericsson Mobile Platforms existed for eight years; on 12 February 2009, Ericsson announced it would be merged with the mobile platform company of STMicroelectronics, ST-NXP Wireless, to create a 50/50 joint venture owned by Ericsson and STMicroelectronics.
This joint venture was divested in 2013 and remaining activities can be found in Ericsson Modems and STMicroelectronics. Ericsson Mobile Platform ceased being a legal entity early 2009.
Starting in 1983 Ericsson Enterprise provided communications systems and services for businesses, public entities and educational institutions. It produced products for voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)-based private branch exchanges (PBX), wireless local area networks (WLAN), and mobile intranets.
Ericsson Enterprise operated mainly from Sweden but also operated through regional units and other partners/distributors. In 2008 it was sold to Aastra.
Ericsson was an official backer in the launch of the .mobi top level domain created specifically for the mobile internet. Since the launch of .mobi in September 2006, Ericsson has launched SonyEricsson.mobi, the mobile portal of Sony Ericsson.
On 7 December 2019, Ericsson agreed to pay more than $1.2 billion (€1.09 billion) to settle US criminal and civil investigations into foreign corruption. US authorities accused the company of conducting a campaign of corruption between 2000 and 2016 across China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Kuwait and Djibouti. Ericsson admitted to paying bribes, falsifying books and records and failing to implement reasonable internal accounting controls in an attempt to strengthen its position in the telecommunications industry. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9424 |
Ethology
Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism as a term also describes the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually referring to measured responses to stimuli or to trained behavioural responses in a laboratory context, without a particular emphasis on evolutionary adaptivity. Throughout history, different naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour. Ethology has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth (1871-1945), and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907-1988) and of Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch (1886-1982), the three recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to some other disciplines such as neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Ethologists typically show interest in a behavioural process rather than in a particular animal group, and often study one type of behaviour, such as aggression, in a number of unrelated species.
Ethology is a rapidly growing field. Since the dawn of the 21st century researchers have re-examined and reached new conclusions in many aspects of animal communication, emotions, culture, learning and sexuality that the scientific community long thought it understood. New fields, such as neuroethology, have developed.
Understanding ethology or animal behaviour can be important in animal training. Considering the natural behaviours of different species or breeds enables trainers to select the individuals best suited to perform the required task. It also enables trainers to encourage the performance of naturally occurring behaviours and the discontinuance of undesirable behaviours.
The term "ethology" derives from the Greek language: ἦθος, "ethos" meaning "character" and , "-logia" meaning "the study of". The term was first popularized by American myrmecologist (a person who studies ants) William Morton Wheeler in 1902.
Because ethology is considered a topic of biology, ethologists have been concerned particularly with the evolution of behaviour and its understanding in terms of natural selection. In one sense, the first modern ethologist was Charles Darwin, whose 1872 book "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" influenced many ethologists. He pursued his interest in behaviour by encouraging his protégé George Romanes, who investigated animal learning and intelligence using an anthropomorphic method, anecdotal cognitivism, that did not gain scientific support.
Other early ethologists, such as Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, Wallace Craig and Julian Huxley, instead concentrated on behaviours that can be called instinctive, or natural, in that they occur in all members of a species under specified circumstances. Their beginning for studying the behaviour of a new species was to construct an ethogram (a description of the main types of behaviour with their frequencies of occurrence). This provided an objective, cumulative database of behaviour, which subsequent researchers could check and supplement.
Due to the work of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, ethology developed strongly in continental Europe during the years prior to World War II. After the war, Tinbergen moved to the University of Oxford, and ethology became stronger in the UK, with the additional influence of William Thorpe, Robert Hinde, and Patrick Bateson at the Sub-department of Animal Behaviour of the University of Cambridge. In this period, too, ethology began to develop strongly in North America.
Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for their work of developing ethology.
Ethology is now a well-recognized scientific discipline, and has a number of journals covering developments in the subject, such as "Animal Behaviour", "Animal Welfare", "Applied Animal Behaviour Science", "Animal Cognition", "Behaviour", "Behavioral Ecology" and "Journal of Ethology", "Ethology". In 1972, the International Society for Human Ethology was founded to promote exchange of knowledge and opinions concerning human behaviour gained by applying ethological principles and methods and published their journal, "The Human Ethology Bulletin". In 2008, in a paper published in the journal "Behaviour", ethologist Peter Verbeek introduced the term "Peace Ethology" as a sub-discipline of Human Ethology that is concerned with issues of human conflict, conflict resolution, reconciliation, war, peacemaking, and peacekeeping behaviour.
In 1972, the English ethologist John H. Crook distinguished comparative ethology from social ethology, and argued that much of the ethology that had existed so far was really comparative ethology—examining animals as individuals—whereas, in the future, ethologists would need to concentrate on the behaviour of social groups of animals and the social structure within them.
E. O. Wilson's book "" appeared in 1975, and since that time, the study of behaviour has been much more concerned with social aspects. It has also been driven by the stronger, but more sophisticated, Darwinism associated with Wilson, Robert Trivers, and W. D. Hamilton. The related development of behavioural ecology has also helped transform ethology. Furthermore, a substantial rapprochement with comparative psychology has occurred, so the modern scientific study of behaviour offers a more or less seamless spectrum of approaches: from animal cognition to more traditional comparative psychology, ethology, sociobiology, and behavioural ecology. In 2020, Dr. Tobias Starzak and Professor Albert Newen from the Institute of Philosophy II at the Ruhr University Bochum postulated that animals may have beliefs.
Comparative psychology also studies animal behaviour, but, as opposed to ethology, is construed as a sub-topic of psychology rather than as one of biology. Historically, where comparative psychology has included research on animal behaviour in the context of what is known about human psychology, ethology involves research on animal behaviour in the context of what is known about animal anatomy, physiology, neurobiology, and phylogenetic history. Furthermore, early comparative psychologists concentrated on the study of learning and tended to research behaviour in artificial situations, whereas early ethologists concentrated on behaviour in natural situations, tending to describe it as instinctive.
The two approaches are complementary rather than competitive, but they do result in different perspectives, and occasionally conflicts of opinion about matters of substance. In addition, for most of the twentieth century, comparative psychology developed most strongly in North America, while ethology was stronger in Europe. From a practical standpoint, early comparative psychologists concentrated on gaining extensive knowledge of the behaviour of very few species. Ethologists were more interested in understanding behaviour across a wide range of species to facilitate principled comparisons across taxonomic groups. Ethologists have made much more use of such cross-species comparisons than comparative psychologists have.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines instinct as "A largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason".
An important development, associated with the name of Konrad Lorenz though probably due more to his teacher, Oskar Heinroth, was the identification of fixed action patterns. Lorenz popularized these as instinctive responses that would occur reliably in the presence of identifiable stimuli called sign stimuli or "releasing stimuli". Fixed action patterns are now considered to be instinctive behavioural sequences that are relatively invariant within the species and that almost inevitably run to completion.
One example of a releaser is the beak movements of many bird species performed by newly hatched chicks, which stimulates the mother to regurgitate food for her offspring. Other examples are the classic studies by Tinbergen on the egg-retrieval behaviour and the effects of a "supernormal stimulus" on the behaviour of graylag geese.
One investigation of this kind was the study of the waggle dance ("dance language") in bee communication by Karl von Frisch.
Habituation is a simple form of learning and occurs in many animal taxa. It is the process whereby an animal ceases responding to a stimulus. Often, the response is an innate behaviour. Essentially, the animal learns not to respond to irrelevant stimuli. For example, prairie dogs ("Cynomys ludovicianus") give alarm calls when predators approach, causing all individuals in the group to quickly scramble down burrows. When prairie dog towns are located near trails used by humans, giving alarm calls every time a person walks by is expensive in terms of time and energy. Habituation to humans is therefore an important adaptation in this context.
Associative learning in animal behaviour is any learning process in which a new response becomes associated with a particular stimulus. The first studies of associative learning were made by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who observed that dogs trained to associate food with the ringing of a bell would salivate on hearing the bell.
Imprinting enables the young to discriminate the members of their own species, vital for reproductive success. This important type of learning only takes place in a very limited period of time. Lorenz observed that the young of birds such as geese and chickens followed their mothers spontaneously from almost the first day after they were hatched, and he discovered that this response could be imitated by an arbitrary stimulus if the eggs were incubated artificially and the stimulus were presented during a critical period that continued for a few days after hatching.
Imitation is an advanced behaviour whereby an animal observes and exactly replicates the behaviour of another.
The National Institutes of Health reported that capuchin monkeys preferred the company of researchers who imitated them to that of researchers who did not. The monkeys not only spent more time with their imitators but also preferred to engage in a simple task with them even when provided with the option of performing the same task with a non-imitator. Imitation has been observed in recent research on chimpanzees; not only did these chimps copy the actions of another individual, when given a choice, the chimps preferred to imitate the actions of the higher-ranking elder chimpanzee as opposed to the lower-ranking young chimpanzee.
There are various ways animals can learn using observational learning but without the process of imitation. One of these is "stimulus enhancement" in which individuals become interested in an object as the result of observing others interacting with the object. Increased interest in an object can result in object manipulation which allows for new object-related behaviours by trial-and-error learning. Haggerty (1909) devised an experiment in which a monkey climbed up the side of a cage, placed its arm into a wooden chute, and pulled a rope in the chute to release food. Another monkey was provided an opportunity to obtain the food after watching a monkey go through this process on four separate occasions. The monkey performed a different method and finally succeeded after trial-and-error. Another example familiar to some cat and dog owners is the ability of their animals to open doors. The action of humans operating the handle to open the door results in the animals becoming interested in the handle and then by trial-and-error, they learn to operate the handle and open the door.
In local enhancement, a demonstrator attracts an observer's attention to a particular location. Local enhancement has been observed to transmit foraging information among birds, rats and pigs. The stingless bee ("Trigona corvina") uses local enhancement to locate other members of their colony and food resources.
A well-documented example of social transmission of a behaviour occurred in a group of macaques on Hachijojima Island, Japan. The macaques lived in the inland forest until the 1960s, when a group of researchers started giving them potatoes on the beach: soon, they started venturing onto the beach, picking the potatoes from the sand, and cleaning and eating them. About one year later, an individual was observed bringing a potato to the sea, putting it into the water with one hand, and cleaning it with the other. This behaviour was soon expressed by the individuals living in contact with her; when they gave birth, this behaviour was also expressed by their young - a form of social transmission.
Teaching is a highly specialized aspect of learning in which the "teacher" (demonstrator) adjusts their behaviour to increase the probability of the "pupil" (observer) achieving the desired end-result of the behaviour. For example, killer whales are known to intentionally beach themselves to catch pinniped prey. Mother killer whales teach their young to catch pinnipeds by pushing them onto the shore and encouraging them to attack the prey. Because the mother killer whale is altering her behaviour to help her offspring learn to catch prey, this is evidence of teaching. Teaching is not limited to mammals. Many insects, for example, have been observed demonstrating various forms of teaching to obtain food. Ants, for example, will guide each other to food sources through a process called "tandem running," in which an ant will guide a companion ant to a source of food. It has been suggested that the pupil ant is able to learn this route to obtain food in the future or teach the route to other ants.This behaviour of teaching is also exemplified by crows, specifically New Caledonian crows. The adults (whether individual or in families) teach their young adolescent offspring how to construct and utilize tools. For example, "Pandanus" branches are used to extract insects and other larvae from holes within trees.
Individual reproduction is the most important phase in the proliferation of individuals or genes within a species: for this reason, there exist complex mating rituals, which can be very complex even if they are often regarded as fixed action patterns. The stickleback's complex mating ritual, studied by Tinbergen, is regarded as a notable example.
Often in social life, animals fight for the right to reproduce, as well as social supremacy. A common example of fighting for social and sexual supremacy is the so-called pecking order among poultry. Every time a group of poultry cohabitate for a certain time length, they establish a pecking order. In these groups, one chicken dominates the others and can peck without being pecked. A second chicken can peck all the others except the first, and so on. Chickens higher in the pecking order may at times be distinguished by their healthier appearance when compared to lower level chickens. While the pecking order is establishing, frequent and violent fights can happen, but once established, it is broken only when other individuals enter the group, in which case the pecking order re-establishes from scratch.
Several animal species, including humans, tend to live in groups. Group size is a major aspect of their social environment. Social life is probably a complex and effective survival strategy. It may be regarded as a sort of symbiosis among individuals of the same species: a society is composed of a group of individuals belonging to the same species living within well-defined rules on food management, role assignments and reciprocal dependence.
When biologists interested in evolution theory first started examining social behaviour, some apparently unanswerable questions arose, such as how the birth of sterile castes, like in bees, could be explained through an evolving mechanism that emphasizes the reproductive success of as many individuals as possible, or why, amongst animals living in small groups like squirrels, an individual would risk its own life to save the rest of the group. These behaviours may be examples of altruism. Of course, not all behaviours are altruistic, as indicated by the table below. For example, revengeful behaviour was at one point claimed to have been observed exclusively in "Homo sapiens". However, other species have been reported to be vengeful including chimpanzees, as well as anecdotal reports of vengeful camels.
Altruistic behaviour has been explained by the gene-centred view of evolution.
One advantage of group living can be decreased predation. If the number of predator attacks stays the same despite increasing prey group size, each prey may have a reduced risk of predator attacks through the dilution effect. Further, according to the selfish herd theory, the fitness benefits associated with group living vary depending on the location of an individual within the group. The theory suggests that conspecifics positioned at the centre of a group will reduce the likelihood predations while those at the periphery will become more vulnerable to attack. Additionally, a predator that is confused by a mass of individuals can find it more difficult to single out one target. For this reason, the zebra's stripes offer not only camouflage in a habitat of tall grasses, but also the advantage of blending into a herd of other zebras. In groups, prey can also actively reduce their predation risk through more effective defence tactics, or through earlier detection of predators through increased vigilance.
Another advantage of group living can be an increased ability to forage for food. Group members may exchange information about food sources between one another, facilitating the process of resource location. Honeybees are a notable example of this, using the waggle dance to communicate the location of flowers to the rest of their hive. Predators also receive benefits from hunting in groups, through using better strategies and being able to take down larger prey.
Some disadvantages accompany living in groups. Living in close proximity to other animals can facilitate the transmission of parasites and disease, and groups that are too large may also experience greater competition for resources and mates.
Theoretically, social animals should have optimal group sizes that maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of group living. However, in nature, most groups are stable at slightly larger than optimal sizes. Because it generally benefits an individual to join an optimally-sized group, despite slightly decreasing the advantage for all members, groups may continue to increase in size until it is more advantageous to remain alone than to join an overly full group.
Niko Tinbergen argued that ethology always needed to include four kinds of explanation in any instance of behaviour:
These explanations are complementary rather than mutually exclusive—all instances of behaviour require an explanation at each of these four levels. For example, the function of eating is to acquire nutrients (which ultimately aids survival and reproduction), but the immediate cause of eating is hunger (causation). Hunger and eating are evolutionarily ancient and are found in many species (evolutionary history), and develop early within an organism's lifespan (development). It is easy to confuse such questions—for example, to argue that people eat because they're hungry and not to acquire nutrients—without realizing that the reason people experience hunger is because it causes them to acquire nutrients. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9425 |
Electromagnetic radiation
In physics, electromagnetic radiation (EM radiation or EMR) refers to the waves (or their quanta, photons) of the electromagnetic field, propagating (radiating) through space, carrying electromagnetic radiant energy. It includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, (visible) light, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays.
Classically, electromagnetic radiation consists of electromagnetic waves, which are synchronized oscillations of electric and magnetic fields. In a vacuum, electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light, commonly denoted "c". In homogeneous, isotropic media, the oscillations of the two fields are perpendicular to each other and perpendicular to the direction of energy and wave propagation, forming a transverse wave. The wavefront of electromagnetic waves emitted from a point source (such as a light bulb) is a sphere. The position of an electromagnetic wave within the electromagnetic spectrum can be characterized by either its frequency of oscillation or its wavelength. Electromagnetic waves of different frequency are called by different names since they have different sources and effects on matter. In order of increasing frequency and decreasing wavelength these are: radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays and gamma rays.
Electromagnetic waves are emitted by electrically charged particles undergoing acceleration, and these waves can subsequently interact with other charged particles, exerting force on them. EM waves carry energy, momentum and angular momentum away from their source particle and can impart those quantities to matter with which they interact. Electromagnetic radiation is associated with those EM waves that are free to propagate themselves ("radiate") without the continuing influence of the moving charges that produced them, because they have achieved sufficient distance from those charges. Thus, EMR is sometimes referred to as the far field. In this language, the near field refers to EM fields near the charges and current that directly produced them, specifically electromagnetic induction and electrostatic induction phenomena.
In quantum mechanics, an alternate way of viewing EMR is that it consists of photons, uncharged elementary particles with zero rest mass which are the quanta of the electromagnetic force, responsible for all electromagnetic interactions. Quantum electrodynamics is the theory of how EMR interacts with matter on an atomic level. Quantum effects provide additional sources of EMR, such as the transition of electrons to lower energy levels in an atom and black-body radiation. The energy of an individual photon is quantized and is greater for photons of higher frequency. This relationship is given by Planck's equation "E" = "hf", where "E" is the energy per photon, "f" is the frequency of the photon, and "h" is Planck's constant. A single gamma ray photon, for example, might carry ~100,000 times the energy of a single photon of visible light.
The effects of EMR upon chemical compounds and biological organisms depend both upon the radiation's power and its frequency. EMR of visible or lower frequencies (i.e., visible light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves) is called "non-ionizing radiation", because its photons do not individually have enough energy to ionize atoms or molecules or break chemical bonds. The effects of these radiations on chemical systems and living tissue are caused primarily by heating effects from the combined energy transfer of many photons. In contrast, high frequency ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays are called "ionizing radiation", since individual photons of such high frequency have enough energy to ionize molecules or break chemical bonds. These radiations have the ability to cause chemical reactions and damage living cells beyond that resulting from simple heating, and can be a health hazard.
James Clerk Maxwell derived a wave form of the electric and magnetic equations, thus uncovering the wave-like nature of electric and magnetic fields and their symmetry. Because the speed of EM waves predicted by the wave equation coincided with the measured speed of light, Maxwell concluded that light itself is an EM wave. Maxwell's equations were confirmed by Heinrich Hertz through experiments with radio waves.
According to Maxwell's equations, a spatially varying electric field is always associated with a magnetic field that changes over time. Likewise, a spatially varying magnetic field is associated with specific changes over time in the electric field. In an electromagnetic wave, the changes in the electric field are always accompanied by a wave in the magnetic field in one direction, and vice versa. This relationship between the two occurs without either type of field causing the other; rather, they occur together in the same way that time and space changes occur together and are interlinked in special relativity. In fact, magnetic fields can be viewed as electric fields in another frame of reference, and electric fields can be viewed as magnetic fields in another frame of reference, but they have equal significance as physics is the same in all frames of reference, so the close relationship between space and time changes here is more than an analogy. Together, these fields form a propagating electromagnetic wave, which moves out into space and need never again interact with the source. The distant EM field formed in this way by the acceleration of a charge carries energy with it that "radiates" away through space, hence the term.
Maxwell's equations established that some charges and currents ("sources") produce a local type of electromagnetic field near them that does "not" have the behaviour of EMR. Currents directly produce a magnetic field, but it is of a magnetic dipole type that dies out with distance from the current. In a similar manner, moving charges pushed apart in a conductor by a changing electrical potential (such as in an antenna) produce an electric dipole type electrical field, but this also declines with distance. These fields make up the near-field near the EMR source. Neither of these behaviours are responsible for EM radiation. Instead, they cause electromagnetic field behaviour that only efficiently transfers power to a receiver very close to the source, such as the magnetic induction inside a transformer, or the feedback behaviour that happens close to the coil of a metal detector. Typically, near-fields have a powerful effect on their own sources, causing an increased “load” (decreased electrical reactance) in the source or transmitter, whenever energy is withdrawn from the EM field by a receiver. Otherwise, these fields do not “propagate” freely out into space, carrying their energy away without distance-limit, but rather oscillate, returning their energy to the transmitter if it is not received by a receiver.
By contrast, the EM far-field is composed of "radiation" that is free of the transmitter in the sense that (unlike the case in an electrical transformer) the transmitter requires the same power to send these changes in the fields out, whether the signal is immediately picked up or not. This distant part of the electromagnetic field "is" "electromagnetic radiation" (also called the far-field). The far-fields propagate (radiate) without allowing the transmitter to affect them. This causes them to be independent in the sense that their existence and their energy, after they have left the transmitter, is completely independent of both transmitter and receiver. Due to conservation of energy, the amount of power passing through any spherical surface drawn around the source is the same. Because such a surface has an area proportional to the square of its distance from the source, the power density of EM radiation always decreases with the inverse square of distance from the source; this is called the inverse-square law. This is in contrast to dipole parts of the EM field close to the source (the near-field), which varies in power according to an inverse cube power law, and thus does "not" transport a conserved amount of energy over distances, but instead fades with distance, with its energy (as noted) rapidly returning to the transmitter or absorbed by a nearby receiver (such as a transformer secondary coil).
The far-field (EMR) depends on a different mechanism for its production than the near-field, and upon different terms in Maxwell's equations. Whereas the magnetic part of the near-field is due to currents in the source, the magnetic field in EMR is due only to the local change in the electric field. In a similar way, while the electric field in the near-field is due directly to the charges and charge-separation in the source, the electric field in EMR is due to a change in the local magnetic field. Both processes for producing electric and magnetic EMR fields have a different dependence on distance than do near-field dipole electric and magnetic fields. That is why the EMR type of EM field becomes dominant in power “far” from sources. The term “far from sources” refers to how far from the source (moving at the speed of light) any portion of the outward-moving EM field is located, by the time that source currents are changed by the varying source potential, and the source has therefore begun to generate an outwardly moving EM field of a different phase.
A more compact view of EMR is that the far-field that composes EMR is generally that part of the EM field that has traveled sufficient distance from the source, that it has become completely disconnected from any feedback to the charges and currents that were originally responsible for it. Now independent of the source charges, the EM field, as it moves farther away, is dependent only upon the accelerations of the charges that produced it. It no longer has a strong connection to the direct fields of the charges, or to the velocity of the charges (currents).
In the Liénard–Wiechert potential formulation of the electric and magnetic fields due to motion of a single particle (according to Maxwell's equations), the terms associated with acceleration of the particle are those that are responsible for the part of the field that is regarded as electromagnetic radiation. By contrast, the term associated with the changing static electric field of the particle and the magnetic term that results from the particle's uniform velocity, are both associated with the electromagnetic near-field, and do not comprise EM radiation.
Electrodynamics is the physics of electromagnetic radiation, and electromagnetism is the physical phenomenon associated with the theory of electrodynamics. Electric and magnetic fields obey the properties of superposition. Thus, a field due to any particular particle or time-varying electric or magnetic field contributes to the fields present in the same space due to other causes. Further, as they are vector fields, all magnetic and electric field vectors add together according to vector addition. For example, in optics two or more coherent light waves may interact and by constructive or destructive interference yield a resultant irradiance deviating from the sum of the component irradiances of the individual light waves.
Since light is an oscillation it is not affected by traveling through static electric or magnetic fields in a linear medium such as a vacuum. However, in nonlinear media, such as some crystals, interactions can occur between light and static electric and magnetic fields — these interactions include the Faraday effect and the Kerr effect.
In refraction, a wave crossing from one medium to another of different density alters its speed and direction upon entering the new medium. The ratio of the refractive indices of the media determines the degree of refraction, and is summarized by Snell's law. Light of composite wavelengths (natural sunlight) disperses into a visible spectrum passing through a prism, because of the wavelength-dependent refractive index of the prism material (dispersion); that is, each component wave within the composite light is bent a different amount.
