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Ithaca College
Ithaca College is a private liberal arts college in Ithaca, New York. The college was founded by William Egbert in 1892 as a conservatory of music and is set against the backdrop of the city of Ithaca, Cayuga Lake, waterfalls, and gorges. The college is best known for its large list of alumni who have played substantial roles in the media and entertainment industries.
Ithaca College is internationally known for the Roy H. Park School of Communications, which is ranked by several organizations as a top school for journalism, film, media and entertainment. The college has a strong liberal arts core, and offers several pre-professional programs, along with some graduate programs.
Ithaca College has been ranked among the Top 10 masters universities in the "Regional Universities North" category by "U.S. News & World Report," every year since 1996, and was ranked 9th in 2019. Ithaca College is consistently named among the best colleges in the nation by "Princeton Review", with the 2018 guide ranking the college number 3 for theater, number 3 for newspaper, and number 6 for Radio, and is among the top schools producing Fulbright scholarship recipients.
Ithaca College was founded as the Ithaca Conservatory of Music in 1892 when a local violin teacher, William Grant Egbert, rented four rooms and arranged for the instruction of eight students. For nearly seven decades the institution flourished in the city of Ithaca, adding to its music curriculum the study of elocution, dance, physical education, speech correction, radio, business, and the liberal arts. In 1931 the conservatory was chartered as a private college. The college was originally housed in the Boardman House, that later became the Ithaca College Museum of Art, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
By 1960, some 2,000 students were in attendance. A modern campus was built on South Hill in the 1960s, and students were shuttled between the old and new during the construction. The hillside campus continued to grow in the ensuing 30 years to accommodate more than 6,000 students.
As the campus expanded, the college also began to expand its curriculum. By the 1990s, some 2,000 courses in more than 100 programs of study were available in the college's five schools. The school attracts a multicultural student body with representatives from almost every state and from 78 foreign countries.
Ithaca College's current campus was built in the 1960s on South Hill. The college's final academic department moved from downtown to the South Hill campus in 1968, making the move complete.
Besides its Ithaca campus, Ithaca College has also operated satellite campuses in other cities. The Ithaca College London Center has been in existence since 1972. Ithaca runs the Ithaca College Los Angeles Program at the James B. Pendleton Center. Additionally, there is an Ithaca College Washington Semester Program, and a recently launched Ithaca College New York City Center.
Former programs include the Ithaca College Antigua Program and the Ithaca College Walkabout Down Under Program in Australia.
Ithaca College also operates direct enrollment exchange programs with several universities, including Griffith University, La Trobe University, Murdoch University, and University of Tasmania (Australia); Chengdu Sport University and Beijing Sport University (China); University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong); Masaryk University (Czech Republic); Akita International University and University of Tsukuba (Japan); Hanyang University (Korea); Nanyang Technological University (Singapore); University of Valencia (Spain); and Jönköping University (Sweden). Ithaca College is also affiliated with study abroad programs such as IES Abroad and offers dozens of exchange or study abroad options to students.
The college offers a curriculum with more than 100 degree programs in its five schools.
Until recently, several cross-disciplinary degree programs, along with the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, were housed in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies; however, starting in the spring of 2011, the division was eliminated and its programs, centers and institutes were absorbed into other schools.
, the most popular majors included visual and performing arts, health professions and related programs, business, management, marketing, and related support services and biological and biomedical Sciences.
With its top-ranked Roy H. Park School of Communications, Ithaca College is well known for its several prominent student-run media vehicles, including:
Historically, various independent and national fraternities and sororities had active chapters at Ithaca College. However, due to a series of highly publicized hazing incidents in the 1980s, including one that was responsible for the death of a student, the college administration reevaluated their Greek life policy and only professional music fraternities were allowed to remain affiliated with the school.
, three recognized Greek organizations remain on campus, all of which are music-oriented:
A fourth house, performing arts fraternity Kappa Gamma Psi (Iota Chapter) became inactive in 2008. Although there are potentially plans to reactivate the chapter, it is unclear whether this will be permitted or not due to the college's policy on Greek Life.
However, there are various Greek letter organizations at Ithaca College that are unaffiliated with the school, and therefore not subject to the same housing privileges or rules that contribute to the safety of their members such as non-hazing and non-drinking policies. Additionally, while not particularly common, Ithaca College students may rush for Greek houses affiliated with Cornell University, subject to the rules of each individual fraternity or sorority. Some Cornell-affiliated Greek organizations actively recruit Ithaca College students.