EM radiation exhibits both wave properties and particle properties at the same time (see wave-particle duality). Both wave and particle characteristics have been confirmed in many experiments. Wave characteristics are more apparent when EM radiation is measured over relatively large timescales and over large distances while particle characteristics are more evident when measuring small timescales and distances. For example, when electromagnetic radiation is absorbed by matter, particle-like properties will be more obvious when the average number of photons in the cube of the relevant wavelength is much smaller than 1. It is not so difficult to experimentally observe non-uniform deposition of energy when light is absorbed, however this alone is not evidence of "particulate" behavior. Rather, it reflects the quantum nature of "matter". Demonstrating that the light itself is quantized, not merely its interaction with matter, is a more subtle affair.
Some experiments display both the wave and particle natures of electromagnetic waves, such as the self-interference of a single photon. When a single photon is sent through an interferometer, it passes through both paths, interfering with itself, as waves do, yet is detected by a photomultiplier or other sensitive detector only once.
A quantum theory of the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and matter such as electrons is described by the theory of quantum electrodynamics.
Electromagnetic waves can be polarized, reflected, refracted, diffracted or interfere with each other.
In homogeneous, isotropic media, electromagnetic radiation is a transverse wave, meaning that its oscillations are perpendicular to the direction of energy transfer and travel. The electric and magnetic parts of the field stand in a fixed ratio of strengths in order to satisfy the two Maxwell equations that specify how one is produced from the other. In dissipation less (lossless) media, these E and B fields are also in phase, with both reaching maxima and minima at the same points in space (see illustrations). A common misconception is that the E and B fields in electromagnetic radiation are out of phase because a change in one produces the other, and this would produce a phase difference between them as sinusoidal functions (as indeed happens in electromagnetic induction, and in the near-field close to antennas). However, in the far-field EM radiation which is described by the two source-free Maxwell curl operator equations, a more correct description is that a time-change in one type of field is proportional to a space-change in the other. These derivatives require that the E and B fields in EMR are in-phase (see mathematics section below).
An important aspect of light's nature is its frequency. The frequency of a wave is its rate of oscillation and is measured in hertz, the SI unit of frequency, where one hertz is equal to one oscillation per second. Light usually has multiple frequencies that sum to form the resultant wave. Different frequencies undergo different angles of refraction, a phenomenon known as dispersion.
A monochromatic wave (a wave of a single frequency) consists of successive troughs and crests, and the distance between two adjacent crests or troughs is called the wavelength. Waves of the electromagnetic spectrum vary in size, from very long radio waves longer than a continent to very short gamma rays smaller than atom nuclei. Frequency is inversely proportional to wavelength, according to the equation:
where "v" is the speed of the wave ("c" in a vacuum, or less in other media), "f" is the frequency and λ is the wavelength. As waves cross boundaries between different media, their speeds change but their frequencies remain constant.
Electromagnetic waves in free space must be solutions of Maxwell's electromagnetic wave equation. Two main classes of solutions are known, namely plane waves and spherical waves. The plane waves may be viewed as the limiting case of spherical waves at a very large (ideally infinite) distance from the source. Both types of waves can have a waveform which is an arbitrary time function (so long as it is sufficiently differentiable to conform to the wave equation). As with any time function, this can be decomposed by means of Fourier analysis into its frequency spectrum, or individual sinusoidal components, each of which contains a single frequency, amplitude and phase. Such a component wave is said to be "monochromatic". A monochromatic electromagnetic wave can be characterized by its frequency or wavelength, its peak amplitude, its phase relative to some reference phase, its direction of propagation and its polarization.
Interference is the superposition of two or more waves resulting in a new wave pattern. If the fields have components in the same direction, they constructively interfere, while opposite directions cause destructive interference. An example of interference caused by EMR is electromagnetic interference (EMI) or as it is more commonly known as, radio-frequency interference (RFI). Additionally, multiple polarization signals can be combined (i.e. interfered) to form new states of polarization, which is known as parallel polarization state generation.
The energy in electromagnetic waves is sometimes called radiant energy.
An anomaly arose in the late 19th century involving a contradiction between the wave theory of light and measurements of the electromagnetic spectra that were being emitted by thermal radiators known as black bodies. Physicists struggled with this problem unsuccessfully for many years. It later became known as the ultraviolet catastrophe. In 1900, Max Planck developed a new theory of black-body radiation that explained the observed spectrum. Planck's theory was based on the idea that black bodies emit light (and other electromagnetic radiation) only as discrete bundles or packets of energy. These packets were called quanta. In 1905, Albert Einstein proposed that light quanta be regarded as real particles. Later the particle of light was given the name photon, to correspond with other particles being described around this time, such as the electron and proton. A photon has an energy, "E", proportional to its frequency, "f", by
where "h" is Planck's constant, formula_3 is the wavelength and "c" is the speed of light. This is sometimes known as the Planck–Einstein equation. In quantum theory (see first quantization) the energy of the photons is thus directly proportional to the frequency of the EMR wave.
Likewise, the momentum "p" of a photon is also proportional to its frequency and inversely proportional to its wavelength:
The source of Einstein's proposal that light was composed of particles (or could act as particles in some circumstances) was an experimental anomaly not explained by the wave theory: the photoelectric effect, in which light striking a metal surface ejected electrons from the surface, causing an electric current to flow across an applied voltage. Experimental measurements demonstrated that the energy of individual ejected electrons was proportional to the "frequency", rather than the "intensity", of the light. Furthermore, below a certain minimum frequency, which depended on the particular metal, no current would flow regardless of the intensity. These observations appeared to contradict the wave theory, and for years physicists tried in vain to find an explanation. In 1905, Einstein explained this puzzle by resurrecting the particle theory of light to explain the observed effect. Because of the preponderance of evidence in favor of the wave theory, however, Einstein's ideas were met initially with great skepticism among established physicists. Eventually Einstein's explanation was accepted as new particle-like behavior of light was observed, such as the Compton effect.
As a photon is absorbed by an atom, it excites the atom, elevating an electron to a higher energy level (one that is on average farther from the nucleus). When an electron in an excited molecule or atom descends to a lower energy level, it emits a photon of light at a frequency corresponding to the energy difference. Since the energy levels of electrons in atoms are discrete, each element and each molecule emits and absorbs its own characteristic frequencies. Immediate photon emission is called fluorescence, a type of photoluminescence. An example is visible light emitted from fluorescent paints, in response to ultraviolet (blacklight). Many other fluorescent emissions are known in spectral bands other than visible light. Delayed emission is called phosphorescence.
The modern theory that explains the nature of light includes the notion of wave–particle duality. More generally, the theory states that everything has both a particle nature and a wave nature, and various experiments can be done to bring out one or the other. The particle nature is more easily discerned using an object with a large mass. A bold proposition by Louis de Broglie in 1924 led the scientific community to realize that matter (e.g. electrons) also exhibits wave–particle duality.
Together, wave and particle effects fully explain the emission and absorption spectra of EM radiation. The matter-composition of the medium through which the light travels determines the nature of the absorption and emission spectrum. These bands correspond to the allowed energy levels in the atoms. Dark bands in the absorption spectrum are due to the atoms in an intervening medium between source and observer. The atoms absorb certain frequencies of the light between emitter and detector/eye, then emit them in all directions. A dark band appears to the detector, due to the radiation scattered out of the beam. For instance, dark bands in the light emitted by a distant star are due to the atoms in the star's atmosphere. A similar phenomenon occurs for emission, which is seen when an emitting gas glows due to excitation of the atoms from any mechanism, including heat. As electrons descend to lower energy levels, a spectrum is emitted that represents the jumps between the energy levels of the electrons, but lines are seen because again emission happens only at particular energies after excitation. An example is the emission spectrum of nebulae. Rapidly moving electrons are most sharply accelerated when they encounter a region of force, so they are responsible for producing much of the highest frequency electromagnetic radiation observed in nature.
These phenomena can aid various chemical determinations for the composition of gases lit from behind (absorption spectra) and for glowing gases (emission spectra). Spectroscopy (for example) determines what chemical elements comprise a particular star. Spectroscopy is also used in the determination of the distance of a star, using the red shift.
When any wire (or other conducting object such as an antenna) conducts alternating current, electromagnetic radiation is propagated at the same frequency as the current. In many such situations it is possible to identify an electrical dipole moment that arises from separation of charges due to the exciting electrical potential, and this dipole moment oscillates in time, as the charges move back and forth. This oscillation at a given frequency gives rise to changing electric and magnetic fields, which then set the electromagnetic radiation in motion.
At the quantum level, electromagnetic radiation is produced when the wavepacket of a charged particle oscillates or otherwise accelerates. Charged particles in a stationary state do not move, but a superposition of such states may result in a transition state that has an electric dipole moment that oscillates in time. This oscillating dipole moment is responsible for the phenomenon of radiative transition between quantum states of a charged particle. Such states occur (for example) in atoms when photons are radiated as the atom shifts from one stationary state to another.
As a wave, light is characterized by a velocity (the speed of light), wavelength, and frequency. As particles, light is a stream of photons. Each has an energy related to the frequency of the wave given by Planck's relation "E = hf", where "E" is the energy of the photon, "h" = 6.626 × 10−34 J·s is Planck's constant, and "f" is the frequency of the wave.
One rule is obeyed regardless of circumstances: EM radiation in a vacuum travels at the speed of light, "relative to the observer", regardless of the observer's velocity. (This observation led to Einstein's development of the theory of special relativity.)
In a medium (other than vacuum), velocity factor or refractive index are considered, depending on frequency and application. Both of these are ratios of the speed in a medium to speed in a vacuum.
By the late nineteenth century, various experimental anomalies could not be explained by the simple wave theory. One of these anomalies involved a controversy over the speed of light. The speed of light and other EMR predicted by Maxwell's equations did not appear unless the equations were modified in a way first suggested by FitzGerald and Lorentz (see history of special relativity), or else otherwise that speed would depend on the speed of observer relative to the "medium" (called luminiferous aether) which supposedly "carried" the electromagnetic wave (in a manner analogous to the way air carries sound waves). Experiments failed to find any observer effect. In 1905, Einstein proposed that space and time appeared to be velocity-changeable entities for light propagation and all other processes and laws. These changes accounted for the constancy of the speed of light and all electromagnetic radiation, from the viewpoints of all observers—even those in relative motion.
Electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths other than those of visible light were discovered in the early 19th century. The discovery of infrared radiation is ascribed to astronomer William Herschel, who published his results in 1800 before the Royal Society of London. Herschel used a glass prism to refract light from the Sun and detected invisible rays that caused heating beyond the red part of the spectrum, through an increase in the temperature recorded with a thermometer. These "calorific rays" were later termed infrared.
In 1801, German physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter discovered ultraviolet in an experiment similar to Hershel's, using sunlight and a glass prism. Ritter noted that invisible rays near the violet edge of a solar spectrum dispersed by a triangular prism darkened silver chloride preparations more quickly than did the nearby violet light. Ritter's experiments were an early precursor to what would become photography. Ritter noted that the ultraviolet rays (which at first were called "chemical rays") were capable of causing chemical reactions.
In 1862–64 James Clerk Maxwell developed equations for the electromagnetic field which suggested that waves in the field would travel with a speed that was very close to the known speed of light. Maxwell therefore suggested that visible light (as well as invisible infrared and ultraviolet rays by inference) all consisted of propagating disturbances (or radiation) in the electromagnetic field. Radio waves were first produced deliberately by Heinrich Hertz in 1887, using electrical circuits calculated to produce oscillations at a much lower frequency than that of visible light, following recipes for producing oscillating charges and currents suggested by Maxwell's equations. Hertz also developed ways to detect these waves, and produced and characterized what were later termed radio waves and microwaves.
Wilhelm Röntgen discovered and named X-rays. After experimenting with high voltages applied to an evacuated tube on 8 November 1895, he noticed a fluorescence on a nearby plate of coated glass. In one month, he discovered X-rays' main properties.
The last portion of the EM spectrum to be discovered was associated with radioactivity. Henri Becquerel found that uranium salts caused fogging of an unexposed photographic plate through a covering paper in a manner similar to X-rays, and Marie Curie discovered that only certain elements gave off these rays of energy, soon discovering the intense radiation of radium. The radiation from pitchblende was differentiated into alpha rays (alpha particles) and beta rays (beta particles) by Ernest Rutherford through simple experimentation in 1899, but these proved to be charged particulate types of radiation. However, in 1900 the French scientist Paul Villard discovered a third neutrally charged and especially penetrating type of radiation from radium, and after he described it, Rutherford realized it must be yet a third type of radiation, which in 1903 Rutherford named gamma rays. In 1910 British physicist William Henry Bragg demonstrated that gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation, not particles, and in 1914 Rutherford and Edward Andrade measured their wavelengths, finding that they were similar to X-rays but with shorter wavelengths and higher frequency, although a 'cross-over' between X and gamma rays makes it possible to have X-rays with a higher energy (and hence shorter wavelength) than gamma rays and vice versa. The origin of the ray differentiates them, gamma rays tend to be a natural phenomena originating from the unstable nucleus of an atom and X-rays are electrically generated (and hence man-made) unless they are as a result of bremsstrahlung X-radiation caused by the interaction of fast moving particles (such as beta particles) colliding with certain materials, usually of higher atomic numbers.
EM radiation (the designation 'radiation' excludes static electric and magnetic and near fields) is classified by wavelength into radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. Arbitrary electromagnetic waves can be expressed by Fourier analysis in terms of sinusoidal monochromatic waves, which in turn can each be classified into these regions of the EMR spectrum.
For certain classes of EM waves, the waveform is most usefully treated as "random", and then spectral analysis must be done by slightly different mathematical techniques appropriate to random or stochastic processes. In such cases, the individual frequency components are represented in terms of their "power" content, and the phase information is not preserved. Such a representation is called the power spectral density of the random process. Random electromagnetic radiation requiring this kind of analysis is, for example, encountered in the interior of stars, and in certain other very wideband forms of radiation such as the Zero point wave field of the electromagnetic vacuum.
The behavior of EM radiation and its interaction with matter depends on its frequency, and changes qualitatively as the frequency changes. Lower frequencies have longer wavelengths, and higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths, and are associated with photons of higher energy. There is no fundamental limit known to these wavelengths or energies, at either end of the spectrum, although photons with energies near the Planck energy or exceeding it (far too high to have ever been observed) will require new physical theories to describe.
Radio waves have the least amount of energy and the lowest frequency. When radio waves impinge upon a conductor, they couple to the conductor, travel along it and induce an electric current on the conductor surface by moving the electrons of the conducting material in correlated bunches of charge. Such effects can cover macroscopic distances in conductors (such as radio antennas), since the wavelength of radiowaves is long.
Electromagnetic radiation phenomena with wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter are called microwaves; with frequencies between 300 MHz (0.3 GHz) and 300 GHz.
At radio and microwave frequencies, EMR interacts with matter largely as a bulk collection of charges which are spread out over large numbers of affected atoms. In electrical conductors, such induced bulk movement of charges (electric currents) results in absorption of the EMR, or else separations of charges that cause generation of new EMR (effective reflection of the EMR). An example is absorption or emission of radio waves by antennas, or absorption of microwaves by water or other molecules with an electric dipole moment, as for example inside a microwave oven. These interactions produce either electric currents or heat, or both.
Like radio and microwave, infrared (IR) also is reflected by metals (and also most EMR, well into the ultraviolet range). However, unlike lower-frequency radio and microwave radiation, Infrared EMR commonly interacts with dipoles present in single molecules, which change as atoms vibrate at the ends of a single chemical bond. It is consequently absorbed by a wide range of substances, causing them to increase in temperature as the vibrations dissipate as heat. The same process, run in reverse, causes bulk substances to radiate in the infrared spontaneously (see thermal radiation section below).
Infrared radiation is divided into spectral subregions. While different subdivision schemes exist, the spectrum is commonly divided as near-infrared (0.75 –1.4 μm), short-wavelength infrared (1.4 –3 μm), mid-wavelength infrared (3 –8 μm), long-wavelength infrared (8 –15 μm) and far infrared (15 –1000 μm).
Natural sources produce EM radiation across the spectrum. EM radiation with a wavelength between approximately 400 nm and 700 nm is directly detected by the human eye and perceived as visible light. Other wavelengths, especially nearby infrared (longer than 700 nm) and ultraviolet (shorter than 400 nm) are also sometimes referred to as light.
As frequency increases into the visible range, photons have enough energy to change the bond structure of some individual molecules. It is not a coincidence that this happens in the visible range, as the mechanism of vision involves the change in bonding of a single molecule (retinal) which absorbs light in the rhodopsin in the retina of the human eye. Photosynthesis becomes possible in this range as well, for similar reasons, as a single molecule of chlorophyll is excited by a single photon. Animals that detect infrared make use of small packets of water that change temperature, in an essentially thermal process that involves many photons (see infrared sensing in snakes). For this reason, infrared, microwaves and radio waves are thought to damage molecules and biological tissue only by bulk heating, not excitation from single photons of the radiation.
Visible light is able to affect a few molecules with single photons, but usually not in a permanent or damaging way, in the absence of power high enough to increase temperature to damaging levels. However, in plant tissues that conduct photosynthesis, carotenoids act to quench electronically excited chlorophyll produced by visible light in a process called non-photochemical quenching, in order to prevent reactions that would otherwise interfere with photosynthesis at high light levels. Limited evidence indicate that some reactive oxygen species are created by visible light in skin, and that these may have some role in photoaging, in the same manner as ultraviolet A.
As frequency increases into the ultraviolet, photons now carry enough energy (about three electron volts or more) to excite certain doubly bonded molecules into permanent chemical rearrangement. In DNA, this causes lasting damage. DNA is also indirectly damaged by reactive oxygen species produced by ultraviolet A (UVA), which has energy too low to damage DNA directly. This is why ultraviolet at all wavelengths can damage DNA, and is capable of causing cancer, and (for UVB) skin burns (sunburn) that are far worse than would be produced by simple heating (temperature increase) effects. This property of causing molecular damage that is out of proportion to heating effects, is characteristic of all EMR with frequencies at the visible light range and above. These properties of high-frequency EMR are due to quantum effects that permanently damage materials and tissues at the molecular level.
At the higher end of the ultraviolet range, the energy of photons becomes large enough to impart enough energy to electrons to cause them to be liberated from the atom, in a process called photoionisation. The energy required for this is always larger than about 10 electron volt (eV) corresponding with wavelengths smaller than 124 nm (some sources suggest a more realistic cutoff of 33 eV, which is the energy required to ionize water). This high end of the ultraviolet spectrum with energies in the approximate ionization range, is sometimes called "extreme UV." Ionizing UV is strongly filtered by the Earth's atmosphere.
Electromagnetic radiation composed of photons that carry minimum-ionization energy, or more, (which includes the entire spectrum with shorter wavelengths), is therefore termed ionizing radiation. (Many other kinds of ionizing radiation are made of non-EM particles). Electromagnetic-type ionizing radiation extends from the extreme ultraviolet to all higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths, which means that all X-rays and gamma rays qualify. These are capable of the most severe types of molecular damage, which can happen in biology to any type of biomolecule, including mutation and cancer, and often at great depths below the skin, since the higher end of the X-ray spectrum, and all of the gamma ray spectrum, penetrate matter.
Most UV and X-rays are blocked by absorption first from molecular nitrogen, and then (for wavelengths in the upper UV) from the electronic excitation of dioxygen and finally ozone at the mid-range of UV. Only 30% of the Sun's ultraviolet light reaches the ground, and almost all of this is well transmitted.
Visible light is well transmitted in air, as it is not energetic enough to excite nitrogen, oxygen, or ozone, but too energetic to excite molecular vibrational frequencies of water vapor.
Absorption bands in the infrared are due to modes of vibrational excitation in water vapor. However, at energies too low to excite water vapor, the atmosphere becomes transparent again, allowing free transmission of most microwave and radio waves.
Finally, at radio wavelengths longer than 10 meters or so (about 30 MHz), the air in the lower atmosphere remains transparent to radio, but plasma in certain layers of the ionosphere begins to interact with radio waves (see skywave). This property allows some longer wavelengths (100 meters or 3 MHz) to be reflected and results in shortwave radio beyond line-of-sight. However, certain ionospheric effects begin to block incoming radiowaves from space, when their frequency is less than about 10 MHz (wavelength longer than about 30 meters).
The basic structure of matter involves charged particles bound together. When electromagnetic radiation impinges on matter, it causes the charged particles to oscillate and gain energy. The ultimate fate of this energy depends on the context. It could be immediately re-radiated and appear as scattered, reflected, or transmitted radiation. It may get dissipated into other microscopic motions within the matter, coming to thermal equilibrium and manifesting itself as thermal energy, or even kinetic energy, in the material. With a few exceptions related to high-energy photons (such as fluorescence, harmonic generation, photochemical reactions, the photovoltaic effect for ionizing radiations at far ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma radiation), absorbed electromagnetic radiation simply deposits its energy by heating the material. This happens for infrared, microwave and radio wave radiation. Intense radio waves can thermally burn living tissue and can cook food. In addition to infrared lasers, sufficiently intense visible and ultraviolet lasers can easily set paper afire.
Ionizing radiation creates high-speed electrons in a material and breaks chemical bonds, but after these electrons collide many times with other atoms eventually most of the energy becomes thermal energy all in a tiny fraction of a second. This process makes ionizing radiation far more dangerous per unit of energy than non-ionizing radiation. This caveat also applies to UV, even though almost all of it is not ionizing, because UV can damage molecules due to electronic excitation, which is far greater per unit energy than heating effects.
Infrared radiation in the spectral distribution of a black body is usually considered a form of heat, since it has an equivalent temperature and is associated with an entropy change per unit of thermal energy. However, "heat" is a technical term in physics and thermodynamics and is often confused with thermal energy. Any type of electromagnetic energy can be transformed into thermal energy in interaction with matter. Thus, "any" electromagnetic radiation can "heat" (in the sense of increase the thermal energy temperature of) a material, when it is absorbed.
The inverse or time-reversed process of absorption is thermal radiation. Much of the thermal energy in matter consists of random motion of charged particles, and this energy can be radiated away from the matter. The resulting radiation may subsequently be absorbed by another piece of matter, with the deposited energy heating the material.
The electromagnetic radiation in an opaque cavity at thermal equilibrium is effectively a form of thermal energy, having maximum radiation entropy.
Bioelectromagnetics is the study of the interactions and effects of EM radiation on living organisms. The effects of electromagnetic radiation upon living cells, including those in humans, depends upon the radiation's power and frequency. For low-frequency radiation (radio waves to visible light) the best-understood effects are those due to radiation power alone, acting through heating when radiation is absorbed. For these thermal effects, frequency is important as it affects the intensity of the radiation and penetration into the organism (for example, microwaves penetrate better than infrared). It is widely accepted that low frequency fields that are too weak to cause significant heating could not possibly have any biological effect.
Despite the commonly accepted results, some research has been conducted to show that weaker "non-thermal" electromagnetic fields, (including weak ELF magnetic fields, although the latter does not strictly qualify as EM radiation), and modulated RF and microwave fields have biological effects. Fundamental mechanisms of the interaction between biological material and electromagnetic fields at non-thermal levels are not fully understood.
The World Health Organization has classified radio frequency electromagnetic radiation as Group 2B - possibly carcinogenic. This group contains possible carcinogens such as lead, DDT, and styrene. For example, epidemiological studies looking for a relationship between cell phone use and brain cancer development, have been largely inconclusive, save to demonstrate that the effect, if it exists, cannot be a large one.
At higher frequencies (visible and beyond), the effects of individual photons begin to become important, as these now have enough energy individually to directly or indirectly damage biological molecules. All UV frequences have been classed as Group 1 carcinogens by the World Health Organization. Ultraviolet radiation from sun exposure is the primary cause of skin cancer.
Thus, at UV frequencies and higher (and probably somewhat also in the visible range), electromagnetic radiation does more damage to biological systems than simple heating predicts. This is most obvious in the "far" (or "extreme") ultraviolet. UV, with X-ray and gamma radiation, are referred to as ionizing radiation due to the ability of photons of this radiation to produce ions and free radicals in materials (including living tissue). Since such radiation can severely damage life at energy levels that produce little heating, it is considered far more dangerous (in terms of damage-produced per unit of energy, or power) than the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The heat ray is an application of EMR that makes use of microwave frequencies to create an unpleasant heating effect in the upper layer of the skin. A publicly known heat ray weapon called the Active Denial System was developed by the US military as an experimental weapon to deny the enemy access to an area. A death ray is a weapon that delivers heat ray electromagnetic energy at levels that injure human tissue. The inventor of the death ray, Harry Grindell Matthews, claims to have lost sight in his left eye while developing his death ray weapon based on a primitive microwave magnetron from the 1920s (a typical microwave oven induces a tissue damaging cooking effect inside the oven at about 2 kV/m).
Electromagnetic waves are predicted by the classical laws of electricity and magnetism, known as Maxwell's equations. There are nontrivial solutions of the homogeneous Maxwell's equations (without charges or currents), describing "waves" of changing electric and magnetic fields. Beginning with Maxwell's equations in free space:
Besides the trivial solution
useful solutions can be derived with the following vector identity, valid for all vectors formula_16 in some vector field:
Taking the curl of the second Maxwell equation () yields:
Evaluating the left hand side of () with the above identity and simplifying using (), yields:
Evaluating the right hand side of () by exchanging the sequence of derivations and inserting the fourth yields:
Combining () and () again, gives a vector-valued differential equation for the electric field, solving the homogeneous Maxwell equations:
Taking the curl of the fourth Maxwell equation () results in a similar differential equation for a magnetic field solving the homogeneous Maxwell equations:
Both differential equations have the form of the general wave equation for waves propagating with speed formula_18 where formula_19 is a function of time and location, which gives the amplitude of the wave at some time at a certain location:
for a generic wave traveling in the formula_24 direction.
This form will satisfy the wave equation.
The first of Maxwell's equations implies that the electric field is orthogonal to the direction the wave propagates.
The second of Maxwell's equations yields the magnetic field. The remaining equations will be satisfied by this choice of formula_29.
The electric and magnetic field waves in the far-field travel at the speed of light. They have a special restricted orientation and proportional magnitudes, formula_30, which can be seen immediately from the Poynting vector. The electric field, magnetic field, and direction of wave propagation are all orthogonal, and the wave propagates in the same direction as formula_31. Also, E and B far-fields in free space, which as wave solutions depend primarily on these two Maxwell equations, are in-phase with each other. This is guaranteed since the generic wave solution is first order in both space and time, and the curl operator on one side of these equations results in first-order spatial derivatives of the wave solution, while the time-derivative on the other side of the equations, which gives the other field, is first-order in time, resulting in the same phase shift for both fields in each mathematical operation.
From the viewpoint of an electromagnetic wave traveling forward, the electric field might be oscillating up and down, while the magnetic field oscillates right and left. This picture can be rotated with the electric field oscillating right and left and the magnetic field oscillating down and up. This is a different solution that is traveling in the same direction. This arbitrariness in the orientation with respect to propagation direction is known as polarization. On a quantum level, it is described as photon polarization. The direction of the polarization is defined as the direction of the electric field.
More general forms of the second-order wave equations given above are available, allowing for both non-vacuum propagation media and sources. Many competing derivations exist, all with varying levels of approximation and intended applications. One very general example is a form of the electric field equation, which was factorized into a pair of explicitly directional wave equations, and then efficiently reduced into a single uni-directional wave equation by means of a simple slow-evolution approximation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9426 |
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for "The Kansas City Star" before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel "A Farewell to Arms" (1929).
In 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel "The Sun Also Rises" was published in 1926. He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had been a journalist. He based "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940) on his experience there. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. He was present with the troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.
Hemingway maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida (in the 1930s) and Cuba (in the 1940s and 1950s). He almost died in 1954 after two plane crashes in as many days; these consecutive accidents left him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where, in mid-1961, he ended his own life.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. His parents were well-educated and well-respected in Oak Park, a conservative community about which resident Frank Lloyd Wright said, "So many churches for so many good people to go to." When Clarence and Grace Hemingway married in 1896, they lived with Grace's father, Ernest Hall, after whom they named their first son, the second of their six children. His sister Marcelline preceded him in 1898, followed by Ursula in 1902, Madelaine in 1904, Carol in 1911, and Leicester in 1915.
Hemingway's mother, a well-known musician in the village, taught her son to play the cello despite his refusal to learn; though later in life he admitted the music lessons contributed to his writing style, evidenced for example in the "contrapuntal structure" of "For Whom the Bell Tolls". As an adult Hemingway professed to hate his mother, although biographer Michael S. Reynolds points out that he shared similar energies and enthusiasms.
Each summer the family traveled to Windemere on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan. There young Ernest joined his father and learned to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan, early experiences that instilled a life-long passion for outdoor adventure and living in remote or isolated areas.
Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from 1913 until 1917. He was a good athlete, involved with a number of sports—boxing, track and field, water polo, and football; performed in the school orchestra for two years with his sister Marcelline; and received good grades in English classes. During his last two years at high school he edited the "Trapeze" and "Tabula" (the school's newspaper and yearbook), where he imitated the language of sportswriters and used the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr.—a nod to Ring Lardner of the "Chicago Tribune" whose byline was "Line O'Type". Like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist. After leaving high school he went to work for "The Kansas City Star" as a cub reporter. Although he stayed there for only six months, he relied on the "Star"s style guide as a foundation for his writing: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."
In December 1917 Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort and signed on to be an ambulance driver in Italy, after having failed to enlist in the U.S. Army because of poor eyesight. In May 1918 he sailed from New York, and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery. That June he arrived at the Italian Front. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion to join rescuers retrieving the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his non-fiction book "Death in the Afternoon": "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments." A few days later, he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave.
On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line. Despite his wounds, Hemingway assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery. He was still only 18 at the time. Hemingway later said of the incident: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you ... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you." He sustained severe shrapnel wounds to both legs, underwent an immediate operation at a distribution center, and spent five days at a field hospital before he was transferred for recuperation to the Red Cross hospital in Milan.
He spent six months at the hospital, where he met and formed a strong friendship with "Chink" Dorman-Smith that lasted for decades and shared a room with future American foreign service officer, ambassador, and author Henry Serrano Villard.
While recuperating he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. When Hemingway returned to the United States in January 1919, he believed Agnes would join him within months and the two would marry. Instead he received a letter in March with her announcement that she was engaged to an Italian officer. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes Agnes's rejection devastated and scarred the young man; in future relationships Hemingway followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him.
Hemingway returned home early in 1919 to a time of readjustment. Before the age of 20, he had gained from the war a maturity that was at odds with living at home without a job and with the need for recuperation. As Reynolds explains, "Hemingway could not really tell his parents what he thought when he saw his bloody knee." He was not able to tell them how scared he had been "in another country with surgeons who could not tell him in English if his leg was coming off or not."
In September, he took a fishing and camping trip with high school friends to the back-country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The trip became the inspiration for his short story "Big Two-Hearted River", in which the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams takes to the country to find solitude after returning from war. A family friend offered him a job in Toronto, and with nothing else to do, he accepted. Late that year he began as a freelancer and staff writer for the "Toronto Star Weekly". He returned to Michigan the following June and then moved to Chicago in September 1920 to live with friends, while still filing stories for the "Toronto Star". In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal "Cooperative Commonwealth", where he met novelist Sherwood Anderson.
When St. Louis native Hadley Richardson came to Chicago to visit the sister of Hemingway's roommate, Hemingway became infatuated. He later claimed, "I knew she was the girl I was going to marry." Hadley, red-haired, with a "nurturing instinct," was eight years older than Hemingway. Despite the age difference, Hadley, who had grown up with an overprotective mother, seemed less mature than usual for a young woman her age. Bernice Kert, author of "The Hemingway Women", claims Hadley was "evocative" of Agnes, but that Hadley had a childishness that Agnes lacked. The two corresponded for a few months and then decided to marry and travel to Europe. They wanted to visit Rome, but Sherwood Anderson convinced them to visit Paris instead, writing letters of introduction for the young couple. They were married on September 3, 1921; two months later, Hemingway was hired as foreign correspondent for the "Toronto Star", and the couple left for Paris. Of Hemingway's marriage to Hadley, Meyers claims: "With Hadley, Hemingway achieved everything he had hoped for with Agnes: the love of a beautiful woman, a comfortable income, a life in Europe."
Carlos Baker, Hemingway's first biographer, believes that while Anderson suggested Paris because "the monetary exchange rate" made it an inexpensive place to live, more importantly it was where "the most interesting people in the world" lived. In Paris, Hemingway met American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, Irish novelist James Joyce, American poet Ezra Pound (who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career") and other writers.
The Hemingway of the early Paris years was a "tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man." He and Hadley lived in a small walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter, and he worked in a rented room in a nearby building. Stein, who was the bastion of modernism in Paris, became Hemingway's mentor and godmother to his son Jack; she introduced him to the expatriate artists and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter, whom she referred to as the "Lost Generation"—a term Hemingway popularized with the publication of "The Sun Also Rises". A regular at Stein's salon, Hemingway met influential painters such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris. He eventually withdrew from Stein's influence and their relationship deteriorated into a literary quarrel that spanned decades. Ezra Pound met Hemingway by chance at Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company in 1922. The two toured Italy in 1923 and lived on the same street in 1924. They forged a strong friendship, and in Hemingway, Pound recognized and fostered a young talent. Pound introduced Hemingway to James Joyce, with whom Hemingway frequently embarked on "alcoholic sprees".
During his first 20 months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the "Toronto Star" newspaper. He covered the Greco-Turkish War, where he witnessed the burning of Smyrna, and wrote travel pieces such as "Tuna Fishing in Spain" and "Trout Fishing All Across Europe: Spain Has the Best, Then Germany". He described also the retreat of the Greek army with civilians from East Thrace.
Hemingway was devastated on learning that Hadley had lost a suitcase filled with his manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon as she was traveling to Geneva to meet him in December 1922. The following September, the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. During their absence, Hemingway's first book, "Three Stories and Ten Poems", was published. Two of the stories it contained were all that remained after the loss of the suitcase, and the third had been written early the previous year in Italy. Within months a second volume, "in our time" (without capitals), was published. The small volume included six vignettes and a dozen stories Hemingway had written the previous summer during his first visit to Spain, where he discovered the thrill of the "corrida". He missed Paris, considered Toronto boring, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life of a journalist.
Hemingway, Hadley and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924 and moved into a new apartment on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs. Hemingway helped Ford Madox Ford edit "The Transatlantic Review", which published works by Pound, John Dos Passos, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Stein, as well as some of Hemingway's own early stories such as "Indian Camp". When "In Our Time" was published in 1925, the dust jacket bore comments from Ford. "Indian Camp" received considerable praise; Ford saw it as an important early story by a young writer, and critics in the United States praised Hemingway for reinvigorating the short story genre with his crisp style and use of declarative sentences. Six months earlier, Hemingway had met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the pair formed a friendship of "admiration and hostility". Fitzgerald had published "The Great Gatsby" the same year: Hemingway read it, liked it, and decided his next work had to be a novel.
With his wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, in 1923, where he became fascinated by bullfighting. It is at this time that he began to be referred to as "Papa", even by much older friends. Hadley would much later recall that Hemingway had his own nicknames for everyone, and that he often did things for his friends; she suggested that he liked to be looked up to. She didn't remember precisely how the nickname came into being; however, it certainly stuck. The Hemingways returned to Pamplona in 1924 and a third time in June 1925; that year they brought with them a group of American and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, Donald Ogden Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden (recently divorced), her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb. A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (July 21), he began to write the draft of what would become "The Sun Also Rises", finishing eight weeks later. A few months later, in December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer joined them in January and against Hadley's advice, urged Hemingway to sign a contract with Scribner's. He left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with the publishers, and on his return, during a stop in Paris, began an affair with Pfeiffer, before returning to Schruns to finish the revisions in March. The manuscript arrived in New York in April; he corrected the final proof in Paris in August 1926, and Scribner's published the novel in October.
"The Sun Also Rises" epitomized the post-war expatriate generation, received good reviews, and is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work". Hemingway himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in "The Sun Also Rises" may have been "battered" but were not lost.
Hemingway's marriage to Hadley deteriorated as he was working on "The Sun Also Rises". In early 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pfeiffer, who came to Pamplona with them that July. On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a separation; in November she formally requested a divorce. They split their possessions while Hadley accepted Hemingway's offer of the proceeds from "The Sun Also Rises". The couple were divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married Pfeiffer in May.
Pfeiffer, who was from a wealthy Catholic Arkansas family, had moved to Paris to work for "Vogue" magazine. Before their marriage, Hemingway converted to Catholicism. They honeymooned in Le Grau-du-Roi, where he contracted anthrax, and he planned his next collection of short stories, "Men Without Women", which was published in October 1927, and included his boxing story "Fifty Grand". "Cosmopolitan" magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands ... the best prize-fight story I ever read ... a remarkable piece of realism."
By the end of the year Pauline, who was pregnant, wanted to move back to America. John Dos Passos recommended Key West, and they left Paris in March 1928. Hemingway suffered a severe injury in their Paris bathroom when he pulled a skylight down on his head thinking he was pulling on a toilet chain. This left him with a prominent forehead scar, which he carried for the rest of his life. When Hemingway was asked about the scar, he was reluctant to answer. After his departure from Paris, Hemingway "never again lived in a big city".
Hemingway and Pauline traveled to Kansas City, where their son Patrick was born on June 28, 1928. Pauline had a difficult delivery; Hemingway fictionalized a version of the event as a part of "A Farewell to Arms". After Patrick's birth, Pauline and Hemingway traveled to Wyoming, Massachusetts, and New York. In the winter, he was in New York with Bumby, about to board a train to Florida, when he received a cable telling him that his father had killed himself. Hemingway was devastated, having earlier written to his father telling him not to worry about financial difficulties; the letter arrived minutes after the suicide. He realized how Hadley must have felt after her own father's suicide in 1903, and he commented, "I'll probably go the same way."
Upon his return to Key West in December, Hemingway worked on the draft of "A Farewell to Arms" before leaving for France in January. He had finished it in August but delayed the revision. The serialization in "Scribner's Magazine" was scheduled to begin in May, but as late as April, Hemingway was still working on the ending, which he may have rewritten as many as seventeen times. The completed novel was published on September 27. Biographer James Mellow believes "A Farewell to Arms" established Hemingway's stature as a major American writer and displayed a level of complexity not apparent in "The Sun Also Rises". In Spain in mid-1929, Hemingway researched his next work, "Death in the Afternoon". He wanted to write a comprehensive treatise on bullfighting, explaining the "toreros" and "corridas" complete with glossaries and appendices, because he believed bullfighting was "of great tragic interest, being literally of life and death."
During the early 1930s, Hemingway spent his winters in Key West and summers in Wyoming, where he found "the most beautiful country he had seen in the American West" and hunted deer, elk, and grizzly bear. He was joined there by Dos Passos and in November 1930, after bringing Dos Passos to the train station in Billings, Montana, Hemingway broke his arm in a car accident. The surgeon tended the compound spiral fracture and bound the bone with kangaroo tendon. Hemingway was hospitalized for seven weeks, with Pauline tending to him; the nerves in his writing hand took as long as a year to heal, during which time he suffered intense pain.
His third son, Gregory Hancock Hemingway, was born a year later on November 12, 1931, in Kansas City. Pauline's uncle bought the couple a house in Key West with a carriage house, the second floor of which was converted into a writing studio. While in Key West, Hemingway frequented the local bar Sloppy Joe's. He invited friends—including Waldo Peirce, Dos Passos, and Max Perkins—to join him on fishing trips and on an all-male expedition to the Dry Tortugas. Meanwhile, he continued to travel to Europe and to Cuba, and—although in 1933 he wrote of Key West, "We have a fine house here, and kids are all well"—Mellow believes he "was plainly restless".
In 1933, Hemingway and Pauline went on safari to East Africa. The 10-week trip provided material for "Green Hills of Africa", as well as for the short stories "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". The couple visited Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in Kenya; then moved on to Tanganyika Territory, where they hunted in the Serengeti, around Lake Manyara, and west and southeast of present-day Tarangire National Park. Their guide was the noted "white hunter" Philip Percival who had guided Theodore Roosevelt on his 1909 safari. During these travels, Hemingway contracted amoebic dysentery that caused a prolapsed intestine, and he was evacuated by plane to Nairobi, an experience reflected in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". On Hemingway's return to Key West in early 1934, he began work on "Green Hills of Africa", which he published in 1935 to mixed reviews.
Hemingway bought a boat in 1934, named it the "Pilar", and began sailing the Caribbean. In 1935 he first arrived at Bimini, where he spent a considerable amount of time. During this period he also worked on "To Have and Have Not", published in 1937 while he was in Spain, the only novel he wrote during the 1930s.
In 1937, Hemingway left for Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), despite Pauline's reluctance to have him working in a war zone. He and Dos Passos both signed on to work with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens as screenwriters for "The Spanish Earth". Dos Passos left the project after the execution of José Robles, his friend and Spanish translator, which caused a rift between the two writers.
Hemingway was joined in Spain by journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, who he had met in Key West a year earlier. Like Hadley, Martha was a St. Louis native, and like Pauline, she had worked for "Vogue" in Paris. Of Martha, Kert explains, "she never catered to him the way other women did". Late in 1937, while in Madrid with Martha, Hemingway wrote his only play, "The Fifth Column", as the city was being bombarded by Francoist forces. He returned to Key West for a few months, then back to Spain twice in 1938, where he was present at the Battle of the Ebro, the last republican stand, and he was among the British and American journalists who were some of the last to leave the battle as they crossed the river.
In early 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. This was the separation phase of a slow and painful split from Pauline, which began when Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn. Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they rented "Finca Vigía" ("Lookout Farm"), a property from Havana. Pauline and the children left Hemingway that summer, after the family was reunited during a visit to Wyoming; when his divorce from Pauline was finalized, he and Martha were married on November 20, 1940 in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Hemingway moved his primary summer residence to Ketchum, Idaho, just outside the newly built resort of Sun Valley, and moved his winter residence to Cuba. He had been disgusted when a Parisian friend allowed his cats to eat from the table, but he became enamored of cats in Cuba and kept dozens of them on the property.
Gellhorn inspired him to write his most famous novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls", which he started in March 1939 and finished in July 1940. It was published in October 1940. His pattern was to move around while working on a manuscript, and he wrote "For Whom the Bell Tolls" in Cuba, Wyoming, and Sun Valley. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and "triumphantly re-established Hemingway's literary reputation" in the words of Meyers.
In January 1941, Martha was sent to China on assignment for "Collier's" magazine. Hemingway went with her, sending in dispatches for the newspaper "PM", but in general he disliked China. A 2009 book suggests during that period he may have been recruited to work for Soviet intelligence agents under the name "Agent Argo". They returned to Cuba before the declaration of war by the United States that December, when he convinced the Cuban government to help him refit the "Pilar", which he intended to use to ambush German submarines off the coast of Cuba.
Hemingway was in Europe from May 1944 to March 1945. When he arrived in London, he met "Time" magazine correspondent Mary Welsh, with whom he became infatuated. Martha had been forced to cross the Atlantic in a ship filled with explosives because Hemingway refused to help her get a press pass on a plane, and she arrived in London to find him hospitalized with a concussion from a car accident. She was unsympathetic to his plight; she accused him of being a bully and told him that she was "through, absolutely finished". The last time that Hemingway saw Martha was in March 1945 as he was preparing to return to Cuba, and their divorce was finalized later that year. Meanwhile, he had asked Mary Welsh to marry him on their third meeting.
Hemingway accompanied the troops to the Normandy Landings wearing a large head bandage, according to Meyers, but he was considered "precious cargo" and not allowed ashore. The landing craft came within sight of Omaha Beach before coming under enemy fire and turning back. Hemingway later wrote in "Collier's" that he could see "the first, second, third, fourth and fifth waves of [landing troops] lay where they had fallen, looking like so many heavily laden bundles on the flat pebbly stretch between the sea and first cover". Mellow explains that, on that first day, none of the correspondents were allowed to land and Hemingway was returned to the "Dorothea Dix".
Late in July, he attached himself to "the 22nd Infantry Regiment commanded by Col. Charles 'Buck' Lanham, as it drove toward Paris", and Hemingway became de facto leader to a small band of village militia in Rambouillet outside of Paris. Paul Fussell remarks: "Hemingway got into considerable trouble playing infantry captain to a group of Resistance people that he gathered because a correspondent is not supposed to lead troops, even if he does it well." This was in fact in contravention of the Geneva Convention, and Hemingway was brought up on formal charges; he said that he "beat the rap" by claiming that he only offered advice.
On August 25, he was present at the liberation of Paris as a journalist; contrary to the Hemingway legend, he was not the first into the city, nor did he liberate the Ritz. In Paris, he visited Sylvia Beach and Pablo Picasso with Mary Welsh, who joined him there; in a spirit of happiness, he forgave Gertrude Stein. Later that year, he observed heavy fighting in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. On December 17, 1944, he had himself driven to Luxembourg in spite of illness to cover The Battle of the Bulge. As soon as he arrived, however, Lanham handed him to the doctors, who hospitalized him with pneumonia; he recovered a week later, but most of the fighting was over.
In 1947, Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery during World War II. He was recognized for having been "under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions", with the commendation that "through his talent of expression, Mr. Hemingway enabled readers to obtain a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the front-line soldier and his organization in combat".
Hemingway said he "was out of business as a writer" from 1942 to 1945 during his residence in Cuba. In 1946 he married Mary, who had an ectopic pregnancy five months later. The Hemingway family suffered a series of accidents and health problems in the years following the war: in a 1945 car accident, he "smashed his knee" and sustained another "deep wound on his forehead"; Mary broke first her right ankle and then her left in successive skiing accidents. A 1947 car accident left Patrick with a head wound and severely ill. Hemingway sank into depression as his literary friends began to die: in 1939 William Butler Yeats and Ford Madox Ford; in 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald; in 1941 Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce; in 1946 Gertrude Stein; and the following year in 1947, Max Perkins, Hemingway's long-time Scribner's editor and friend. During this period, he suffered from severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and eventually diabetes—much of which was the result of previous accidents and many years of heavy drinking. Nonetheless, in January 1946, he began work on "The Garden of Eden", finishing 800 pages by June. During the post-war years, he also began work on a trilogy tentatively titled "The Land", "The Sea" and "The Air", which he wanted to combine in one novel titled "The Sea Book". However, both projects stalled, and Mellow says that Hemingway's inability to continue was "a symptom of his troubles" during these years.
In 1948, Hemingway and Mary traveled to Europe, staying in Venice for several months. While there, Hemingway fell in love with the then 19-year-old Adriana Ivancich. The platonic love affair inspired the novel "Across the River and into the Trees", written in Cuba during a time of strife with Mary, and published in 1950 to negative reviews. The following year, furious at the critical reception of "Across the River and Into the Trees", he wrote the draft of "The Old Man and the Sea" in eight weeks, saying that it was "the best I can write ever for all of my life". "The Old Man and the Sea" became a book-of-the-month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1952, a month before he left for his second trip to Africa.
In 1954, while in Africa, Hemingway was almost fatally injured in two successive plane crashes. He chartered a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo as a Christmas present to Mary. On their way to photograph Murchison Falls from the air, the plane struck an abandoned utility pole and "crash landed in heavy brush". Hemingway's injuries included a head wound, while Mary broke two ribs. The next day, attempting to reach medical care in Entebbe, they boarded a second plane that exploded at take-off, with Hemingway suffering burns and another concussion, this one serious enough to cause leaking of cerebral fluid. They eventually arrived in Entebbe to find reporters covering the story of Hemingway's death. He briefed the reporters and spent the next few weeks recuperating and reading his erroneous obituaries. Despite his injuries, Hemingway accompanied Patrick and his wife on a planned fishing expedition in February, but pain caused him to be irascible and difficult to get along with. When a bushfire broke out, he was again injured, sustaining second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. Months later in Venice, Mary reported to friends the full extent of Hemingway's injuries: two cracked discs, a kidney and liver rupture, a dislocated shoulder and a broken skull. The accidents may have precipitated the physical deterioration that was to follow. After the plane crashes, Hemingway, who had been "a thinly controlled alcoholic throughout much of his life, drank more heavily than usual to combat the pain of his injuries."