There are a few unaffiliated fraternities that some Ithaca College students join - ΔΚΕ (Delta Kappa Epsilon), ΑΕΠ (Alpha Epsilon Pi), and ΚΣ (Kappa Sigma). There is one unaffiliated sorority - ΓΔΠ (Gamma Delta Pi).
Ithaca competes in athletics at the NCAA Division III level as a members of the Liberty League and the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC). Ithaca has one of Division III's strongest athletic programs, with the Bombers winning a total of 15 national titles in seven team sports and five individual sports. Ithaca was previously a member of the Empire 8.
The Ithaca athletics nickname "Bombers" is unique in NCAA athletics, and the origins of the nickname are obscure. Ithaca College's sports teams were originally named the Cayugas, but the name was changed to the Bombers sometime in the 1930s. Some other names that have been used for Ithaca College's teams include: Blue Team, Blues, Blue and Gold, Collegians, and the Seneca Streeters. Several possibilities for the change to the "Bombers" have been posited. The most common explanation is that the school's baseball uniforms—white with navy blue pinstripes and an interlocking "IC" on the left chest—bear a striking resemblance to the distinctive home uniforms of the New York Yankees, who are known as the Bronx Bombers. It may also have referred to the Ithaca basketball team of that era and its propensity for half-court "bombs". Grumman Aircraft also manufactured airplanes including bombers in Ithaca for many years. The first “Bombers” reference on record was in the December 17, 1938 issue of the "Rochester Times-Union" in a men's basketball article.
The name has at times sparked controversy for its perceived martial connotations. It is an occasional source of umbrage from Ithaca's prominent pacifist community, but the athletics department has consistently stated it has no interest in changing the name. The athletics logo has in the past incorporated World War II era fighter planes, but currently does not, and the school does not currently have a physical mascot to personify the name. In 2010 the school launched a contest to choose one. It received over 250 suggestions and narrowed the field down to three: a phoenix, a flying squirrel, and a Lake Beast. In June 2011, President Rochon announced that the school would discontinue the search due to opposition in the alumni community.
Ithaca College remodeled the Hill Center in 2013. The building features hardwood floors (Ben Light Gymnasium) as well as coaches offices. The building is home to Ithaca's men's and women's basketball teams, women's volleyball team, wrestling, and gymnastics. Ithaca also opened the Athletics & Events Center in 2011, a $65.5 million facility funded by donors. The facility is mainly used by the school's varsity athletes. It has a 47,000 square foot, 9-lane 50 meter Olympic-size pool. The building also has Glazer Arena, a 130,000 square foot event space. It is a track and field center that doubles as a practice facility for lacrosse, field hockey, soccer, baseball, tennis, and football. The facility was designed by the architectural firm Moody-Nolan and began construction in June 2009.
Coached by Jim Butterfield for 27 years, the football team has won three NCAA Division III National Football Championships in 1979, 1988 and 1991 (a total surpassed only by Augustana, Mount Union and Wisconsin-Whitewater). Bomber football teams made a record seven appearances in the Division III national championship game, the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl, which has since been surpassed by Mount Union in 2003. The Bombers play the SUNY Cortland Red Dragons for the Cortaca Jug, which was added in 1959 to an already competitive rivalry. The match-up is one of the most prominent in Division III college football. The game alternates locations between Ithaca and Cortland. Cortland had won the Cortaca Jug six years in a row until Ithaca broke the streak in 2017.
Women's soccer has won two national championships in Division III and is consistently ranked in the top 20 nationally.
Gymnastics won the NCAA Division III national championships in 1998.
The men's wrestling team won NCAA Division III National Championships in 1989, 1990 and 1994.
Women's field hockey won the 1982 NCAA Division III Field Hockey Championship.
In 2013, Paula Miller, head of the women's swimming team completed her 30th year as head coach of the Ithaca Bombers. She has led the team to many victories. In the previous four years, the Bombers were undefeated throughout their season defeating tough competition. Ithaca has finished first or second at 25 of the past 29 state meets. The Bombers have also won the Empire 8 crown in each of the past nine seasons.