In October 1954, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He modestly told the press that Carl Sandburg, Isak Dinesen and Bernard Berenson deserved the prize, but he gladly accepted the prize money. Mellow says Hemingway "had coveted the Nobel Prize", but when he won it, months after his plane accidents and the ensuing worldwide press coverage, "there must have been a lingering suspicion in Hemingway's mind that his obituary notices had played a part in the academy's decision." Because he was suffering pain from the African accidents, he decided against traveling to Stockholm. Instead he sent a speech to be read, defining the writer's life:
From the end of the year in 1955 to early 1956, Hemingway was bedridden. He was told to stop drinking to mitigate liver damage, advice he initially followed but then disregarded. In October 1956, he returned to Europe and met Basque writer Pio Baroja, who was seriously ill and died weeks later. During the trip, Hemingway became sick again and was treated for "high blood pressure, liver disease, and arteriosclerosis".
In November 1956, while staying in Paris, he was reminded of trunks he had stored in the Ritz Hotel in 1928 and never retrieved. Upon re-claiming and opening the trunks, Hemingway discovered they were filled with notebooks and writing from his Paris years. Excited about the discovery, when he returned to Cuba in early 1957, he began to shape the recovered work into his memoir "A Moveable Feast". By 1959 he ended a period of intense activity: he finished "A Moveable Feast" (scheduled to be released the following year); brought "True at First Light" to 200,000 words; added chapters to "The Garden of Eden"; and worked on "Islands in the Stream". The last three were stored in a safe deposit box in Havana, as he focused on the finishing touches for "A Moveable Feast". Author Michael Reynolds claims it was during this period that Hemingway slid into depression, from which he was unable to recover.
The Finca Vigia became crowded with guests and tourists, as Hemingway, beginning to become unhappy with life there, considered a permanent move to Idaho. In 1959 he bought a home overlooking the Big Wood River, outside Ketchum, and left Cuba—although he apparently remained on easy terms with the Castro government, telling "The New York Times" he was "delighted" with Castro's overthrow of Batista. He was in Cuba in November 1959, between returning from Pamplona and traveling west to Idaho, and the following year for his 61st birthday; however, that year he and Mary decided to leave after hearing the news that Castro wanted to nationalize property owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. On July 25, 1960, the Hemingways left Cuba for the last time, leaving art and manuscripts in a bank vault in Havana. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Finca Vigia was expropriated by the Cuban government, complete with Hemingway's collection of "four to six thousand books". President Kennedy arranged for Mary Hemingway to travel to Cuba where she met Fidel Castro and obtained her husband's papers and painting in return for donating Finca Vigia to Cuba. In 1964 Mary contacted Jacqueline Kennedy to offer the Hemingway papers to the JFK Presidential Library and Museum.
Hemingway continued to rework the material that was published as "A Moveable Feast" through the 1950s. In mid-1959, he visited Spain to research a series of bullfighting articles commissioned by "Life" magazine. "Life" wanted only 10,000 words, but the manuscript grew out of control. He was unable to organize his writing for the first time in his life, so he asked A. E. Hotchner to travel to Cuba to help him. Hotchner helped him trim the "Life" piece down to 40,000 words, and Scribner's agreed to a full-length book version ("The Dangerous Summer") of almost 130,000 words. Hotchner found Hemingway to be "unusually hesitant, disorganized, and confused", and suffering badly from failing eyesight.
Hemingway and Mary left Cuba for the last time on July 25, 1960. He set up a small office in his New York City apartment and attempted to work, but he left soon after. He then traveled alone to Spain to be photographed for the front cover of "Life" magazine. A few days later, the news reported that he was seriously ill and on the verge of dying, which panicked Mary until she received a cable from him telling her, "Reports false. Enroute Madrid. Love Papa." He was, in fact, seriously ill, and believed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown. Feeling lonely, he took to his bed for days, retreating into silence, despite having the first installments of "The Dangerous Summer" published in "Life" in September 1960 to good reviews. In October, he left Spain for New York, where he refused to leave Mary's apartment, presuming that he was being watched. She quickly took him to Idaho, where physician George Saviers met them at the train.
At this time, Hemingway was constantly worried about money and his safety. He worried about his taxes and that he would never return to Cuba to retrieve the manuscripts that he had left in a bank vault. He became paranoid, thinking that the FBI was actively monitoring his movements in Ketchum. The FBI had, in fact, opened a file on him during World War II, when he used the "Pilar" to patrol the waters off Cuba, and J. Edgar Hoover had an agent in Havana watch him during the 1950s. By the end of November, Mary was at her wits' end, and Saviers suggested that Hemingway go to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota; Hemingway might have believed that he was to be treated there for hypertension. The FBI knew that Hemingway was at the Mayo Clinic, as an agent later documented in a letter written in January 1961. He was checked in at the Mayo Clinic under Saviers's name in order to maintain anonymity. Meyers writes that "an aura of secrecy surrounds Hemingway's treatment at the Mayo" but confirms that he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy as many as 15 times in December 1960 and was "released in ruins" in January 1961.
Hemingway was back in Ketchum in April 1961, three months after being released from the Mayo Clinic, when Mary "found Hemingway holding a shotgun" in the kitchen one morning. She called Saviers, who sedated him and admitted him to the Sun Valley Hospital; from there he was returned to the Mayo for more electroshock treatments. He was released in late June and arrived home in Ketchum on June 30; he then "quite deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961. He had unlocked the basement storeroom where his guns were kept, gone upstairs to the front entrance foyer, and shot himself with the "double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often it might have been a friend".
Mary called the Sun Valley Hospital, and a doctor quickly arrived at the house, determining that Hemingway "had died of a self-inflicted wound to the head". Mary was sedated and taken to the hospital, returning home the next day where she cleaned the house and saw to the funeral and travel arrangements. Bernice Kert writes that it "did not seem to her a conscious lie" when she told the press that his death had been accidental. In a press interview five years later, Mary confirmed that he had shot himself.
Family and friends flew to Ketchum for the funeral, officiated by the local Catholic priest, who believed that the death had been accidental. An altar boy fainted at the head of the casket during the funeral, and Hemingway's brother Leicester wrote: "It seemed to me Ernest would have approved of it all." He is buried in the Ketchum cemetery.
Hemingway's behavior during his final years had been similar to that of his father before he killed himself; his father may have had the genetic disease hemochromatosis, whereby the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration. Medical records made available in 1991 confirm that Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961. His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also killed themselves. Hemingway's health was further compromised by being a heavy drinker for most of his life.
A memorial to Hemingway just north of Sun Valley is inscribed on the base with a eulogy Hemingway had written for a friend several decades earlier:
"The New York Times" wrote in 1926 of Hemingway's first novel, "No amount of analysis can convey the quality of "The Sun Also Rises". It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame." "The Sun Also Rises" is written in the spare, tight prose that made Hemingway famous, and, according to James Nagel, "changed the nature of American writing." In 1954, when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was for "his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in "The Old Man and the Sea", and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."
Henry Louis Gates believes Hemingway's style was fundamentally shaped "in reaction to [his] experience of world war". After World War I, he and other modernists "lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization" by reacting against the elaborate style of 19th-century writers and by creating a style "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly."
Because he began as a writer of short stories, Baker believes Hemingway learned to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth." Hemingway called his style the iceberg theory: the facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight. The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission". Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing (such as Nick Adams fishing in "The Big Two-Hearted River") though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface (Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not have to think about anything else). Paul Smith writes that Hemingway's first stories, collected as "In Our Time", showed he was still experimenting with his writing style. He avoided complicated syntax. About 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences—a childlike syntax without subordination.
Jackson Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details as framing devices about life in general—not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?" Writing in "The Art of the Short Story", Hemingway explains: "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit."
The simplicity of the prose is deceptive. Zoe Trodd believes Hemingway crafted skeletal sentences in response to Henry James's observation that World War I had "used up words". Hemingway offers a "multi-focal" photographic reality. His iceberg theory of omission is the foundation on which he builds. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates static sentences. The photographic "snapshot" style creates a collage of images. Many types of internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) are omitted in favor of short declarative sentences. The sentences build on each other, as events build to create a sense of the whole. Multiple strands exist in one story; an "embedded text" bridges to a different angle. He also uses other cinematic techniques of "cutting" quickly from one scene to the next; or of "splicing" a scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap, as though responding to instructions from the author, and create three-dimensional prose.
Hemingway habitually used the word "and" in place of commas. This use of polysyndeton may serve to convey immediacy. Hemingway's polysyndetonic sentence—or in later works his use of subordinate clauses—uses conjunctions to juxtapose startling visions and images. Benson compares them to haikus. Many of Hemingway's followers misinterpreted his lead and frowned upon all expression of emotion; Saul Bellow satirized this style as "Do you have emotions? Strangle them." However, Hemingway's intent was not to eliminate emotion, but to portray it more scientifically. Hemingway thought it would be easy, and pointless, to describe emotions; he sculpted collages of images in order to grasp "the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always". This use of an image as an objective correlative is characteristic of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Proust. Hemingway's letters refer to Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" several times over the years, and indicate he read the book at least twice.
The popularity of Hemingway's work depends on its themes of love, war, wilderness, and loss, all of which are strongly evident in the body of work. These are recurring themes in American literature, and are quite clearly evident in Hemingway's work. Critic Leslie Fiedler sees the theme he defines as "The Sacred Land"—the American West—extended in Hemingway's work to include mountains in Spain, Switzerland and Africa, and to the streams of Michigan. The American West is given a symbolic nod with the naming of the "Hotel Montana" in "The Sun Also Rises" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls". According to Stoltzfus and Fiedler, in Hemingway's work, nature is a place for rebirth and rest; and it is where the hunter or fisherman might experience a moment of transcendence at the moment they kill their prey. Nature is where men exist without women: men fish; men hunt; men find redemption in nature. Although Hemingway does write about sports, such as fishing, Carlos Baker notes the emphasis is more on the athlete than the sport. At its core, much of Hemingway's work can be viewed in the light of American naturalism, evident in detailed descriptions such as those in "Big Two-Hearted River".
Fiedler believes Hemingway inverts the American literary theme of the evil "Dark Woman" versus the good "Light Woman". The dark woman—Brett Ashley of "The Sun Also Rises"—is a goddess; the light woman—Margot Macomber of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"—is a murderess. Robert Scholes admits that early Hemingway stories, such as "A Very Short Story", present "a male character favorably and a female unfavorably". According to Rena Sanderson, early Hemingway critics lauded his male-centric world of masculine pursuits, and the fiction divided women into "castrators or love-slaves". Feminist critics attacked Hemingway as "public enemy number one", although more recent re-evaluations of his work "have given new visibility to Hemingway's female characters (and their strengths) and have revealed his own sensitivity to gender issues, thus casting doubts on the old assumption that his writings were one-sidedly masculine." Nina Baym believes that Brett Ashley and Margot Macomber "are the two outstanding examples of Hemingway's 'bitch women.
The theme of women and death is evident in stories as early as "Indian Camp". The theme of death permeates Hemingway's work. Young believes the emphasis in "Indian Camp" was not so much on the woman who gives birth or the father who kills himself, but on Nick Adams who witnesses these events as a child, and becomes a "badly scarred and nervous young man". Hemingway sets the events in "Indian Camp" that shape the Adams persona. Young believes "Indian Camp" holds the "master key" to "what its author was up to for some thirty-five years of his writing career". Stoltzfus considers Hemingway's work to be more complex with a representation of the truth inherent in existentialism: if "nothingness" is embraced, then redemption is achieved at the moment of death. Those who face death with dignity and courage live an authentic life. Francis Macomber dies happy because the last hours of his life are authentic; the bullfighter in the corrida represents the pinnacle of a life lived with authenticity. In his paper "The Uses of Authenticity: Hemingway and the Literary Field", Timo Müller writes that Hemingway's fiction is successful because the characters live an "authentic life", and the "soldiers, fishers, boxers and backwoodsmen are among the archetypes of authenticity in modern literature".
The theme of emasculation is prevalent in Hemingway's work, most notably in "The Sun Also Rises". Emasculation, according to Fiedler, is a result of a generation of wounded soldiers; and of a generation in which women such as Brett gained emancipation. This also applies to the minor character, Frances Clyne, Cohn's girlfriend in the beginning in the book. Her character supports the theme not only because the idea was presented early on in the novel but also the impact she had on Cohn in the start of the book while only appearing a small number of times. Baker believes Hemingway's work emphasizes the "natural" versus the "unnatural". In "Alpine Idyll" the "unnaturalness" of skiing in the high country late spring snow is juxtaposed against the "unnaturalness" of the peasant who allowed his wife's dead body to linger too long in the shed during the winter. The skiers and peasant retreat to the valley to the "natural" spring for redemption.
Descriptions of food and drink feature prominently in many of Hemingway's works. In the short story "Big Two-Hearted River" Hemingway describes a hungry Nick Adams cooking a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti over a fire in a heavy cast iron pot. The primitive act of preparing the meal in solitude is a restorative act and one of Hemingway's narratives of post-war integration.
Susan Beegel has written that some more recent critics—writing through the lens of a more modern social and cultural context several decades after Hemingway's death, and more than half a century after his novels were first published—have characterized the social era portrayed in his fiction as misogynistic and homophobic. In her 1996 essay, "Critical Reception", Beegel analyzed four decades of Hemingway criticism and found that "critics interested in multiculturalism", particularly in the 1980s, simply ignored Hemingway, although some "apologetics" have been written. Typical, according to Beegel, is an analysis of Hemingway's 1926 novel, "The Sun Also Rises", in which a critic contended: "Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew." Also during the 1980s, according to Beegel, criticism was published that focused on investigating the "horror of homosexuality" and the "racism" typical of the social era portrayed in Hemingway's fiction. In an overall assessment of Hemingway's work Beegel has written: "Throughout his remarkable body of fiction, he tells the truth about human fear, guilt, betrayal, violence, cruelty, drunkenness, hunger, greed, apathy, ecstasy, tenderness, love and lust."
Hemingway's legacy to American literature is his style: writers who came after him either emulated or avoided it. After his reputation was established with the publication of "The Sun Also Rises", he became the spokesperson for the post-World War I generation, having established a style to follow. His books were burned in Berlin in 1933, "as being a monument of modern decadence", and disavowed by his parents as "filth". Reynolds asserts the legacy is that "[Hemingway] left stories and novels so starkly moving that some have become part of our cultural heritage."
Benson believes the details of Hemingway's life have become a "prime vehicle for exploitation", resulting in a Hemingway industry. Hemingway scholar Hallengren believes the "hard boiled style" and the machismo must be separated from the author himself. Benson agrees, describing him as introverted and private as J. D. Salinger, although Hemingway masked his nature with braggadocio. During World War II, Salinger met and corresponded with Hemingway, whom he acknowledged as an influence. In a letter to Hemingway, Salinger claimed their talks "had given him his only hopeful minutes of the entire war" and jokingly "named himself national chairman of the Hemingway Fan Clubs."
The extent of Hemingway's influence is seen in the tributes and echoes of his fiction in popular culture. A minor planet, discovered in 1978 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh, was named for him (3656 Hemingway); Ray Bradbury wrote "The Kilimanjaro Device", with Hemingway transported to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro; the 1993 motion picture "Wrestling Ernest Hemingway", about the friendship of two retired men, Irish and Cuban, in a seaside town in Florida, starred Robert Duvall, Richard Harris, Shirley MacLaine, Sandra Bullock, and Piper Laurie. The influence is evident with the many restaurants named "Hemingway"; and the proliferation of bars called "Harry's" (a nod to the bar in "Across the River and Into the Trees"). A line of Hemingway furniture, promoted by Hemingway's son Jack (Bumby), has pieces such as the "Kilimanjaro" bedside table, and a "Catherine" slip-covered sofa. Montblanc offers a Hemingway fountain pen, and a line of Hemingway safari clothes has been created. The International Imitation Hemingway Competition was created in 1977 to publicly acknowledge his influence and the comically misplaced efforts of lesser authors to imitate his style. Entrants are encouraged to submit one "really good page of really bad Hemingway" and winners are flown to Italy to Harry's Bar.
In 1965, Mary Hemingway established the Hemingway Foundation and in the 1970s she donated her husband's papers to the John F. Kennedy Library. In 1980, a group of Hemingway scholars gathered to assess the donated papers, subsequently forming the Hemingway Society, "committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship".
Almost exactly 35 years after Hemingway's death, on July 1, 1996, his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway died in Santa Monica, California. Margaux was a supermodel and actress, co-starring with her younger sister Mariel in the 1976 movie "Lipstick". Her death was later ruled a suicide, making her "the fifth person in four generations of her family to commit suicide".
Three houses associated with Hemingway are listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places: the Ernest Hemingway Cottage on Walloon Lake, Michigan, designated in 1968; the Ernest Hemingway House in Key West, designated in 1968; and the Ernest and Mary Hemingway House in Ketchum, designated in 2015. His boyhood home, in Oak Park, Illinois, is a museum and archive dedicated to Hemingway. In 2012, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
Several prizes have been established in his honor to recognize significant achievement in the arts and culture. These include:
A crater on Mercury has been named in his honor. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9428 |
Spain in Flames
Spain in Flames is a 1937 compilation film made by Helen van Dongen during the Spanish Civil War. Hal Erickson has written that the film "... is remarkable in its willingness to offer both sides of the conflict -- though its sympathies are firmly with the Loyalists." The film consists of two parts. The first, "The Fight for Freedom", was based on film footage from a Spanish government documentary "Spain and the Fight for Freedom". A foreword by the then Spanish Ambassador to the United States, Fernando de los Ríos, began one of the film's screenings in New York in 1937.
The second part, "They Shalt Not Pass", was based on a short film "No Pasaran!" done by the Artkino Film Company of the Soviet Union, where van Dongen was working at the time the film was made. John Dos Passos narrated parts of the film, and the commentary was written by Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and Prudencio de Pareda. Erickson writes that, "The horrendous images of battlefield carnage, not to mention the close-ups of suffering and dying Spanish children, still pack a wallop when seen today."
Later, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman and others founded the company Contemporary Historians, which produced another film called "The Spanish Earth" (1937), directed by Joris Ivens and edited by van Dongen.
"Spain in Flames" was banned in New Brunswick, New Jersey and Waterbury, Connecticut. A screening of the film, accompanied by a speech from Granville Hicks, was also banned in Provincetown, Massachusetts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9433 |
The Downward Spiral
The Downward Spiral is the second studio album by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released on March 8, 1994, by Nothing Records and Interscope Records in the United States and by Island Records in Europe. It is a concept album detailing the destruction of a man from the beginning of his "downward spiral" to his death by suicide. "The Downward Spiral" features elements of industrial rock, techno and heavy metal music, in contrast to the band's synthpop-influenced debut album "Pretty Hate Machine" (1989), and was produced by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and Flood.
In 1992, Reznor moved to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, where actress Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Manson Family. It was used as a studio called "Le Pig" for recording "Broken" (1992) and "The Downward Spiral" with collaborations from other musicians. The album was influenced by late-1970s rock music albums such as David Bowie's "Low" and Pink Floyd's "The Wall" in particular, and focused on texture and space. The album spawned two singles, "March of the Pigs" and "Closer", in addition to the promotional singles "Piggy" and "Hurt". "March of the Pigs" and "Closer" were accompanied by music videos, with the former shot twice and the latter's heavily censored.
"The Downward Spiral" was a commercial success, and established Nine Inch Nails as a reputable force in the 1990s music scene, with its sound being widely imitated and Reznor receiving media attention and multiple honors, while diverging into drug abuse and depression. It has been regarded by music critics and audiences as one of the most important albums of the 1990s, and was praised for its abrasive and eclectic nature and dark themes, although it was scrutinized by social conservatives for some of its lyrics. A remix album titled "Further Down the Spiral" was released in 1995.
"The Downward Spiral" was conceived after the Lollapalooza festival tour as Trent Reznor thought of a "negative vibe" felt by the band when they were in a European hotel. Nine Inch Nails live performances were known for its aggressive on-stage dynamic, in which band members act angry, injure themselves, and destroy instruments. Reznor had a feud with TVT Records that resulted in him co-founding Nothing Records with his former manager John Malm, Jr. and signing with Interscope. He wanted to explore a fictional character whose life is psychologically wounded and developed a concept about the album's themes; he later used the concept as lyrics. The concept was based on Reznor's social issues at the time: he had personal conflicts with band member Richard Patrick and was known for enjoying alcohol. When developing "The Downward Spiral", Reznor struggled with drug addiction and was depressed as he wrote songs related to personal issues. His friends suggested that he could take Prozac (fluoxetine), an antidepressant, but this choice did not appeal to him. He wanted the album's sound to diverge from "Broken", emphasizing mood, texture, restraint and subtlety, although he was not sure about its musical direction. The album was made with "full range" and focused on texture and space, avoiding explicit usage of guitars or synthesizers.
Reznor searched for and moved to 10050 Cielo Drive in 1992 for recording "Broken" and "The Downward Spiral", a decision made against his initial choice to record the album in New Orleans. 10050 Cielo Drive is referred to as the "Tate House" since Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Manson Family in 1969; Reznor named the studio "Le Pig" after the message that was scrawled on the front door with Tate's blood by her murderers, and stayed there with Malm for 18 months. He called his first night in 10050 Cielo Drive "terrifying" because he already knew it and read books related to the incident. Reznor chose the Tate house to calibrate his engineering skills and the band bought a large console and two Studer machines as resources, a move that he believed was cheaper than renting. The studio was also used for the recording of Marilyn Manson's debut album "Portrait of an American Family", which Reznor co-produced. Marilyn Manson accepted Reznor's offer of signing a contract with Nothing Records.
Reznor collaborated with former Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros drummer Stephen Perkins, progressive rock guitarist Adrian Belew, and Nine Inch Nails drummer Chris Vrenna. Belew's first visit to the studio involved playing the guitar parts in "Mr. Self-Destruct", and he was told to play freely, think on reacting to melodies, concentrate on rhythm, and use noise. This approach improved Reznor's confidence in the instrument: he found it to be more expressive than the keyboard due to the interface. Belew praised Reznor for his "command of technology," and commented that the music of Nine Inch Nails made innovations "that are in [his] realm." Vrenna and Perkins played drum parts recorded live in the studio; the tracks were rendered into looped samples. Reznor took a similar approach to recording guitar parts: he would tape 20- to 25-minute-long sessions of himself playing guitars on a hard disc recorder with the Studio Vision sequencer.
Most of the music was recorded into a Macintosh computer using a board and manipulated with music editor programs on the computer. Unique effects such as analyzing and inverting the frequency were applied to the tracks to create original sounds. The band would "get an arrangement together" and convert it into analog tape. Reznor sampled excerpts from guitar tracks and processed them to the point of randomness and expression. Digidesign's TurboSynth and Zoom 9030 effects unit were used extensively to process guitar tracks, often in conjunction with a Marshall JMP-1 preamp; Zoom 9030 was also used to distort vocals. Acoustic drums in various settings, as well as Roland's TR-808 and R-70 drum machines were sampled through multiple Akai S1000s and a Kurzweil K2000. Additionally, Vrenna had compiled various movie samples on digital audio tapes for Reznor to sample. Other equipments and software Reznor used for recording the album include Oberheim OB-Mx, Minimoog, Prophet VS keyboard, Eventide H3000 Harmonizer, Pro Tools and various Jackson and Gibson guitars.
In December 1993, Reznor was confronted by Patti Tate, who asked if he was exploiting Sharon Tate's death in the house. Reznor responded that he was interested in the house as her death happened there. He later made a statement about this encounter during a 1997 interview with "Rolling Stone":
Flood, known for engineering and producing U2 and Depeche Mode albums, was employed as co-producer on "The Downward Spiral". It became his last collaboration with Nine Inch Nails due to creative differences. A "very dangerously self-destructive," humorous short song written for the album, "Just Do It", was not included in the final version and criticized by Flood in that Reznor had "gone too far." Reznor completed the last song written for the album, "Big Man with a Gun", in late 1993. After the album's recording, Reznor moved out and the house was demolished shortly thereafter. "The Downward Spiral" entered its mixing and mastering processes, done at Record Plant Studios and A&M Studios with Alan Moulder, who subsequently took on more extensive production duties for future album releases.
Numerous layers of metaphors are present throughout "The Downward Spiral", leaving it open to wide interpretation. The album relays nihilism and is defined by a prominent theme of self-abuse and self-control. It is a semi-autobiographical concept album, in which the overarching plot follows the protagonist's descent into madness in his own inner solipsistic world through a metaphorical "downward spiral", dealing with religion, dehumanization, violence, disease, society, drugs, sex, and finally, suicide. Reznor described the concept as consisting of "someone who sheds everything around them to a potential nothingness, but through career, religion, relationship, belief and so on." Media journalists like "The New York Times" writer Jon Pareles noted the album's theme of angst had already been used by grunge bands like Nirvana, and that Nine Inch Nails' depiction was more generalized.
Using elements of genres such as techno, dance, electronic, heavy metal, and hard rock, "The Downward Spiral" is considered industrial rock, industrial, alternative rock and industrial metal. Reznor regularly uses noise and distortion in his song arrangements that do not follow verse–chorus form, and incorporates dissonance with chromatic melody or harmony (or both). The treatment of metal guitars in "Broken" is carried over to "The Downward Spiral", which includes innovative techniques such as expanded song structures and unconventional time signatures. The album features a wide range of textures and moods to illustrate the mental progress of the central protagonist. Reznor's singing follows a similar pattern from beginning to end, frequently moving from whispers to screams. These techniques are all used in the song "Hurt", which features a highly dissonant tritone played on guitar during the verses, a B5#11, emphasized when Reznor sings the eleventh note on the word "I" every time the B/E# dyad is played.
"Mr. Self Destruct", a song about a powerful person, follows a build-up sampled from the 1971 film "THX 1138" with an "industrial roar" and is accompanied by an audio loop of a pinion rotating. "The Becoming" expresses the state of being dead and the protagonist's transformation into a non-human organism. "Closer" concludes with a chromatic piano motif: The melody is introduced during the second verse of "Piggy" on organ, then reappears in power chords at drop D tuning throughout the chorus of "Heresy", and recurs for the final time on "The Downward Spiral". The album was chiefly inspired by David Bowie's "Low", an experimental rock album which Reznor related to on songwriting, mood, and structures, as well as progressive rock group Pink Floyd's "The Wall", a concept album featuring themes of abuse, isolation, and mental instability.
"Committere", an installation featuring artwork and sketches for "The Downward Spiral", "Closer" and "March of the Pigs" by Russell Mills was displayed at the Glasgow School of Art. Mills explained the ideas and materials that made up the painting (titled "Wound") that was used for the album's cover art:
"March of the Pigs" and "Closer" were released as singles; two other songs, "Hurt" and "Piggy", were issued to radio without a commercial single release. "March of the Pigs" has an unusual meter, alternating three bars of 7/8 time with one of 8/8 (in effect, a 29/8 time signature), and has a BPM rate of 269. The song's music video was directed by Peter Christopherson and was shot twice; the first version scrapped due to Reznor's involvement, and the released second version being a live performance.
"Closer" features a heavily modified bass drum sample from the Iggy Pop song "Nightclubbing" from his album "The Idiot". Lyrically, it is a meditation on self-hatred and obsession, but to Reznor's dismay, the song was widely misinterpreted as a lust anthem due to its chorus, which included the line "I wanna fuck you like an animal". The music video for "Closer" was directed by Mark Romanek and received frequent rotation on MTV, though the network heavily censored the original version, which they perceived to be too graphic. The video shows events in a laboratory dealing with religion, sexuality, animal cruelty, politics, and terror; controversial imagery included a nude bald woman with a crucifix mask, a monkey tied to a cross, a pig's head spinning on a machine, a diagram of a vulva, Reznor wearing an S&M mask while swinging in shackles, and of him wearing a ball gag. A radio edit that partially censored the song's explicit lyrics also received extensive airtime. The video has since been made part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
"Piggy" uses "nothing can stop me now", a line that recurs in "Ruiner" and "Big Man with a Gun". The frantic drumming on the song's outro is Reznor's only attempt at performing drums on the record, and one of the few "live" drum performances on the album. He had stated that the recording was from him testing the microphone setup in studio, but he liked the sound too much not to include it. It was released as a promotional single in December 1994 and reached the Top 20 on the "Billboard" Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Released in 1995, "Hurt" clearly includes references to self-harm and heroin addiction.
The Nine Inch Nails live band embarked on the Self Destruct tour in support of "The Downward Spiral". Chris Vrenna and James Woolley performed drums and keyboards respectively, Robin Finck replaced Richard Patrick on guitar and bassist Danny Lohner was added to the line-up. The stage set-up consisted of dirty curtains which would be pulled down and up for visuals shown during songs such as "Hurt". The back of the stage was littered with darker and standing lights, along with very few actual ones. The tour debuted the band's grungy and messy image in which they would come out in ragged clothes slathered in corn starch. The concerts were violent and chaotic, with band members often injuring themselves. They would frequently destroy their instruments at the end of concerts, attack each other, and stage-dive into the crowd.
The tour included a set at Woodstock '94 broadcast on pay-per-view and seen in as many as 24 million homes. The band being covered in mud was a result of pre-concert backstage play, contrary to the belief that it was an attention-grabbing ploy, thus making it difficult for Reznor to navigate the stage: Reznor pushed Lohner into the mud pit as the concert began and saw mud from his hair entering his eyes while performing. Nine Inch Nails was widely proclaimed to have "stolen the show" from its popular contemporaries, mostly classic rock bands, and its fan base expanded. The band received considerable mainstream success thereafter, performing with significantly higher production values and the addition of various theatrical visual elements. Its performance of "Happiness in Slavery" from the Woodstock concert earned the group a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1995. "Entertainment Weekly" commented about the band's Woodstock '94 performance: "Reznor unstrings rock to its horrifying, melodramatic core—an experience as draining as it is exhilarating". Despite this acclaim, Reznor attributed his dislike of the concert to its technical difficulties.
The main leg of the tour featured Marilyn Manson as the supporting act, who featured bassist Jeordie White (then playing under the pseudonym "Twiggy Ramirez"); White later played bass with Nine Inch Nails from 2005 to 2007. After another tour leg supporting the remix album "Further Down the Spiral", Nine Inch Nails contributed to the Alternative Nation Festival in Australia and subsequently embarked on the Dissonance Tour, which included 26 separate performances with co-headliner David Bowie. Nine Inch Nails was the opening act for the tour, and its set transitioned into Bowie's set with joint performances of both bands' songs. However, the crowds reportedly did not respond positively to the pairing due to their creative differences.
The tour concluded with "Nights of Nothing", a three-night showcase of performances from Nothing Records bands Marilyn Manson, Prick, Meat Beat Manifesto, and Pop Will Eat Itself, which ended with an 80-minute set from Nine Inch Nails. "Kerrang!" described the Nine Inch Nails set during the Nights of Nothing showcase as "tight, brash and dramatic", but was disappointed at the lack of new material. On the second of the three nights, Richard Patrick was briefly reunited with the band and contributed guitar to a performance of "Head Like a Hole". After the Self Destruct tour, Chris Vrenna, member of the live band since 1988 and frequent contributor to Nine Inch Nails studio recordings, left the act permanently to pursue a career in producing and to form Tweaker.
"The Downward Spiral"s release date was delayed at various times to slow down Reznor's intended pace of the album's recording. The first delay caused the process of setting up Le Pig to take longer than he expected, and its release was postponed again as he was educating himself different ways to write songs that did not resemble those on "Broken" and "Pretty Hate Machine". He considered delivering the album to Interscope in early 1993, only to experience a writer's block as he was unable to produce any satisfactory material. Interscope grew impatient and concerned with this progress, but Reznor was not forced by their demands of expediency despite crediting the label for giving him creative freedom. He told rock music producer Rick Rubin that his motivation for creating the album was to get it finished, thus Rubin responded that Reznor might not do so until he makes music that is allowed to be heard. Reznor realized that he was in the most fortunate situation he imagined when the album was recorded with a normal budget, "cool" equipment, and a studio to work at.
Released on March 8, 1994 to instant success, "The Downward Spiral" debuted at number two on the US "Billboard" 200, selling nearly 119,000 copies in its first week. On October 28, 1998, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the album quadruple platinum, and by December 2011, it had sold 3.7 million copies in the United States. The album peaked at number nine on the UK Albums Chart, and on July 22, 2013, it was certified gold by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), denoting shipments in excess of 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom. It reached number 13 on the Canadian "RPM" albums chart and received a triple platinum certification from the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) for shipping 200,000 copies in Canada. A group of early listeners of the album viewed it as "commercial suicide", but Reznor did not make it for profit as his goal was to slightly broaden Nine Inch Nails' scope. Reznor felt that the finished product he delivered to Interscope was complete and faithful to his vision and thought its commercial potential was limited, but after its release he was surprised by the success and received questions about a follow-up single with a music video to be shown on MTV. The album has since sold over four million copies worldwide.
Many music critics and audiences praised "The Downward Spiral" for its abrasive, eclectic nature and dark themes and commented on the concept of a destruction of a man. "The New York Times" writer Jon Pareles' review of the album found the music to be highly abrasive. Pareles asserted that unlike other electro-industrial groups like Ministry and Nitzer Ebb, "Reznor writes full-fledged tunes" with stronger use of melodies than riffs. He noticed criticisms of Nine Inch Nails from industrial purists for popularizing the genre and the album's transgression. "Village Voice" critic Robert Christgau gave it an "honorable mention" in his capsule review column and summed the record up as, "musically, Hieronymus Bosch as postindustrial atheist; lyrically, Transformers as kiddie porn." Jonathan Gold, writing for "Rolling Stone", likened the album to cyberpunk fiction. "Entertainment Weekly" reviewer Tom Sinclair commented: "Reznor's pet topics (sex, power, S&M, hatred, transcendence) are all here, wrapped in hooks that hit your psyche with the force of a blowtorch."
"The Downward Spiral" has been listed on several publications' best album lists. In 2003, the album was ranked number 201 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list. The "Rolling Stone" staff wrote: "Holing up in the one-time home of Manson-family victim Sharon Tate, Trent Reznor made an overpowering meditation on NIN's central theme: control." The album was placed 10th on "Spin"s "125 Best Albums of the Past 25 Years" list; the "Spin" staff quoted Ann Powers' review that appreciated its bleak, aggressive style. It was ranked number 488 in the book "The Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time" by heavy metal music critic Martin Popoff. In 2001, "Q" named "The Downward Spiral" as one of the "50 Heaviest Albums of All Time"; in 2010, the album was ranked number 102 on their "250 Best Albums of Q's Lifetime (1986–2011)" list. "The Downward Spiral" was featured in Robert Dimery's book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". In May 2014, "Loudwire" placed "The Downward Spiral" at number two on its "10 Best Hard Rock Albums of 1994" list. In July 2014, "Guitar World" placed "The Downward Spiral" at number 43 in their "Superunknown: 50 Iconic Albums That Defined 1994" list.
The immediate success of "The Downward Spiral" established Nine Inch Nails as a reputable force in the 1990s. The band's image and musical style became so recognizable that a Gatorade commercial featured a remix of "Down in It" without their involvement. Reznor felt uncomfortable with the media hype and success the band earned, received false reports of his death, depression, and was falsely reported to have had a relationship with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and was depicted as a sex icon due to his visual appearance. Nine Inch Nails received several honors, including Grammy Award nominations for Best Alternative Performance for "The Downward Spiral" and Best Rock Song for "Hurt". After the release of "The Downward Spiral", many bands such as Gravity Kills, Stabbing Westward, Filter, and Mötley Crüe made albums that imitated the sound of Nine Inch Nails.
Reznor interpreted "The Downward Spiral" as an extension of himself that "became the truth fulfilling itself," as he experienced personal and social issues presented in the album after its release. He had already struggled with social anxiety disorder and depression and started his abuse of narcotics including cocaine while he went on an alcohol binge. Around this time, his studio perfectionism, struggles with addiction, and bouts of writer's block prolonged the production of "The Fragile", and Reznor completed rehabilitation from drugs in 2001.
One year after "The Downward Spiral"’s release, the band released an accompanying remix album titled "Further Down the Spiral". It features contributions from Coil with Danny Hyde, J. G. Thirlwell, electronic musician Aphex Twin, producer Rick Rubin, and Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. The album peaked at number 23 on the "Billboard" 200 and received mixed reviews. "Recoiled", a remix EP of "Gave Up", "Closer", "The Downward Spiral", and "Eraser" by Coil, was released on February 24, 2014 via British record label Cold Spring.
Retrospective reviews regard "The Downward Spiral" as one of the most important albums of the 1990s and Reznor's greatest work. The 2004 edition of "The New Rolling Stone Album Guide" gave the album five out of five stars and called it "a powerful statement, and one of the landmark albums of the Nineties." Writing for "Entertainment Weekly", Kyle Anderson remembered watching the music video of "Closer" on MTV as an adolescent and expressed that the album changed his perception of popular music from that of songs heard on the radio to albums with cover art. "Stereogum"s Tom Breihan remains favorable toward the album since it is "the one that most fully inhabits" Nine Inch Nails' characteristics and influenced youth culture, with teenagers wearing ripped fish nets on their arms. The album was also included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". According to Acclaimed Music, it is the 165th most acclaimed album, based on appearances in critics' all-time lists.
"The Downward Spiral"s emphasis on transgressive themes made its lyrics vulnerable to criticism from American social conservatives. Senator Bob Dole, then the head of the Republican Party, sharply denounced Time Warner, the former owner of Interscope's former parent company Warner Music Group, after a meeting between Michael J. Fuchs (head of WMG), William Bennett, and C. Delores Tucker. Tucker and Bennett demanded Fuchs to recite lyrics from "Big Man with a Gun", because they thought the song was an attack on American conservatives by metaphorically claiming within the lyrics they had a jingoistic agenda. Interscope had previously been blamed for releasing gangsta rap albums by rappers such as Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur, and Snoop Dogg that were deemed objectionable. Reznor called Tucker (who erroneously referred to Nine Inch Nails as a gangsta rap act) "such a fucking idiot", and claimed that the song was actually a satire of the gangsta rap genre as a whole and was originally about madness. Reznor conceded "The Downward Spiral" could be "harmful, through implying and subliminally suggesting things", whereas hardcore hip hop could be "cartoonish". Robert Bork also repeatedly referenced "Big Man with a Gun" in his book "Slouching Toward Gomorrah" as evidence of a cultural decline. The book also incorrectly states that it is a rap song.
Before the Columbine High School massacre, perpetrator Dylan Klebold referenced lyrics from Nine Inch Nails songs multiple times in his journal. Klebold heavily identified with the protagonist of "The Downward Spiral" as a symbol of his own depression. On May 4, 1999, a hearing on the marketing and distribution practices of violent content to minors by the television, music, film, and video game industries was conducted before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The committee heard testimony from cultural observers, professors, and mental health professionals, that included conservative William Bennett and the Archbishop of Denver, Reverend Charles J. Chaput. Participants criticized the album, Nine Inch Nails' label-mate Marilyn Manson, and the 1999 film "The Matrix" for their alleged contribution to the environment that made tragedies like Columbine possible. The committee requested that the Federal Trade Commission and the United States Department of Justice investigate the entertainment industry's marketing practices to minors.
In 2009, Apple rejected a proposal for a Nine Inch Nails iPhone application, citing objectionable content in the title track. Days later, Apple reversed the decision, but refused to explain its reasoning.
Notes
To mark the album's tenth anniversary, "The Downward Spiral" was re-released on November 23, 2004 in high-resolution SACD and DualDisc formats. Disc one of the album's deluxe edition re-release is nearly identical to the original version; track anomalies such as sounds from previous tracks creeping up on start of tracks are fixed, and it includes a stereo and multi-channel SACD layer. The second bonus disc is a collection of remixes and B-sides and also includes a stereo SACD layer in addition to the Redbook CD layer. The last three tracks on the bonus disc are previously unreleased demo recordings from the original album.
"DualDisc" (Halo 8 DVD-A)
The DualDisc edition of "The Downward Spiral" contains the same CD content on Side A as the Deluxe Edition, with a DVD-Audio layer on Side B. When played on DVD-Video players a Dolby Digital 5.1 multi-channel or Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo mix of "The Downward Spiral" can be selected, along with videos of "March of the Pigs", "Hurt" and an uncensored video of "Closer". There is also an interactive discography and an image gallery. High resolution 24-bit/48 kHz 5.1 Surround sound and stereo versions of "The Downward Spiral" can be played on a DVD-Audio player, allowing the user a similar high fidelity experience as the SACD layer of the Deluxe Edition. The DualDisc release does not contain the additional B-sides and demo tracks.
Credits adapted from the liner notes of "The Downward Spiral". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9441 |
Electrical telegraph
An electrical telegraph was a point-to-point text messaging system, used from the 1840s until better systems became widespread. It used coded pulses of electric current through dedicated wires to transmit information over long distances. It was the first electrical telecommunications system, the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems called "telegraphs", devised to send text messages more rapidly than written messages could be sent. This system allowed for communication to occur without the necessity of physical transportation. Prior to this, beacons, smoke signal, flag semaphore, and optical telegraphs used visual signals to communicate over distances of land.
An electrical telegraph consisted of two or more geographically separated stations (often called telegraph offices) connected by wires, usually supported overhead on utility poles. There were many different electrical telegraph systems invented, but the ones that became widespread fit into two broad categories. The first category consists of needle telegraphs in which a needle pointer is made to move electromagnetically with a pulse of electric current from a battery or dynamo down the telegraph line. Early systems used multiple needles requiring multiple wires. The first commercial system, and the most widely used needle telegraph, was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, invented in 1837. Early equipment sets used five needles to point to the letter being transmitted, but the cost of installing wires was more economically significant than the cost of training operators so a single-needle system with a code that had to be learned became the norm.
The second category consists of armature systems in which the pulse activates a telegraph sounder which makes a click. The archetype of this category was the Morse system, invented by Samuel Morse in 1838, using a single wire. At the sending station, an operator would tap on a switch called a telegraph key, spelling out text messages in Morse code. Originally, the armature was intended to make marks on paper tape, but operators learned to interpret the clicks and it was more efficient to write down the message directly. In 1865, the Morse system became the standard for international communication with a modified code developed for German railways. However, some countries continued to use established national systems internally for some time afterwards.
In the 1840s the electrical telegraph superseded optical telegraph systems (except in France), becoming the standard way to send urgent messages. By the latter half of the century, most developed nations had created commercial telegraph networks with local telegraph offices in most cities and towns, allowing the public to send messages called telegrams addressed to any person in the country, for a fee. Beginning in 1854 submarine telegraph cables allowed for the first rapid communication between continents. Electrical telegraph networks permitted people and commerce to transmit messages across both continents and oceans almost instantly, with widespread social and economic impacts. In the early 20th century the telegraph was slowly replaced by teletype networks.
From early studies of electricity, electrical phenomena were known to travel with great speed, and many experimenters worked on the application of electricity to communications at a distance. All the known effects of electricity—such as sparks, electrostatic attraction, chemical changes, electric shocks, and later electromagnetism—were applied to the problems of detecting controlled transmissions of electricity at various distances.
In 1753, an anonymous writer in the "Scots Magazine" suggested an electrostatic telegraph. Using one wire for each letter of the alphabet, a message could be transmitted by connecting the wire terminals in turn to an electrostatic machine, and observing the deflection of pith balls at the far end. The writer has never been positively identified, but the letter was signed C.M. and posted from Renfrew leading to a Charles Marshall of Renfrew being suggested. Telegraphs employing electrostatic attraction were the basis of early experiments in electrical telegraphy in Europe, but were abandoned as being impractical and were never developed into a useful communication system.
In 1774, Georges-Louis Le Sage realised an early electric telegraph. The telegraph had a separate wire for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet and its range was only between two rooms of his home.
In 1800, Alessandro Volta invented the voltaic pile, allowing for a continuous current of electricity for experimentation. This became a source of a low-voltage current that could be used to produce more distinct effects, and which was far less limited than the momentary discharge of an electrostatic machine, which with Leyden jars were the only previously known man-made sources of electricity.
Another very early experiment in electrical telegraphy was an 'electrochemical telegraph' created by the German physician, anatomist and inventor Samuel Thomas von Sömmering in 1809, based on an earlier, less robust design of 1804 by Spanish polymath and scientist Francisco Salva Campillo. Both their designs employed multiple wires (up to 35) to represent almost all Latin letters and numerals. Thus, messages could be conveyed electrically up to a few kilometers (in von Sömmering's design), with each of the telegraph receiver's wires immersed in a separate glass tube of acid. An electric current was sequentially applied by the sender through the various wires representing each letter of a message; at the recipient's end the currents electrolysed the acid in the tubes in sequence, releasing streams of hydrogen bubbles next to each associated letter or numeral. The telegraph receiver's operator would watch the bubbles and could then record the transmitted message. This is in contrast to later telegraphs that used a single wire (with ground return).
Hans Christian Ørsted discovered in 1820 that an electric current produces a magnetic field that will deflect a compass needle. In the same year Johann Schweigger invented the galvanometer, with a coil of wire around a compass, which could be used as a sensitive indicator for an electric current. Also that year, André-Marie Ampère suggested that telegraphy could be achieved by placing small magnets under the ends of a set of wires, one pair of wires for each letter of the alphabet. He was apparently unaware of Schweigger's invention at the time, which would have made his system much more sensitive. In 1825, Peter Barlow tried Ampère's idea but only got it to work over and declared it impractical. In 1830 William Ritchie improved on Ampère's design by placing the magnetic needles inside a coil of wire connected to each pair of conductors. He successfully demonstrated it, showing the feasibility of the electromagnetic telegraph, but only within a lecture hall.
In 1825, William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet, with a single winding of uninsulated wire on a piece of varnished iron, which increased the magnetic force produced by electric current. Joseph Henry improved it in 1828 by placing several windings of insulated wire around the bar, creating a much more powerful electromagnet which could operate a telegraph through the high resistance of long telegraph wires. During his tenure at The Albany Academy from 1826 to 1832, Henry first demonstrated the theory of the 'magnetic telegraph' by ringing a bell through a mile (1.6 km) of wire strung around the room in 1831.
In 1835, Joseph Henry and Edward Davy independently invented the mercury dipping electrical relay, in which a magnetic needle is dipped into a pot of mercury when an electric current passes through the surrounding coil. In 1837, Davy invented the much more practical metallic make-and-break relay which became the relay of choice in telegraph systems and a key component allowing weak signals to be periodically renewed. Davy demonstrated his telegraph system in Regent's Park in 1837 and was granted a patent on 4 July 1838. Davy also invented a printing telegraph which used the electric current from the telegraph signal to mark a ribbon of calico infused with potassium iodide and calcium hypochlorite.
The first working telegraph was built by the English inventor Francis Ronalds in 1816 and used static electricity. At the family home on Hammersmith Mall, he set up a complete subterranean system in a 175 yard long trench as well as an eight mile long overhead telegraph. The lines were connected at both ends to revolving dials marked with the letters of the alphabet and electrical impulses sent along the wire were used to transmit messages. Offering his invention to the Admiralty in July 1816, it was rejected as "wholly unnecessary". His account of the scheme and the possibilities of rapid global communication in "Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph and of some other Electrical Apparatus" was the first published work on electric telegraphy and even described the risk of signal retardation due to induction. Elements of Ronalds’ design were utilised in the subsequent commercialisation of the telegraph over 20 years later.
The telegraph invented by Baron Schilling von Canstatt in 1832 had a transmitting device which consisted of a keyboard with 16 black-and-white keys. These served for switching the electric current. The receiving instrument consisted of six galvanometers with magnetic needles, suspended from silk threads. Both stations of Schilling's telegraph were connected by eight wires; six were connected with the galvanometers, one served for the return current and one for a signal bell. When at the starting station the operator pressed a key, the corresponding pointer was deflected at the receiving station. Different positions of black and white flags on different disks gave combinations which corresponded to the letters or numbers. Pavel Schilling subsequently improved its apparatus by reducing the number of connecting wires from eight to two.