The 2013–2014 season ended with regaining the NCAA Division III Championship trophy.
During the 2015–2016 season the Bombers swimming and diving team held the UNYSCSA Empire 8 state champion meet in the Athletic and Events center at Ithaca College. The men's swimming and diving team scored 616.5 points, finishing 4th in states under coach Kevin Markwardt. The men's team was led by captain Addison Hebert, who was injured the first day of the meet and was able to overcome it by the last day helping the rest of the bombers get 3rd place in the 400 freestyle relay by .01 seconds. The girls' swimming and diving team scored 1227 points, winning states under Paula Miller. The bombers were to bring two women divers to South Carolina, to compete in nationals in March. During the 2017-2018 season the Bombers' Veronica Griesemer won the diving national championships.
The Men’s and Women’s Crew programs are housed in the Robert B. Tallman Rowing Center, a $2.6 million boathouse dedicated in 2012. The new boathouse replaced the Haskell Davidson Boathouse, which was constructed in 1974 on Cayuga Inlet. The old boathouse was razed to make room for the new facility. At 8,500 square feet, the Tallman boathouse is almost twice the size of the previous structure.
The women's crew won back-to-back NCAA Division III Rowing Championships in 2004 and 2005. The men's crew received 4 medals at the New York State Collegiate Championships in 2008.
Ithaca is also home to more than 60 club sports, many of which compete regularly against other colleges in leagues and tournaments. The Men's Rugby team is of particular note, consistently earning a top-25 ranking under NSCRO. Repeating as Upstate Small College Rugby Conference champions in 2019, they earned a trip to the Northeast Regional playoff. The team finished 3rd in the region for a second year in a row.
Along with Intercollegiate athletics, Ithaca College has a large intramural sport program. This extracurricular program serves approximately 25% of the undergraduate population yearly. Fourteen traditional team activities are offered throughout the year and include basketball, flag football, kickball, soccer, softball, ultimate frisbee, ski racing, and volleyball.
For most activities, divisions are offered for men's, women's, and co-recreational teams. Throughout the year usually two or more activities run concurrently and participants are able to play on a single sex team and co-recreational team for each activity.
Ithaca's School of Business was the first college or university business school in the world to achieve LEED Platinum Certification alongside Yale University, which had the second. Ithaca's Peggy Ryan Williams Center is also LEED Platinum certified. It makes extensive use of day light in occupied spaces. There are sensors that regulate lighting and ventilation based on occupancy and natural light. Over 50% of the building energy comes from renewable sources such as wind power. The college also has a LEED Gold Certified building, the Athletics & Events Center. The college composts its dining hall waste, runs a "Take It or Leave It" Green move-out program, and offers a sustainable living option. It also operates an office supply collection and reuse program, as well as a sustainability education program during new student orientation. Ithaca received a B- grade on the Sustainable Endowments Institute's 2009 College Sustainability Report Card and an A- for 2010.
Ithaca College was listed as one of Princeton Review's top "green colleges" for being environmentally responsible.
In the spring of 2007, then-President Peggy R. Williams signed the American College and University President's Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), pledging Ithaca College to the task of developing a strategy and long-range plan to achieve "carbon neutrality" at some point in the future. In 2009 the Ithaca College Board of Trustees approved the Ithaca College Climate Action Plan, which calls for 100% carbon neutrality by 2050. In 2009, the Ithaca College Board of Trustees approved the Ithaca College Climate Action Plan, which calls for 100% carbon neutrality by 2050 and offers a 40-year action plan to work toward that ambitious goal.
The college purchases 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Including offsets from a solar farm, the college's overall energy usage is 45 percent carbon neutral.
The college aims to optimize investment returns and does not invest the endowment in on-campus sustainability projects, renewable energy funds, or community development loan funds. The college's investment policy reserves the right of the investment committee to restrict investments for any reason, which could include environmental and sustainability factors.
While the Ithaca College Natural Lands has issued a statement that Ithaca College should join efforts calling for a moratorium on horizontal drilling and high volume (“slick water”) hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the college as a whole has refused to issue a statement regarding the issue.
Ithaca's current president is Shirley M. Collado. She was named the ninth president of Ithaca College on February 22, 2017, and assumed the presidency on July 1, 2017. She was previously executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer at Rutgers University–Newark and vice president of student affairs and dean of the college at Middlebury College. She is the first Dominican American to be named president of a college in the United States.