On 21 October 1832, Schilling managed a short-distance transmission of signals between two telegraphs in different rooms of his apartment. In 1836, the British government attempted to buy the design but Schilling instead accepted overtures from Nicholas I of Russia. Schilling's telegraph was tested on a experimental underground and underwater cable, laid around the building of the main Admiralty in Saint Petersburg and was approved for a telegraph between the imperial palace at Peterhof and the naval base at Kronstadt. However, the project was cancelled following Schilling's death in 1837. Schilling was also one of the first to put into practice the idea of the binary system of signal transmission.
In 1833, Carl Friedrich Gauss, together with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber in Göttingen installed a wire above the town's roofs. Gauss combined the Poggendorff-Schweigger multiplicator with his magnetometer to build a more sensitive device, the galvanometer. To change the direction of the electric current, he constructed a commutator of his own. As a result, he was able to make the distant needle move in the direction set by the commutator on the other end of the line.
At first, Gauss and Weber used the telegraph to coordinate time, but soon they developed other signals and finally, their own alphabet. The alphabet was encoded in a binary code which was transmitted by positive or negative voltage pulses which were generated by means of moving an induction coil up and down over a permanent magnet and connecting the coil with the transmission wires by means of the commutator. The page of Gauss' laboratory notebook containing both his code and the first message transmitted, as well as a replica of the telegraph made in the 1850s under the instructions of Weber are kept in the faculty of physics at the University of Göttingen, in Germany.
Gauss was convinced that this communication would be a help to his kingdom's towns. Later in the same year, instead of a Voltaic pile, Gauss used an induction pulse, enabling him to transmit seven letters a minute instead of two. The inventors and university did not have the funds to develop the telegraph on their own, but they received funding from Alexander von Humboldt. Carl August Steinheil in Munich was able to build a telegraph network within the city in 1835–1836. He installed a telegraph line along the first German railroad in 1835. Steinheil built a telegraph along the Nuremberg - Fürth railway line in 1838, the first earth-return telegraph put into service.
By 1837, William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had co-developed a telegraph system which used a number of needles on a board that could be moved to point to letters of the alphabet. Any number of needles could be used, depending on the number of characters it was required to code. In May 1837 they patented their system. The patent recommended five needles, which coded twenty of the alphabet's 26 letters.
Samuel Morse independently developed and patented a recording electric telegraph in 1837. Morse's assistant Alfred Vail developed an instrument that was called the register for recording the received messages. It embossed dots and dashes on a moving paper tape by a stylus which was operated by an electromagnet. Morse and Vail developed the Morse code signalling alphabet. The first telegram in the United States was sent by Morse on 11 January 1838, across of wire at Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey, although it was only later, in 1844, that he sent the message "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT" over the from the Capitol in Washington to the old Mt. Clare Depot in Baltimore.
The first commercial electrical telegraph was the Cooke and Wheatstone system. A demonstration four-needle system was installed on the Euston to Camden Town section of Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham Railway in 1837 for signalling rope-hauling of locomotives. It was rejected in favour of pneumatic whistles. Cooke and Wheatstone had their first commercial success with a system installed on the Great Western Railway over the from Paddington station to West Drayton in 1838. This was a five-needle, six-wire system. This system suffered from failing insulation on the underground cables. When the line was extended to Slough in 1843, the telegraph was converted to a one-needle, two-wire system with uninsulated wires on poles. The one-needle telegraph proved highly successful on British railways, and 15,000 sets were still in use at the end of the nineteenth century. Some remained in service in the 1930s. The Electric Telegraph Company, the world's first public telegraphy company was formed in 1845 by financier John Lewis Ricardo and Cooke.
Wheatstone developed a practical alphabetical system in 1840 called the A.B.C. System, used mostly on private wires. This consisted of a "communicator" at the sending end and an "indicator" at the receiving end. The communicator consisted of a circular dial with a pointer and the 26 letters of the alphabet (and four punctuation marks) around its circumference. Against each letter was a key that could be pressed. A transmission would begin with the pointers on the dials at both ends set to the start position. The transmitting operator would then press down the key corresponding to the letter to be transmitted. In the base of the communicator was a magneto actuated by a handle on the front. This would be turned to apply an alternating voltage to the line. Each half cycle of the current would move the pointers at both ends on by one position. When the pointer reached the position of the depressed key, it would stop and the magneto would be disconnected from the line. The communicator's pointer was geared to the magneto mechanism. The indicator's pointer was moved by a polarised electromagnet whose armature was coupled to it through an escapement. Thus the alternating line voltage moved the indicator's pointer on to the position of the depressed key on the communicator. Pressing another key would then release the pointer and the previous key, and re-connect the magneto to the line. These machines were very robust and simple to operate, and they stayed in use in Britain until well into the 20th century.
In 1851, a conference in Vienna of countries in the German-Austrian Telegraph Union (which included many central European countries) adopted the Morse telegraph as the system for international communications. The code adopted was considerably modified from the original Morse code, and was based on a code used on Hamburg railways (Gerke, 1848). A common code was a necessary step to allow direct telegraph connection between countries. With different codes, additional operators were required to translate and retransmit the message. In 1865, a conference in Paris adopted Gerke's code as the International Morse code and was henceforth the international standard. The US, however, continued to use American Morse code internally for some time, hence international messages required retransmission in both directions.
In the United States, the Morse/Vail telegraph was quickly deployed in the two decades following the first demonstration in 1844. The overland telegraph connected the west coast of the continent to the east coast by 24 October 1861, bringing an end to the Pony Express.
France was slow to adopt the electrical telegraph. They had an extensive optical telegraph system built during the Napoleonic era. There was also serious concern that an electrical telegraph could be quickly put out of action by enemy saboteurs, something that was much more difficult to do with optical telegraphs which had no exposed hardware between stations. The Foy-Breguet telegraph was eventually adopted. This was a two-needle system using two signal wires, but displayed in a uniquely different way to other needle telegraphs. The needles made symbols similar to the Chappe optical system symbols, making it more familiar to the telegraph operators. The optical system was decommissioned starting in 1846, but not completed until 1855. In that year the Foy-Breguet system was replaced with the Morse system.
As well as the rapid expansion of the use of the telegraphs along the railways, they soon spread into the field of mass communication with the instruments being installed in post offices. The era of mass personal communication had begun. Telegraph networks were expensive to build, but financing was readily available, especially from London bankers. By 1852, National systems were in operation in major countries:
The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company, for example, was created in 1852 in Rochester, New York and eventually became the Western Union Telegraph Company. Although many countries had telegraph networks, there was no "worldwide" interconnection. Message by post was still the primary means of communication to countries outside Europe.
A continuing goal in telegraphy was to reduce the cost per message by reducing hand-work, or increasing the sending rate. There were many experiments with moving pointers, and various electrical encodings. However, most systems were too complicated and unreliable. A successful expedient to reduce the cost per message was the development of telegraphese.
The first system that didn't require skilled technicians to operate, was Charles Wheatstone's ABC system in 1840 where the letters of the alphabet were arranged around a clock-face, and the signal caused a needle to indicate the letter. This early system required the receiver to be present in real time to record the message and it reached speeds of up to 15 words a minute.
In 1846, Alexander Bain patented a chemical telegraph in Edinburgh. The signal current moved an iron pen across a moving paper tape soaked in a mixture of ammonium nitrate and potassium ferrocyanide, decomposing the chemical and producing readable blue marks in Morse code. The speed of the printing telegraph was 16 and a half words per minute, but messages still required translation into English by live copyists. Chemical telegraphy came to an end in the US in 1851, when the Morse group defeated the Bain patent in the US District Court.
For a brief period, starting with the New York–Boston line in 1848, some telegraph networks began to employ sound operators, who were trained to understand Morse code aurally. Gradually, the use of sound operators eliminated the need for telegraph receivers to include register and tape. Instead, the receiving instrument was developed into a "sounder", an electromagnet that was energized by a current and attracted a small iron lever. When the sounding key was opened or closed, the sounder lever struck an anvil. The Morse operator distinguished a dot and a dash by the short or long interval between the two clicks. The message was then written out in long-hand.
Royal Earl House developed and patented a letter-printing telegraph system in 1846 which employed an alphabetic keyboard for the transmitter and automatically printed the letters on paper at the receiver, and followed this up with a steam-powered version in 1852. Advocates of printing telegraphy said it would eliminate Morse operators' errors. The House machine was used on four main American telegraph lines by 1852. The speed of the House machine was announced as 2600 words an hour.
David Edward Hughes invented the printing telegraph in 1855; it used a keyboard of 26 keys for the alphabet and a spinning type wheel that determined the letter being transmitted by the length of time that had elapsed since the previous transmission. The system allowed for automatic recording on the receiving end. The system was very stable and accurate and became accepted around the world.
The next improvement was the Baudot code of 1874. French engineer Émile Baudot patented a printing telegraph in which the signals were translated automatically into typographic characters. Each character was assigned a five-bit code, mechanically interpreted from the state of five on/off switches. Operators had to maintain a steady rhythm, and the usual speed of operation was 30 words per minute.
By this point reception had been automated, but the speed and accuracy of the transmission was still limited to the skill of the human operator. The first practical automated system was patented by Charles Wheatstone, the original inventor of the telegraph. The message (in Morse code) was typed onto a piece of perforated tape using a keyboard-like device called the 'Stick Punch'. The transmitter automatically ran the tape through and transmitted the message at the then exceptionally high speed of 70 words per minute.
An early successful teleprinter was invented by Frederick G. Creed. In Glasgow he created his first keyboard perforator, which used compressed air to punch the holes. He also created a reperforator (receiving perforator) and a printer. The reperforator punched incoming Morse signals on to paper tape and the printer decoded this tape to produce alphanumeric characters on plain paper. This was the origin of the Creed High Speed Automatic Printing System, which could run at an unprecedented 200 words per minute. His system was adopted by the "Daily Mail" for daily transmission of the newspaper contents.
With the invention of the teletypewriter, telegraphic encoding became fully automated. Early teletypewriters used the ITA-1 Baudot code, a five-bit code. This yielded only thirty-two codes, so it was over-defined into two "shifts", "letters" and "figures". An explicit, unshared shift code prefaced each set of letters and figures. In 1901, Baudot's code was modified by Donald Murray.
In the 1930s teleprinters were produced by Teletype in the US, Creed in Britain and Siemens in Germany.
By 1935, message routing was the last great barrier to full automation. Large telegraphy providers began to develop systems that used telephone-like rotary dialling to connect teletypewriters. These resulting system was called "Telex" (TELegraph EXchange). Telex machines first performed rotary-telephone-style pulse dialling for circuit switching, and then sent data by ITA2. This "type A" Telex routing functionally automated message routing.
The first wide-coverage Telex network was implemented in Germany during the 1930s as a network used to communicate within the government.
At the rate of 45.45 (±0.5%) baud — considered speedy at the time — up to 25 telex channels could share a single long-distance telephone channel by using "voice frequency telegraphy multiplexing", making telex the least expensive method of reliable long-distance communication.
Automatic teleprinter exchange service was introduced into Canada by CPR Telegraphs and CN Telegraph in July 1957 and in 1958, Western Union started to build a Telex network in the United States.
The most expensive aspect of a telegraph system was the installation – the laying of the wire, which was often very long. The costs would be better covered by finding a way to send more than one message at a time through the single wire, thus increasing revenue per wire. Early devices included the duplex and the quadruplex which allowed, respectively, one or two telegraph transmissions in each direction. However, an even greater number of channels was desired on the busiest lines. In the latter half of the 1800s, several inventors worked towards creating a method for doing just that, including Charles Bourseul, Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray, and Alexander Graham Bell.
One approach was to have resonators of several different frequencies act as carriers of a modulated on-off signal. This was the harmonic telegraph, a form of frequency-division multiplexing. These various frequencies, referred to as harmonics, could then be combined into one complex signal and sent down the single wire. On the receiving end, the frequencies would be separated with a matching set of resonators.
With a set of frequencies being carried down a single wire, it was realized that the human voice itself could be transmitted electrically through the wire. This effort led to the invention of the telephone. (While the work toward packing multiple telegraph signals onto one wire led to telephony, later advances would pack multiple voice signals onto one wire by increasing the bandwidth by modulating frequencies much higher than human hearing. Eventually the bandwidth was widened much further by using laser light signals sent through fiber optic cables. Fiber optic transmission can carry 25,000 telephone signals simultaneously down a single fiber.)
Soon after the first successful telegraph systems were operational, the possibility of transmitting messages across the sea by way of submarine communications cables was first proposed. One of the primary technical challenges was to sufficiently insulate the submarine cable to prevent the current from leaking out into the water. In 1842, a Scottish surgeon William Montgomerie introduced gutta-percha, the adhesive juice of the "Palaquium gutta" tree, to Europe. Michael Faraday and Wheatstone soon discovered the merits of gutta-percha as an insulator, and in 1845, the latter suggested that it should be employed to cover the wire which was proposed to be laid from Dover to Calais. Gutta-percha was used as insulation on a wire laid across the Rhine between Deutz and Cologne. In 1849, C.V. Walker, electrician to the South Eastern Railway, submerged a two-mile wire coated with gutta-percha off the coast from Folkestone, which was tested successfully.
John Watkins Brett, an engineer from Bristol, sought and obtained permission from Louis-Philippe in 1847 to establish telegraphic communication between France and England. The first undersea cable was laid in 1850, connecting the two countries and was followed by connections to Ireland and the Low Countries.
The Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed in London in 1856 to undertake to construct a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean. It was successfully completed on 18 July 1866 by the ship SS "Great Eastern", captained by Sir James Anderson after many mishaps along the away. John Pender, one of the men on the Great Eastern, later founded several telecommunications companies primarily laying cables between Britain and Southeast Asia. Earlier transatlantic submarine cables installations were attempted in 1857, 1858 and 1865. The 1857 cable only operated intermittently for a few days or weeks before it failed. The study of underwater telegraph cables accelerated interest in mathematical analysis of very long transmission lines. The telegraph lines from Britain to India were connected in 1870 (those several companies combined to form the "Eastern Telegraph Company" in 1872). The HMS "Challenger" expedition in 1873-1876 mapped the ocean floor for future underwater telegraph cables.
Australia was first linked to the rest of the world in October 1872 by a submarine telegraph cable at Darwin. This brought news reports from the rest of the world. The telegraph across the Pacific was completed in 1902, finally encircling the world.
From the 1850s until well into the 20th century, British submarine cable systems dominated the world system. This was set out as a formal strategic goal, which became known as the All Red Line. In 1896, there were thirty cable laying ships in the world and twenty-four of them were owned by British companies. In 1892, British companies owned and operated two-thirds of the world's cables and by 1923, their share was still 42.7 percent.
Cable & Wireless was a British telecommunications company that traced its origins back to the 1860s, with Sir John Pender as the founder, although the name was only adopted in 1934. It was formed from successive mergers including:
The ability to send telegrams brought obvious advantages to those conducting war. Secret messages were encoded, so interception alone would not be sufficient for the opposing side to gain an advantage. There were geographical constraints on intercepting the telegraph cables, but once radio was used, interception could be much more widespread.
The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts to use telegraphs and was one of the first to be documented extensively. In 1854, the government in London created a military Telegraph Detachment for the Army commanded by an officer of the Royal Engineers. It was to comprise twenty-five men from the Royal Corps of Sappers & Miners trained by the Electric Telegraph Company to construct and work the first field electric telegraph.
Journalistic recording of the war was provided by William Howard Russell (writing for "The Times" newspaper) with photographs by Roger Fenton. News from war correspondents kept the public of the nations involved in the war informed of the day-to-day events in a way that had not been possible in any previous war. After the French extended the telegraph to the coast of the Black Sea in late 1854, the news reached London in two days. When the British laid an underwater cable to the Crimean peninsula in April 1855, news reached London in a few hours. The daily news reports energised public opinion, which brought down the government and led to Lord Palmerston becoming prime minister.
During the American Civil War the telegraph proved its value as a tactical, operational, and strategic communication medium and an important contributor to Union victory. By contrast the Confederacy failed to make effective use of the South's much smaller telegraph network. Prior to the War the telegraph systems were primarily used in the commercial sector. Government buildings were not inter-connected with telegraph lines, but relied on runners to carry messages back and forth. Before the war the Government saw no need to connect lines within city limits, however, they did see the use in connections between cities. Washington D.C. being the hub of government, it had the most connections, but there were only a few lines running north and south out of the city. It wasn't until the Civil War that the government saw the true potential of the telegraph system. Soon after the shelling of Fort Sumter, the South cut telegraph lines running into D.C., which put the city in a state of panic because they feared an immediate Southern invasion.
Within 6 months of the start of the war, the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps (USMT) had laid approximately 300 miles of line. By war's end they had laid approximately 15,000 miles of line, 8,000 for military and 5,000 for commercial use, and had handled approximately 6.5 million messages. The telegraph was not only important for communication within the armed forces, but also in the civilian sector, helping political leaders to maintain control over their districts.
Even before the war, the American Telegraph Company censored suspect messages informally to block aid to the secession movement. During the war, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, and later Edwin Stanton, wanted control over the telegraph lines to maintain the flow of information. Early in the war, one of Stanton's first acts as Secretary of War was to move telegraph lines from ending at McClellan's headquarters to terminating at the War Department. Stanton himself said "[telegraphy] is my right arm". Telegraphy assisted Northern victories, including the Battle of Antietam (1862), the Battle of Chickamauga (1863), and Sherman's March to the Sea (1865).
The telegraph system still had its flaws. The USMT, while the main source of telegraphers and cable, was still a civilian agency. Most operators were first hired by the telegraph companies and then contracted out to the War Department. This created tension between Generals and their operators. One source of irritation was that USMT operators did not have to follow military authority. Usually they performed without hesitation, but they were not required to, so Albert Myer created a U.S. Army Signal Corps in February 1863. As the new head of the Signal Corps, Myer tried to get all telegraph and flag signaling under his command, and therefore subject to military discipline. After creating the Signal Corps, Myer pushed to further develop new telegraph systems. While the USMT relied primarily on civilian lines and operators, the Signal Corp's new field telegraph could be deployed and dismantled faster than USMT's system.
During World War I, Britain's telegraph communications were almost completely uninterrupted, while it was able to quickly cut Germany's cables worldwide. The British government censored telegraph cable companies in an effort to root out espionage and restrict financial transactions with Central Powers nations. British access to transatlantic cables and its codebreaking expertise led to the Zimmermann Telegram incident that contributed to the US joining the war. Despite British acquisition of German colonies and expansion into the Middle East, debt from the war led to Britain's control over telegraph cables to weaken while US control grew.
World War II revived the 'cable war' of 1914–1918. In 1939, German-owned cables across the Atlantic were cut once again, and, in 1940, Italian cables to South America and Spain were cut in retaliation for Italian action against two of the five British cables linking Gibraltar and Malta. Electra House, Cable & Wireless's head office and central cable station, was damaged by German bombing in 1941.
Resistance movements in occupied Europe sabotaged communications facilities such as telegraph lines, forcing the Germans to use wireless telegraphy, which could then be intercepted by Britain. The Germans developed a highly complex teleprinter attachment (German: "Schlüssel-Zusatz", "cipher attachment") that was used for enciphering telegrams, using the Lorenz cipher, between German High Command (OKW) and the army groups in the field. These contained situation reports, battle plans, and discussions of strategy and tactics. Britain intercepted these signals, diagnosed how the encrypting machine worked, and decrypted a large amount of teleprinter traffic.
In America, the end of the telegraph era can be associated with the fall of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Western Union was the leading telegraph provider for America and was seen as the best competition for the National Bell Telephone Company. Western Union and Bell were both invested in telegraphy and telephone technology. Western Union's decision to allow Bell to gain the advantage in telephone technology was the result of Western Union's upper management's failure to foresee the surpassing of the telephone over the, at the time, dominant telegraph system. Western Union soon lost the legal battle for the rights to their telephone copyrights. This led to Western Union agreeing to a lesser position in the telephone competition, which in turn led to the lessening of the telegraph.
While the telegraph was not the focus of the legal battles that occurred around 1878, the companies that were affected by the effects of the battle were the main powers of telegraphy at the time. Western Union thought that the agreement of 1878 would solidify telegraphy as the long-range communication of choice. However, due to the underestimates of telegraph's future and poor contracts, Western Union found itself declining. AT&T acquired working control of Western Union in 1909 but relinquished it in 1914 under threat of antitrust action. AT&T bought Western Union's electronic mail and Telex businesses in 1990.
Although commercial "telegraph" services are still available in many countries, transmission is usually done by some form of data transmission other than traditional telegraphy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9450 |
Etruscan language
Etruscan ( ) was the language of the Etruscan civilization, in Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria (modern Tuscany plus western Umbria and northern Latium) and in parts of Corsica, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy and Campania. Etruscan influenced Latin, but eventually was completely superseded by it. The Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions which have been found so far, only a small minority of which are of significant length; some bilingual inscriptions with texts also in Latin, Greek, or Phoenician; and a few dozen loanwords, such as the name Roma. Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study, with its being referred to at times as an isolate, one of the Tyrsenian languages, and a number of other less well-known theories.
The consensus among linguists and Etruscologists is that Etruscan was a pre–Indo-European language, and is closely related to the Raetic language spoken in the Alps, and to the language attested in a few inscriptions on Lemnos.
Grammatically, the language is agglutinating, with nouns and verbs showing suffixed inflectional endings and ablaut in some cases. Nouns show four cases, singular and plural numbers, with a gender distinction between "masculine" and "feminine" in pronouns.
Etruscan appears to have had a cross-linguistically common phonological system, with four phonemic vowels and an apparent contrast between aspirated and unaspirated stops. The records of the language suggest that phonetic change took place over time, with the loss and then re-establishment of word-internal vowels, possibly due to the effect of Etruscan's word-initial stress.
Etruscan religion influenced that of the Romans, and many of the few surviving Etruscan language artifacts are of votive or religious significance. Etruscan was written in an alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet; this alphabet was the source of the Latin alphabet. The Etruscan language is also believed to be the source of certain important cultural words of Western Europe such as 'military' and 'person', which do not have obvious Indo-European roots.
Etruscan literacy was widespread over the Mediterranean shores, as evidenced by about 13,000 inscriptions (dedications, epitaphs, etc.), most fairly short, but some of considerable length. They date from about 700 BC.
The Etruscans had a rich literature, as noted by Latin authors. Livy and Cicero were both aware that highly specialized Etruscan religious rites were codified in several sets of books written in Etruscan under the generic Latin title "Etrusca Disciplina". The "Libri Haruspicini" dealt with divination by reading entrails from a sacrificed animal, while the "Libri Fulgurales" expounded the art of divination by observing lightning. A third set, the "Libri Rituales", might have provided a key to Etruscan civilization: its wider scope embraced Etruscan standards of social and political life, as well as ritual practices. According to the 4th century Latin writer Maurus Servius Honoratus, a fourth set of Etruscan books existed; dealing with animal gods, but it is unlikely that any scholar living in that era could have read Etruscan. However, only one book (as opposed to inscription), the "Liber Linteus", survived, and only because the linen on which it was written was used as mummy wrappings.
In 30 BC, Livy noted that Etruscan was once widely taught to Roman boys, but had since become replaced by the teaching of only Greek, while Varro noted that works of theatre had once been composed in Etruscan.
The date of extinction for Etruscan is held by scholarship to have been either in the late first century BC, or the early first century AD. Freeman's analysis of inscriptional evidence would appear to imply that Etruscan was still flourishing in the 2nd century BC, still alive in the first century BC, and surviving in at least one location in the beginning of the first century AD; however, the replacement of Etruscan by Latin likely occurred earlier in southern regions closer to Rome.
In Southern Etruria, the first Etruscan site to be Latinized was Veii, when it was destroyed and repopulated by Romans in 396 BC. Caere (Cerveteri), another southern Etruscan town on the coast 45 kilometers from Rome, appears to have shifted to Latin in the late 2nd century BC. In Tarquinia and Vulci, Latin inscriptions coexisted with Etruscan inscriptions in wall paintings and grave markers for centuries, from the 3rd century BC until the early 1st century BC, after which Etruscan is replaced by exclusive use of Latin.
In Northern Etruria, Etruscan inscriptions continue after they disappear in Southern Etruria. At Clusium (Chiusi), tomb markings show mixed Latin and Etruscan in the first half of the 1st century BC, with cases where two subsequent generations are inscribed in Latin and then the third, youngest generation, surprisingly, is transcribed in Etruscan. At Perugia, monolingual monumental inscriptions in Etruscan are still seen in the first half of the 1st century BC, while the period of bilingual inscriptions appears to have stretched from the 3rd century to the late 1st century BC. The isolated last bilinguals are found at three northern sites. Inscriptions in Arezzo include one dated to 40 BC followed by two with slightly later dates, while in Volterra there is one dated to just after 40 BC and a final one dated to 10–20 AD; coins with written Etruscan near Saena have also been dated to 15 BC. Freeman notes that in rural areas the language may have survived a bit longer, and that a survival into the late 1st century AD and beyond "cannot wholly be dismissed", especially given the revelation of Oscan writing in Pompeii's walls.
Despite the apparent extinction of Etruscan, it appears that Etruscan religious rites continued much later, continuing to use the Etruscan names of deities and possibly with some liturgical usage of the language. In late Republican and early Augustan times, various Latin sources including Cicero noted the esteemed reputation of Etruscan soothsayers. An episode where lightning struck an inscription with the name Caesar, turning it into Aesar, was interpreted to have been a premonition of the deification of Caesar because of the resemblance to Etruscan "aisar", meaning "gods", although this indicates knowledge of a single word and not the language. Centuries later and long after Etruscan is thought to have died out, Ammianus Marcellinus reports that Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor, apparently had Etruscan soothsayers accompany him on his military campaigns with books on war, lightning and celestial events, but the language these books were written in is unknown. According to Zosimus, when Rome was faced with destruction by Alaric in 408 AD, the protection of nearby Etruscan towns was attributed to Etruscan pagan priests who claimed to have summoned a raging thunderstorm, and they offered their services "in the ancestral manner" to Rome as well, but the devout Christians of Rome refused the author, preferring death to help by pagans. Freeman notes that these events may indicate that a limited theological knowledge of Etruscan may have survived among the priestly caste much longer. One 19th-century writer argued in 1892 that Etruscan deities retained an influence on early modern Tuscan folklore.
Around 180, the Latin author Aulus Gellius mentions Etruscan alongside the Gaulish language in an anecdote. Freeman notes that although Gaulish was clearly still alive during Gellius' time, his testimony may not indicate that Etruscan was still alive because the phrase could indicate a meaning of the sort of "it's all Greek (incomprehensible) to me".
At the time of its extinction, only a few educated Romans with antiquarian interests, such as Marcus Terentius Varro, could read Etruscan. The Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC – AD 54), is considered to have possibly been able to read Etruscan, and authored a treatise on Etruscan history; a separate dedication made by Claudius implies a knowledge from "diverse Etruscan sources", but it is unclear if any were fluent speakers of Etruscan. Plautia Urgulanilla, the emperor's first wife, was Etruscan.
Etruscan had some influence on Latin, as a few dozen Etruscan words and names were borrowed by the Romans, some of which remain in modern languages, among which are possibly "columna" "column", "voltur" "vulture", "tuba" "trumpet", "vagina" "sheath", "populus" "people".
Inscriptions have been found in north-west and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears the name of the Etruscan civilization, Tuscany (from Latin "tuscī" "Etruscans"), as well as in modern Latium north of Rome, in today's Umbria west of the Tiber, in Campania and in the Po Valley to the north of Etruria. This range may indicate a maximum Italian homeland where the language was at one time spoken.
Outside mainland Italy, inscriptions have been found in Corsica, Elba, Gallia Narbonensis, Greece, the Balkans, the Black Sea. But by far, the greatest concentration is in Italy.
The phonology of Etruscan is known through the alternation of Greek and Etruscan letters in some inscriptions (for example, the Iguvine Tablets), and many individual words are known through loans into or from Greek and Latin, as well as explanations of Etruscan words by ancient authors. A few concepts of word formation have been formulated (see below). Modern knowledge of the language is incomplete.
In 1998, Helmut Rix put forward the view that Etruscan is related to other members of what he called the "Tyrsenian language family". Rix's Tyrsenian family of languages—composed of Raetic, anciently spoken in the eastern Alps, and Lemnian, together with Etruscan—has gained acceptance among scholars. Rix's Tyrsenian family has been confirmed by Stefan Schumacher, Norbert Oettinger, Carlo De Simone, and Simona Marchesini. Common features between Etruscan, Raetic, and Lemnian have been found in morphology, phonology, and syntax. On the other hand, few lexical correspondences are documented, at least partly due to the scant number of Raetic and Lemnian texts. The Tyrsenian family, or Common Tyrrhenic, in this case is often considered to be Paleo-European and to predate the arrival of Indo-European languages in southern Europe. Several scholars believe that the Lemnian language could have arrived in the Aegean Sea during the Late Bronze Age, when Mycenaean rulers recruited groups of mercenaries from Sicily, Sardinia and various parts of the Italian peninsula. Scholars such as Norbert Oettinger, Michel Gras and Carlo De Simone think that Lemnian is the testimony of an Etruscan piratesque or commercial settlement on the island that took place before 700 BC, not related to the Sea Peoples.
Some scholars think that the Camunic language, an extinct language spoken in the Central Alps of Northern Italy, may be also related to Etruscan and to Raetic.
Etruscan was traditionally considered to be a language isolate. In the first century BC, the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus stated that the Etruscan language was unlike any other. Giuliano Bonfante, a leading scholar in the field, argued in 1990 that "it resembles no other language in Europe or elsewhere".
Over the centuries many hypotheses on the Etruscan language have been developed, many of which have not been accepted or have been considered highly speculative. The interest in Etruscan antiquities and the Etruscan language found its modern origin in a book by a Renaissance Dominican friar, Annio da Viterbo, a cabalist and orientalist now remembered mainly for literary forgeries. In 1498, Annio published his antiquarian miscellany titled "Antiquitatum variarum" (in 17 volumes) where he put together a theory in which both the Hebrew and Etruscan languages were said to originate from a single source, the "Aramaic" spoken by Noah and his descendants, founders of the Etruscan city Viterbo. Annio also started to excavate Etruscan tombs, unearthing sarcophagi and inscriptions, and made a bold attempt at deciphering the Etruscan language.
The 19th century saw numerous attempts to reclassify Etruscan. Ideas of Semitic origins found supporters until this time. In 1858, the last attempt was made by Johann Gustav Stickel, Jena University in his "Das Etruskische […] als semitische Sprache erwiesen". A reviewer concluded that Stickel brought forward every possible argument which would speak for that hypothesis, but he proved the opposite of what he had attempted to do. In 1861, Robert Ellis proposed that Etruscan was related to Armenian, which is nowadays acknowledged as an Indo-European language. Exactly 100 years later, a relationship with Albanian was to be advanced by Zecharia Mayani, but Albanian is also known to be an Indo-European language.
Several theories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries connected Etruscan to Uralic or even Altaic languages. In 1874, the British scholar Isaac Taylor brought up the idea of a genetic relationship between Etruscan and Hungarian, of which also Jules Martha would approve in his exhaustive study "La langue étrusque" (1913). In 1911, the French orientalist Baron Carra de Vaux suggested a connection between Etruscan and the Altaic languages. The Hungarian connection was recently revived by Mario Alinei, Emeritus Professor of Italian Languages at the University of Utrecht. Alinei's proposal has been rejected by Etruscan experts such as Giulio M. Facchetti, Finno-Ugric experts such as Angela Marcantonio, and by Hungarian historical linguists such as Bela Brogyanyi.
The idea of a relation between the language of the Minoan Linear A scripts was taken into consideration as the main hypothesis by Michael Ventris before he discovered that, in fact, the language behind the later Linear B script was Mycenean, a Greek dialect. It has been proposed to possibly be part of a wider Paleo-European "Aegean" language family, which would also include Minoan, Eteocretan (possibly descended from Minoan) and Eteocypriot. This has been proposed by Giulio Mauro Facchetti, a researcher who has dealt with both Etruscan and Minoan, and supported by S. Yatsemirsky, referring to some similarities between Etruscan and Lemnian on one hand, and Minoan and Eteocretan on the other. It has also been proposed that this language family is related to the pre-Indo-European languages of Anatolia, based upon place name analysis.
Others have suggested that Tyrsenian languages may yet be distantly related to early Indo-European languages, such as those of the Anatolian branch. More recently, Robert S. P. Beekes argued in 2002 that the people later known as the Lydians and Etruscans had originally lived in northwest Anatolia, with a coastline to the Sea of Marmara, whence they were driven by the Phrygians "circa" 1200 BC, leaving a remnant known in antiquity as the Tyrsenoi. A segment of this people moved south-west to Lydia, becoming known as the Lydians, while others sailed away to take refuge in Italy, where they became known as Etruscans. This account draws on the well-known story by Herodotus (I, 94) of the Lydian origin of the Etruscans or Tyrrhenians, famously rejected by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (book I), partly on the authority of Xanthus, a Lydian historian, who had no knowledge of the story, and partly on what he judged to be the different languages, laws, and religions of the two peoples.
In 2006, Frederik Woudhuizen went further on Herodotus' traces, suggesting that Etruscan belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family, specifically to Luwian. Woudhuizen revived a conjecture to the effect that the Tyrsenians came from Anatolia, including Lydia, whence they were driven by the Cimmerians in the early Iron Age, 750–675 BC, leaving some colonists on Lemnos. He makes a number of comparisons of Etruscan to Luwian and asserts that Etruscan is modified Luwian. He accounts for the non-Luwian features as a Mysian influence: "deviations from Luwian [...] may plausibly be ascribed to the dialect of the indigenous population of Mysia." According to Woudhuizen, the Etruscans were initially colonizing the Latins, bringing the alphabet from Anatolia.
Another proposal, pursued mainly by a few linguists from the former Soviet Union, suggested a relationship with Northeast Caucasian (or Daghestanian) languages.
The Latin script owes its existence to the Etruscan alphabet, which was adapted for Latin in the form of the Old Italic script. The Etruscan alphabet employs a Euboean variant of the Greek alphabet using the letter digamma and was in all probability transmitted through Pithecusae and Cumae, two Euboean settlements in southern Italy. This system is ultimately derived from West Semitic scripts.
The Etruscans recognized a 26-letter alphabet, which makes an early appearance incised for decoration on a small bucchero terracotta lidded vase in the shape of a cockerel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca 650–600 BC. The full complement of 26 has been termed the model alphabet. The Etruscans did not use four letters of it, mainly because Etruscan did not have the voiced stops "b", "d" and "g"; and also no "o". They innovated one letter for "f".
Writing was from right to left except in archaic inscriptions, which occasionally used boustrophedon. An example found at Cerveteri used left to right. In the earliest inscriptions, the words are continuous. From the sixth century BC, they are separated by a dot or a colon, which symbol might also be used to separate syllables. Writing was phonetic; the letters represented the sounds and not conventional spellings. On the other hand, many inscriptions are highly abbreviated and often casually formed, so the identification of individual letters is sometimes difficult. Spelling might vary from city to city, probably reflecting differences of pronunciation.
Speech featured a heavy stress on the first syllable of a word, causing syncopation by weakening of the remaining vowels, which then were not represented in writing: "Alcsntre" for "Alexandros", "Rasna" for "Rasena". This speech habit is one explanation of the Etruscan "impossible consonant clusters". The resonants, however, may have been syllabic, accounting for some of the clusters (see below under Consonants). In other cases, the scribe sometimes inserted a vowel: Greek "Hēraklēs" became "Hercle" by syncopation and then was expanded to "Herecele". Pallottino regarded this variation in vowels as "instability in the quality of vowels" and accounted for the second phase (e.g. "Herecele") as "vowel harmony, i.e., of the assimilation of vowels in neighboring syllables ..."
The writing system had two historical phases: the archaic from the seventh to fifth centuries BC, which used the early Greek alphabet, and the later from the fourth to first centuries BC, which modified some of the letters. In the later period, syncopation increased.
The alphabet went on in modified form after the language disappeared. In addition to being the source of the Roman alphabet, it has been suggested that it passed northward into Veneto and from there through Raetia into the Germanic lands, where it became the Elder Futhark alphabet, the oldest form of the runes.
The Etruscan corpus is edited in the "Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum" (CIE) and "Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae" (TLE).
The Pyrgi Tablets are a bilingual text in Etruscan and Phoenician engraved on three gold leaves, one for the Phoenician and two for the Etruscan. The Etruscan language portion has 16 lines and 37 words. The date is roughly 500 BC.
The tablets were found in 1964 by Massimo Pallottino during an excavation at the ancient Etruscan port of Pyrgi, now Santa Severa. The only new Etruscan word that could be extracted from close analysis of the tablets was the word for "three", "ci".
According to Rix and his collaborators, only two unified (though fragmentary) texts are available in Etruscan:
Some additional longer texts are:
The main material repository of Etruscan civilization, from the modern perspective, is its tombs, all other public and private buildings having been dismantled and the stone reused centuries ago. The tombs are the main source of Etruscan portables, provenance unknown, in collections throughout the world. Their incalculable value has created a brisk black market in Etruscan "objets d'art" – and equally brisk law enforcement effort, as it is illegal to remove any objects from Etruscan tombs without authorization from the Italian government.
The magnitude of the task involved in cataloguing them means that the total number of tombs is unknown. They are of many types. Especially plentiful are the hypogeal or "underground" chambers or system of chambers cut into tuff and covered by a tumulus. The interior of these tombs represents a habitation of the living stocked with furniture and favorite objects. The walls may display painted murals, the predecessor of wallpaper. Tombs identified as Etruscan date from the Villanovan period to about 100 BC, when presumably the cemeteries were abandoned in favor of Roman ones. Some of the major cemeteries are as follows:
Cisra (Roman Caere / Modern Cerveteri) at mysteriousetruscans.com.
Chapter XXXIII CERVETRI.a – AGYLLA or CAERE., George Dennis at Bill Thayer's Website.
Aerial photo and map at mapsack.com.
"See" Votive gifts.
A speculum is a circular or oval hand-mirror used predominantly by Etruscan women. "Speculum" is Latin; the Etruscan word is "malena" or "malstria". Specula were cast in bronze as one piece or with a tang into which a wooden, bone, or ivory handle fitted. The reflecting surface was created by polishing the flat side. A higher percentage of tin in the mirror improved its ability to reflect. The other side was convex and featured intaglio or cameo scenes from mythology. The piece was generally ornate.
About 2,300 specula are known from collections all over the world. As they were popular plunderables, the provenance of only a minority is known. An estimated time window is 530–100 BC. Most probably came from tombs.
Many bear inscriptions naming the persons depicted in the scenes, so they are often called picture bilinguals. In 1979, Massimo Pallottino, then president of the "Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici" initiated the Committee of the "Corpus Speculorum Etruscanorum", which resolved to publish all the specula and set editorial standards for doing so.
Since then, the committee has grown, acquiring local committees and representatives from most institutions owning Etruscan mirror collections. Each collection is published in its own fascicle by diverse Etruscan scholars.
A cista is a bronze container of circular, ovoid, or more rarely rectangular shape used by women for the storage of sundries. They are ornate, often with feet and lids to which figurines may be attached. The internal and external surfaces bear carefully crafted scenes usually from mythology, usually intaglio, or rarely part intaglio, part cameo.
Cistae date from the Roman Republic of the fourth and third centuries BC in Etruscan contexts. They may bear various short inscriptions concerning the manufacturer or owner or subject matter. The writing may be Latin, Etruscan, or both. Excavations at Praeneste, an Etruscan city which became Roman, turned up about 118 cistae, one of which has been termed "the Praeneste cista" or "the Ficoroni cista" by art analysts, with special reference to the one manufactured by Novios Plutius and given by Dindia Macolnia to her daughter, as the archaic Latin inscription says. All of them are more accurately termed "the Praenestine cistae".
Among the most plunderable portables from the Etruscan tombs of Etruria are the finely engraved gemstones set in patterned gold to form circular or ovoid pieces intended to go on finger rings. Of the magnitude of one centimeter, they are dated to the Etruscan floruit from the second half of the sixth to the first centuries BC. The two main theories of manufacture are native Etruscan and Greek. The materials are mainly dark red carnelian, with agate and sard entering usage from the third to the first centuries BC, along with purely gold finger rings with a hollow engraved bezel setting. The engravings, mainly cameo, but sometimes intaglio, depict scarabs at first and then scenes from Greek mythology, often with heroic personages called out in Etruscan. The gold setting of the bezel bears a border design, such as cabling.
Etruscan-minted coins can be dated between 5th and 3rd centuries BC. Use of the 'Chalcidian' standard, based on the silver unit of 5.8 grams, indicates that this custom, like the alphabet, came from Greece. Roman coinage later supplanted Etruscan, but the basic Roman coin, the "sesterce", is believed to have been based on the 2.5-denomination Etruscan coin. Etruscan coins have turned up in caches or individually in tombs and in excavations seemingly at random, and concentrated, of course, in Etruria.
Etruscan coins were in gold, silver, and bronze, the gold and silver usually having been struck on one side only. The coins often bore a denomination, sometimes a minting authority name, and a cameo motif. Gold denominations were in units of silver; silver, in units of bronze. Full or abbreviated names are mainly Pupluna (Populonia), Vatl or Veltuna (Vetulonia), Velathri (Volaterrae), Velzu or Velznani (Volsinii) and Cha for Chamars (Camars). Insignia are mainly heads of mythological characters or depictions of mythological beasts arranged in a symbolic motif: Apollo, Zeus, Culsans, Athena, Hermes, griffin, gorgon, male sphinx, hippocamp, bull, snake, eagle, or other creatures which had symbolic significance.
In the tables below, conventional letters used for transliterating Etruscan are accompanied by likely pronunciation in symbols within the square brackets, followed by examples of the early Etruscan alphabet which would have corresponded to these sounds:
The Etruscan vowel system consisted of four distinct vowels. Vowels "o" and "u" appear to have not been phonetically distinguished based on the nature of the writing system, as only one symbol is used to cover both in loans from Greek (e.g. Greek "kōthōn" > Etruscan "qutun" "pitcher").
The Etruscan consonant system primarily distinguished between aspirated and non-aspirated stops. There were no voiced stops and loanwords with them were typically devoiced, e.g. Greek "thriambos" was borrowed by Etruscan, becoming "triumpus" and "triumphus" in Latin.
Based on standard spellings by Etruscan scribes of words without vowels or with unlikely consonant clusters (e.g. "cl" 'of this (gen.)' and "lautn" 'freeman'), it is likely that were sometimes syllabic sonorants (cf. English "little", "button"). Thus "cl" and "lautn" .
Rix postulates several syllabic consonants, namely and palatal as well as a labiovelar spirant and some scholars such as Mauro Cristofani also view the aspirates as palatal rather than aspirated but these views are not shared by most Etruscologists. Rix supports his theories by means of variant spellings such as amφare/amφiare, larθal/larθial, aranθ/aranθiia.
Etruscan was inflected, varying the endings of nouns, pronouns and verbs. It also had adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, which were uninflected.
Etruscan substantives had five cases, and a singular and a plural. Not all five cases are attested for every word. Nouns merge the nominative and accusative; pronouns do not generally merge these. Gender appears in personal names (masculine and feminine) and in pronouns (animate and inanimate); otherwise, it is not marked.
Unlike the Indo-European languages, Etruscan noun endings were more agglutinative, with some nouns bearing two or three agglutinated suffixes. For example, where Latin would have distinct nominative plural and dative plural endings, Etruscan would suffix the case ending to a plural marker: Latin nominative singular "fili-us", "son", plural "fili-i", dative plural "fili-is", but Etruscan "clan, clen-ar" and "clen-ar-aśi". Moreover, Etruscan nouns could bear multiple suffixes from the case paradigm alone: that is, Etruscan exhibited "Suffixaufnahme". Pallottino calls this phenomenon "morphological redetermination", which he defines as "the typical tendency ... to redetermine the syntactical function of the form by the superposition of suffixes." His example is" Uni-al-θi", "in the sanctuary of Juno", where" -al" is a genitive ending and "-θi" a locative.
Steinbauer says of Etruscan, "there can be more than one marker ... to design a case, and ... the same marker can occur for more than one case."
Personal pronouns refer to persons; demonstrative pronouns point out: English this, that, there.
The first-person personal pronoun has a nominative "mi" ("I") and an accusative "mini" ("me"). The third person has a personal form "an" ("he" or "she") and an inanimate "in" ("it"). The second person is uncertain, but some, like the Bonfantes, have claimed a dative singular "une" ("to thee") and an accusative singular "un" ("thee").
The demonstratives, "ca" and "ta", are used without distinction. The nominative–accusative singular forms are: "ica, eca, ca, ita, ta"; the plural: "cei, tei". There is a genitive singular: "cla, tla, cal" and plural "clal". The accusative singular: "can, cen, cn, ecn, etan, tn"; plural "cnl". Locative singular: "calti, ceiθi, clθ(i), eclθi"; plural "caiti, ceiθi".
Though uninflected, adjectives fall into a number of types formed from nouns with a suffix:
Adverbs are unmarked: "etnam", "again"; "θui", "now"; "θuni", "at first." Most Indo-European adverbs are formed from the oblique cases, which become unproductive and descend to fixed forms. Cases such as the ablative are therefore called "adverbial". If there is any such system in Etruscan, it is not obvious from the relatively few surviving adverbs.
Verbs had an indicative mood and an imperative mood. Tenses were present and past. The past tense had an active voice and a passive voice.
Etruscan used a verbal root with a zero suffix or -a without distinction to number or person: "ar, ar-a", "he, she, we, you, they make".
Adding the suffix "-(a)ce" to the verb root produces a third-person singular active, which has been called variously a "past", a "preterite", a "perfect" or an "aorist". In contrast to Indo-European, this form is not marked for person. Examples: "tur/tur-ce", "gives/gave"; "sval/sval-ce", "lives/lived."
The third-person past passive is formed with -che: "mena/mena-ce/mena-che", "offers/offered/was offered".
Only a few hundred words of the Etruscan vocabulary are understood with some certainty. The exact count depends on whether the different forms and the expressions are included. Below is a table of some of the words grouped by topic.
Some words with corresponding Latin or other Indo-European forms are likely loanwords to or from Etruscan. For example, "neftś" "nephew", is probably from Latin (Latin "nepōs, nepōtis"; this is a cognate of German "Neffe", Old Norse "nefi"). A number of words and names for which Etruscan origin has been proposed survive in Latin.
At least one Etruscan word has an apparent Semitic/Aramaic origin: "talitha" "girl", that could have been transmitted by Phoenicians or by the Greeks (Greek: ταλιθα). The word "pera" "house" is a false cognate to the Coptic "per" "house".
In addition to words believed to have been borrowed into Etruscan from Indo-European or elsewhere, there is a corpus of words such as "familia" which seem to have been borrowed into Latin from the older Etruscan civilization as a superstrate influence. Some of these words still have widespread currency in English and Latin-influenced languages. Other words believed to have a possible Etruscan origin include:
Much debate has been carried out about a possible Indo-European origin of the Etruscan cardinals. In the words of Larissa Bonfante (1990), "What these numerals show, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is the non-Indo-European nature of the Etruscan language". Conversely, other scholars, including Francisco R. Adrados, Albert Carnoy, Marcello Durante, Vladimir Georgiev, Alessandro Morandi and Massimo Pittau, have proposed a close phonetic proximity of the first ten Etruscan numerals to the corresponding numerals in other Indo-European languages. Italian linguist Massimo Pittau has argued that "all the first ten Etruscan numerals have a congruent phonetic matching in as many Indo-European languages" and "perfectly fit within the Indo-European series", supporting the idea that the Etruscan language was of Indo-European origins.
The Etruscan numbers are (G. Bonfante 2002:96):
It is unclear which of "śa" and "huθ" meant "four" and "six" respectively. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9455 |
Election
An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.
Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.
The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the Elections were not used were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.
Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results).Election is the fact of electing, or being elected.
To "elect" means "to select or make a decision", and so sometimes other forms of ballot such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the pope (see papal election).
In Vedic period of India, the "Raja" (chiefs) of a "gana" (a tribal organization) was apparently elected by the "gana". The "Raja" belonged to the noble Kshatriya varna (warrior class), and was typically a son of the previous R"aja". However, the "gana" members had the final say in his elections. Even during the Sangam Period people elected their representatives by casting their votes and the ballot boxes (Usually a pot) were tied by rope and sealed. After the election the votes were taken out and counted. The Pala King Gopala (ruled c. 750s–770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region. In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the "Kudavolai" system.
The modern "election", which consists of public elections of government officials, didn't emerge until the beginning of the 17th century when the idea of representative government took hold in North America and Europe.
Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries. Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males. However, by 1920 all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage (except Switzerland) and many countries began to consider women's suffrage. Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections (see civil rights movement).
The question of who may vote is a central issue in elections. The electorate does not generally include the entire population; for example, many countries prohibit those who are under the age of majority from voting, all jurisdictions require a minimum age for voting.
In Australia, Aboriginal people were not given the right to vote until 1962 (see 1967 referendum entry) and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for 3 years or more to vote (a large proportion of which were Aboriginal Australians).
Suffrage is typically only for citizens of the country, though further limits may be imposed.
However, in the European Union, one can vote in municipal elections if one lives in the municipality and is an EU citizen; the nationality of the country of residence is not required.
In some countries, voting is required by law; if an eligible voter does not cast a vote, he or she may be subject to punitive measures such as a fine. In Western Australia, the penalty for a first time offender failing to vote is a $20.00 fine, which increases to $50.00 if the offender refused to vote prior.
Historically the size of eligible voters, the electorate, was small having the size of groups or communities of privilieged men like aristocrats and men of a city (citizens).
With the growth of the number of people with bourgeoir citizen rights outside of cities, expanding the term citizen, the electorates grew to numbers beyond the thousands.
Elections with an electorate in the hundred thousands appeared in the final decades of the Roman Republic, by extending voting rights to citizens outside of Rome with the Lex Julia of 90 BC, reaching an electorate of 910,000 and estimated voter turnout of maximum 10% in 70 BC, only again compareable in size to the first elections of the United States. At the same time the Kingdom of Great Britain had in 1780 about 214,000 eligible voters, 3% of the whole population.
A representative democracy requires a procedure to govern nomination for political office. In many cases, nomination for office is mediated through preselection processes in organized political parties.
Non-partisan systems tend to be different from partisan systems as concerns nominations. In a direct democracy, one type of non-partisan democracy, any eligible person can be nominated. Although elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and in the selection of popes and Holy Roman emperors, the origins of elections in the contemporary world lie in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America beginning in the 17th century. In some systems no nominations take place at all, with voters free to choose any person at the time of voting—with some possible exceptions such as through a minimum age requirement—in the jurisdiction. In such cases, it is not required (or even possible) that the members of the electorate be familiar with all of the eligible persons, though such systems may involve indirect elections at larger geographic levels to ensure that some first-hand familiarity among potential electees can exist at these levels (i.e., among the elected delegates).
As far as partisan systems, in some countries, only members of a particular party can be nominated (see one-party state). Or, any eligible person can be nominated through a process; thus allowing him or her to be listed.
Electoral systems are the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision. The first step is to tally the votes, for which various vote counting systems and ballot types are used. Voting systems then determine the result on the basis of the tally. Most systems can be categorized as either proportional or majoritarian. Among the former are party-list proportional representation and additional member system. Among the latter are First Past the Post electoral system (relative majority) and absolute majority. Many countries have growing electoral reform movements, which advocate systems such as approval voting, single transferable vote, instant runoff voting or a Condorcet method; these methods are also gaining popularity for lesser elections in some countries where more important elections still use more traditional counting methods.
While openness and accountability are usually considered cornerstones of a democratic system, the act of casting a vote and the content of a voter's ballot are usually an important exception. The secret ballot is a relatively modern development, but it is now considered crucial in most free and fair elections, as it limits the effectiveness of intimidation.
The nature of democracy is that elected officials are accountable to the people, and they must return to the voters at prescribed intervals to seek their mandate to continue in office. For that reason most democratic constitutions provide that elections are held at fixed regular intervals. In the United States, elections for public offices are typically held between every two and six years in most states and at the federal level, with exceptions for elected judicial positions that may have longer terms of office. There is a variety of schedules, for example presidents: the President of Ireland is elected every seven years, the President of Russia and the President of Finland every six years, the President of France every five years, President of the United States every four years.
Pre-decided or fixed election dates have the advantage of fairness and predictability. However, they tend to greatly lengthen campaigns, and make dissolving the legislature (parliamentary system) more problematic if the date should happen to fall at time when dissolution is inconvenient (e.g. when war breaks out). Other states (e.g., the United Kingdom) only set maximum time in office, and the executive decides exactly when within that limit it will actually go to the polls. In practice, this means the government remains in power for close to its full term, and choose an election date it calculates to be in its best interests (unless something special happens, such as a motion of no-confidence). This calculation depends on a number of variables, such as its performance in opinion polls and the size of its majority.
When elections are called, politicians and their supporters attempt to influence policy by competing directly for the votes of constituents in what are called campaigns. Supporters for a campaign can be either formally organized or loosely affiliated, and frequently utilize campaign advertising. It is common for political scientists to attempt to predict elections via Political Forecasting methods.
The most expensive election campaign included US$7 billion spent on the 2012 United States presidential election and is followed by the US$5 billion spent on the 2014 Indian general election.
In many of the countries with weak rule of law, the most common reason why elections do not meet international standards of being "free and fair" is interference from the incumbent government. Dictators may use the powers of the executive (police, martial law, censorship, physical implementation of the election mechanism, etc.) to remain in power despite popular opinion in favor of removal. Members of a particular faction in a legislature may use the power of the majority or supermajority (passing criminal laws, defining the electoral mechanisms including eligibility and district boundaries) to prevent the balance of power in the body from shifting to a rival faction due to an election.
Non-governmental entities can also interfere with elections, through physical force, verbal intimidation, or fraud, which can result in improper casting or counting of votes. Monitoring for and minimizing electoral fraud is also an ongoing task in countries with strong traditions of free and fair elections. Problems that prevent an election from being "free and fair" take various forms.
The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, and/or lack of access to news and political media. Freedom of speech may be curtailed by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
Gerrymandering, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, needlessly high restrictions on who may be a candidate, like ballot access rules, and manipulating thresholds for electoral success are some of the ways the structure of an election can be changed to favor a specific faction or candidate. It is named for Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry who signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
Those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, suppress or even criminalize campaigning, close campaign headquarters, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence. Foreign electoral intervention can also occur, with the United States interfering between 1946 and 2000 in 81 elections and Russia/USSR in 36.
In 2018 the most intense interventions, by means of false information, were by China in Taiwan and by Russia in Latvia; the next highest levels were in Bahrain, Qatar and Hungary.
This can include falsifying voter instructions,
violation of the secret ballot, ballot stuffing, tampering with voting machines,
destruction of legitimately cast ballots,
voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, and use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places. Other examples include persuading candidates not to run, such as through blackmailing, bribery, intimidation or physical violence.
A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on results of election.
Show elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show nearly 100% voter turnout and high support (typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases) for the prescribed candidate(s) or for the referendum choice that favors the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize show elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.
Sometimes, only one government approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges (or even without any charges) before the election to prevent them from running.
Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote (and thus do not receive stamps) are persecuted as enemies of the people.
In some cases, show elections can backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion or fraud. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election.
Examples of sham elections are the 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy, elections in Nazi Germany, the 1940 elections of the People's Parliaments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the 1958 election in Portugal, and elections in post-revolutionary Iran.
A predetermined conclusion is always established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting a number of votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these.
In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9457 |
Enniskillen
Enniskillen (, from , 'Ceithlenn's island') is a town and civil parish in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. It is located almost exactly in the centre of the county, between the Upper and Lower sections of Lough Erne. It had a population of 13,823 at the 2011 Census. It was the seat of local government for the former Fermanagh District Council, and is the county town of Fermanagh as well as its largest town.
The town's name comes from the . This refers to Cethlenn, a figure in Irish mythology who may have been a goddess. Local legend has it that Cethlenn was wounded in battle by an arrow and attempted to swim across the River Erne, which surrounds the island, but she never reached the other side, so the island was named in reference to her. It has been anglicised many ways over the centuries – "Iniskellen", "Iniskellin", "Iniskillin", "Iniskillen", "Inishkellen", "Inishkellin", "Inishkillin", "Inishkillen" and so on.
The town's oldest building is Enniskillen Castle, built by Hugh (Maguire) the Hospitable who died in 1428. An earthwork, the Skonce on the shore of Lough Erne, may be the remains of an earlier motte. The castle was the stronghold of the junior branch of the Maguires. The first watergate was built around 1580 by Cú Chonnacht Maguire, though subsequent lowering of the level of the lough has left it without water. The strategic position of the castle made its capture important for the English in 1593, to support their plans for the control of Ulster. The castle was besieged three times in 1594–95. The English, led by a Captain Dowdall, captured it in February 1594. Maguire then laid siege to it, and defeated a relieving force at the Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits at Drumane Bridge on the Arney River. Although the defenders were relieved, Maguire gained possession of the castle from 1595 to 1598 and it was not finally captured by the English until 1607.
This was part of a wider campaign to bring the province of Ulster under English control; the final capture of Enniskillen Castle in 1607 was followed by the Plantation of Ulster, during which the lands of the native Irish were seized and handed over to planters loyal to the English Crown. The Maguires were supplanted by William Cole, originally from Devon, who was appointed by James I to build an English settlement there.
Captain Cole was installed as Constable and strengthened the castle wall and built a "fair house" on the old foundation as the centre point of the county town. The first Protestant parish church was erected on the hilltop in 1627. The Royal Free School of Fermanagh was moved onto the island in 1643. The first bridges were drawbridges; permanent bridges were not installed before 1688.
By 1689 the town had grown significantly. During the conflict which resulted from the ousting of King James II by his Protestant rival, William III, Enniskillen and Derry were the focus of Williamite resistance in Ireland, including the nearby Battle of Newtownbutler.
Enniskillen and Derry were the two garrisons in Ulster that were not wholly loyal to James II, and it was the last town to fall before the siege of Derry. As a direct result of this conflict, Enniskillen developed not only as a market town but also as a garrison, which became home to two regiments.
The current site of Fermanagh College (now part of the South West College) was the former Enniskillen Gaol. Many people were tried and hanged in the square during the times of public execution. Part of the old Gaol is still used by the college.
Enniskillen is the site of the foundation of two British Army regiments:
The town's name (with the archaic spelling) continues to form part of the title to The Royal Irish Regiment (27th (Inniskilling) 83rd and 87th and Ulster Defence Regiment). Enniskillen Castle features on the cap badge of both regiments.
Enniskillen was the site of several events during The Troubles, the most notable being the Remembrance Day bombing in which 11 people were killed. Bill Clinton opened the Clinton centre in 2002 on the site of the bombing. The Provisional Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for the attack.
In 2019, at least nine men reported to the police and the press and said in public forums that, in the 1980s and 90s, when they were children, they were repeatedly molested and raped by a paedophile ring of at least 20 men in the Enniskillen area. Investigations are continuing.
On Census day (27 March 2011) there were 13,823 people living in Enniskillen (5,733 households), accounting for 0.76% of the NI total and representing an increase of 1.6% on the Census 2001 population of 13,599. Of these:
Enniskillen has a maritime climate with a narrow range of temperatures and rainfall. The nearest official Met Office weather station for which online records are available is at Lough Navar Forest, about northwest of Enniskillen. Data has also more recently been collected from Enniskillen/St Angelo Airport, under north of the town centre, which should in time give a more accurate representation of the climate of the Enniskillen area.
The absolute maximum temperature is , recorded during July 2006. In an 'average' year, the warmest day is and only 2.4 days a year should rise to or above. The respective absolute maximum for St Angelo is
The absolute minimum temperature is , recorded during January 1984. In an 'average' year, the coldest night should fall to . Lough Navar is a frosty location, with some 76 air frosts recorded in a typical year. It is likely that Enniskillen town centre is significantly less frosty than this. The absolute minimum at St Angelo is , reported during the record cold month of December 2010.
The warmest month on record at St Angelo was August 1995 with a mean temperature of (mean maximum , mean minimum , while the coldest month was December 2010, with a mean temperature of (mean maximum , mean minimum .
Rainfall is high, averaging over 1500 mm. 212 days of the year report at least 1 mm of precipitation, ranging from 15 days during April, May and June, to 20 days in October, November, December, January and March.
The Köppen climate classification subtype for this climate is "" (Marine West Coast Climate/Oceanic climate).
Football
The town has two association football teams called Enniskillen Rangers and Enniskillen Town United F.C.
Enniskillen Rangers are the current holders of the Irish Junior Cup, defeating Hill Street 5-1 on Monday, 1 May 2017. The match was played at the National Football Stadium at Windsor Park in Belfast. They play their home games at the Ball Range.
Enniskillen Rangers have several notable former players including Sandy Fulton and Jim Cleary.
Enniskillen Town United F.C. currently play in the Fermanagh & Western 1st Division. Their most notable former player is Michael McGovern who currently plays for Norwich City F.C. At the moment, Enniskillen Town play their home games at The Lakeland Forum playing fields in Enniskillen.
Rugby
Enniskillen Rugby Football Club was founded in 1925 and plays their home games at Mullaghmeen. The club currently fields 4 senior men's teams, a senior ladies teams, a range of male and female youth teams, a vibrant mini section and a disability tag team called The Enniskillen Elks. Enniskillen XV won the Ulster Towns Cup in the 2018/19 season, defeating Ballyclare 19-0. The team currently play in Kukri Ulster Rugby Championship Division 1.
The rugby club was formed on 28 August 1925, when 37 attended a meeting in Enniskillen Town Hall. The name Enniskillen Rugby Club was agreed and the club adopted the rules of Dublin University. The first match was played on 30 September 1925 against Ballyshannon in County Donegal.
Gaelic Football
Enniskillen Gaels are a Gaelic Athletic Association club founded in 1927. They play their home games at Brewster Park, Enniskillen.
Enniskillen was the venue of the 39th G8 summit which was held on 17 and 18 June 2013. It was held at the Lough Erne Resort, a five-star hotel and golf resort on the shore of Lough Erne. The gathering was the biggest international diplomatic gathering ever held in Northern Ireland. Among the G8 leaders who attended were British Prime Minister David Cameron, United States President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In the past, Enniskillen has hosted an array of international events, most notably stages of the World Waterski World Cup, annually from 2005 to 2007 at the Broadmeadow. Despite its success, Enniskillen was not chosen as a World Cup Stop for 2008.
In January 2009, Enniskillen hosted the ceremonial start of Rally Ireland 2009, the first stage of the WRC FIA World Rally Championship 2009 Calendar.
Enniskillen has hosted the Happy Days arts festival since 2012, which celebrates "the work and influence of Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett" and is the "first annual, international, multi-arts festival to be held in Northern Ireland since the launch of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen’s in 1962".
There are numerous schools and colleges in and around the Enniskillen area, from primary level to secondary level, including some further education colleges such as the technical college.
Railway lines from Enniskillen railway station linked the town with Derry from 1854, Dundalk from 1861, Bundoran from 1868 and Sligo from 1882. By 1883 the Great Northern Railway (Ireland) absorbed all the lines except the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway, which remained independent throughout its existence. In October 1957 the Government of Northern Ireland closed the GNR line, which made it impossible for the SL&NCR continue and forced it also to close.
The nearest railway station to Enniskillen is Sligo station which is served by trains to Dublin Connolly and is operated by Iarnród Éireann. The Dublin-Sligo railway line has a two-hourly service run by Iarnród Éireann Official site – Timetables, bookings and operations
The connecting bus from Sligo via Manorhamilton to Enniskillen is route 66 operated by Bus Éireann.
Bus service to Enniskillen is provided by both Ulsterbus and Bus Éireann, from Enniskillen bus station. Number 261, 261b and X261 Goldline buses run from Belfast to Enniskillen. Bus Éireann Route 30 runs from Donegal to Dublin Airport/Dublin City via Enniskillen.
Enniskillen has a World War II-era airport, Enniskillen/St Angelo Airport. The airport had scheduled flights in the past but now serves mainly private traffic.
The town is on the main A4/N16 route linking Belfast and Sligo, and on the main Dublin to Ballyshannon route, the N3/A46/A509.
Enniskillen was originally twinned with Brackwede – a Bielefeld suburb – where the Inniskilling Dragoon Guards were stationed in the late 1950s when the twinning was initiated; however, this suburb was incorporated into Stadt Bielefeld in 1973, the city with which Enniskillen is now officially twinned.
Though the twinning arrangements are still operational, at a meeting of the Regeneration and Community Committee, in February 2018, it was agreed that the twinning arrangements would be formally terminated at the end of the Council term in June 2018. However, Fermanagh and Omagh District Council still have plans to send representatives to Brackwede for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the twinning. Therefore, the future of the twinning is now somewhat unclear. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9459 |
Eric Raymond (disambiguation)
Eric S. Raymond (born 1957) is an American computer programmer and author.
Eric Raymond may also refer to: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9461 |
Longest word in English
The identity of the longest word in English depends upon the definition of what constitutes a word in the English language, as well as how length should be compared.
Words may be derived naturally from the language's roots or formed by coinage and construction. Additionally, comparisons are complicated because place names may be considered words, technical terms may be arbitrarily long, and the addition of suffixes and prefixes may extend the length of words to create grammatically correct but unused or novel words.
The "length" of a word may also be understood in multiple ways. Most commonly, length is based on orthography (conventional spelling rules) and counting the number of written letters. Alternate, but less common, approaches include phonology (the spoken language) and the number of phonemes (sounds).
The longest word in any of the major English language dictionaries is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis", a word that refers to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; medically, it is the same as silicosis. The word was deliberately coined to be the longest word in English, and has since been used in a close approximation of its originally intended meaning, lending at least some degree of validity to its claim.
The "Oxford English Dictionary" contains "pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism" (30 letters).
"Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary" does not contain "antidisestablishmentarianism" (28 letters), as the editors found no widespread, sustained usage of the word in its original meaning. The longest word in that dictionary is "electroencephalographically" (27 letters).
The longest non-technical word in major dictionaries is "floccinaucinihilipilification" at 29 letters. Consisting of a series of Latin words meaning "nothing" and defined as "the act of estimating something as worthless"; its usage has been recorded as far back as 1741.
Ross Eckler has noted that most of the longest English words are not likely to occur in general text, meaning non-technical present-day text seen by casual readers, in which the author did not specifically intend to use an unusually long word. According to Eckler, the longest words likely to be encountered in general text are "deinstitutionalization" and "counterrevolutionaries", with 22 letters each.
A computer study of over a million samples of normal English prose found that the longest word one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis is "uncharacteristically", at 20 letters.
The word "internationalization" is abbreviated "i18n", the embedded number representing the number of letters between the first and the last.
In his play "Assemblywomen" ("Ecclesiazousae"), the ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes created a word of 171 letters (183 in the transliteration below), which describes a dish by stringing together its ingredients:
Henry Carey's farce "Chrononhotonthologos" (1743) holds the opening line: "Aldiborontiphoscophornio! Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?"
Thomas Love Peacock put these creations into the mouth of the phrenologist Mr. Cranium in his 1816 romp "Headlong Hall": "osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous" (44 characters) and "osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary" (51 characters).
James Joyce made up nine 100-letter words plus one 101-letter word in his novel "Finnegans Wake", the most famous of which is Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk. Appearing on the first page, it allegedly represents the symbolic thunderclap associated with the fall of Adam and Eve. As it appears nowhere else except in reference to this passage, it is generally not accepted as a real word. Sylvia Plath made mention of it in her semi-autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar", when the protagonist was reading "Finnegans Wake".
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", the 34-letter title of a song from the movie "Mary Poppins", does appear in several dictionaries, but only as a proper noun defined in reference to the song title. The attributed meaning is "a word that you say when you don't know what to say." The idea and invention of the word is credited to songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman.
The English language permits the legitimate extension of existing words to serve new purposes by the addition of prefixes and suffixes. This is sometimes referred to as agglutinative construction. This process can create arbitrarily long words: for example, the prefixes "pseudo" (false, spurious) and "anti" (against, opposed to) can be added as many times as desired. A word like "anti-aircraft" (pertaining to the defense against aircraft) is easily extended to "anti-anti-aircraft" (pertaining to counteracting the defense against aircraft, a legitimate concept) and can from there be prefixed with an endless stream of "anti-"s, each time creating a new level of counteraction. More familiarly, the addition of numerous "great"s to a relative, e.g. great-great-great-grandfather, can produce words of arbitrary length. In musical notation, an 8192nd note may be called a "semihemidemisemihemidemisemihemidemisemiquaver".
"Antidisestablishmentarianism" is the longest common example of a word formed by agglutinative construction.
A number of scientific naming schemes can be used to generate arbitrarily long words.
The IUPAC nomenclature for organic chemical compounds is open-ended, giving rise to the 189,819-letter chemical name "Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine" for the protein also known as titin, which is involved in striated muscle formation. In nature, DNA molecules can be much bigger than protein molecules and therefore potentially be referred to with much longer chemical names. For example, the wheat chromosome 3B contains almost 1 billion base pairs, so the sequence of one of its strands, if written out in full like "Adenilyladenilylguanilylcystidylthymidyl...", would be about 8 billion letters long. The longest published word, "Acetylseryltyrosylseryliso...serine", referring to the coat protein of a certain strain of tobacco mosaic virus (), is 1,185 letters long, and appeared in the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstracts Service in 1964 and 1966. In 1965, the Chemical Abstracts Service overhauled its naming system and started discouraging excessively long names. In 2011, a dictionary broke this record with a 1909-letter word describing the "trpA" protein ().
John Horton Conway and Landon Curt Noll developed an open-ended system for naming powers of 10, in which one ", coming from the Latin name for 6560, is the name for 103(6560+1) = 1019683. Under the long number scale, it would be 106(6560) = 1039360.
" is sometimes cited as the longest binomial name—it is a kind of amphipod. However, this name, proposed by B. Dybowski, was invalidated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature in 1929 after being petitioned by Mary J. Rathbun to take up the case.
"Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides" is the longest accepted binomial name. It is a species of soldier fly.
"", at 52 letters, describing the spa waters at Bath, England, is attributed to Dr. Edward Strother (1675–1737). The word is composed of the following elements:
The longest officially recognized place name in an English-speaking country is
"Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu" (57 letters), which is a hill in New Zealand. The name is in the Māori language. A longer and widely recognised version of the name is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (85 letters), which appears on the signpost at the location (see the photo on this page). In Māori, the digraphs "ng" and "wh" are each treated as single letters.
In Canada, the longest place name is "Dysart, Dudley, Harcourt, Guilford, Harburn, Bruton, Havelock, Eyre and Clyde", a township in Ontario, at 61 letters or 68 non-space characters.
The longest non-contrived place name in the United Kingdom which is a single non-hyphenated word is Cottonshopeburnfoot (19 letters) and the longest which is hyphenated is Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe (29 characters).
The longest place name in the United States (45 letters) is "Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg", a lake in Webster, Massachusetts. It means "Fishing Place at the Boundaries – Neutral Meeting Grounds" and is sometimes facetiously translated as "you fish your side of the water, I fish my side of the water, nobody fishes the middle". The lake is also known as Webster Lake. The longest hyphenated names in the U.S. are "Winchester-on-the-Severn", a town in Maryland, and "Washington-on-the-Brazos", a notable place in Texas history.
The longest official geographical name in Australia is Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya. It has 26 letters and is a Pitjantjatjara word meaning "where the Devil urinates".
In Ireland, the longest English place name at 19 letters is Newtownmountkennedy in County Wicklow.
"Guinness World Records" formerly contained a category for longest personal name used.
Long birth names are often coined in protest of naming laws or for other personal reasons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9467 |
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