Collado succeeds Thomas Rochon, who was named eighth president of Ithaca College on April 11, 2008. Rochon took over as president of the college following Peggy Williams, who had announced on July 12, 2007, that she would retire from the presidency post effective May 31, 2009, following a one-year sabbatical. During the fall 2015 semester, multiple protests focusing on campus climate and Rochon's leadership were led by students and faculty. After multiple racially charged events including student house party themes and racially tinged comments at administration led-programs, students, faculty and staff all decided to hold votes of "no confidence" in Rochon. Students voted "no confidence" by a count of 72% no confidence, 27% confidence, and 1% abstaining. The faculty voted 77.8% no confidence to 22.2% confidence. Rochon retired on July 1, 2017.
Ithaca College has over 70,000 alumni, with clubs in Boston, Chicago, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Metro New York, National Capital, North and South Carolina, Philadelphia, Rochester (NY), San Diego, and Southern Florida. Alumni events are hosted in cooperation with city-specific clubs and through a program called "IC on the Road".
Following is a brief list of noteworthy Ithaca College alumni.
For a more extensive list, refer to the List of Ithaca College alumni.
Following is a brief list of current and former noteworthy Ithaca College faculty.
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Differential psychology
Differential psychology studies the ways in which individuals differ in their behavior and the processes that underlie it. This is a discipline that develops classifications (taxonomies) of psychological individual differences. This is distinguished from other aspects of psychology in that although psychology is ostensibly a study of individuals, modern psychologists often study groups, or attempt to discover general psychological processes that apply to all individuals. This particular area of psychology has been named first named “differential psychology” at Breslau University and kept the name as Vidkunn Coucheron Jarl quotes William Stern when he calls this field “a new and fast growing off-shoot of experimental psychology.”(Jarl, 2013).
For example, in evaluating the effectiveness of a new therapy, the mean performance of the therapy in one treatment group might be compared to the mean effectiveness of a placebo (or a well-known therapy) in a second, control group. In this context, differences between individuals in their reaction to the experimental and control manipulations are actually treated as errors rather than as interesting phenomena to study. This approach is applied because psychological research depends upon statistical controls that are only defined upon groups of people.
Importantly, individuals can also differ not only in their
current state, but in the magnitude or even direction of response to a
given stimulus. Such phenomena, often
explained in terms of inverted-U response curves,
place differential psychology at an important location in such
endeavours as personalized medicine, in which diagnoses are
customised for an individual's response profile.
Individual differences research typically includes personality, temperament (neuro-chemically-based behavioural traits), motivation, intelligence, ability, IQ, interests, values, self-concept, self-efficacy, and self-esteem (to name just a few). There are few remaining "differential psychology" programs in the United States, although research in this area is very active. Current researchers are found in a variety of applied and experimental programs, including clinical psychology, educational psychology, Industrial and organizational psychology, personality psychology, social psychology, behavioral genetics, and developmental psychology programs, in the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development in particular.
To study individual differences, psychologists use a variety of methods. Psychophysiological experiments on both humans and other mammals include EEG, PET-scans, MRI, functional MRI, neurochemistry experiments with neurotransmitter and hormonal systems, caffeine and controlled drug challenges. These methods can be used for a search of biomarkers of consistent, biologically-based behavioural patterns (temperament traits and symptoms of psychiatric disorders). Other sets of methods include behavioural experiments, to see how different people behave in similar settings. Behavioural experiments are often used in personality and social psychology, and include lexical and self-report methods where people are asked to complete paper-based and computer-based forms prepared by psychologists.
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Industrial and organizational psychology
Industrial and organizational psychology, which is also known as occupational psychology, organizational psychology, or work and organizational psychology; is an applied discipline within psychology. Industrial, work and organizational psychology (IWO) is the broader global term for the field internationally.
The discipline is the science of human behavior relating to work and applies psychological theories and principles to organizations and individuals in their places of work as well as the individual's work-life more generally. IO psychologists are trained in the scientist–practitioner model. They contribute to an organization's success by improving the performance, motivation, job satisfaction, and occupational safety and health as well as the overall health and well-being of its employees. An IO psychologist conducts research on employee behaviors and attitudes, and how these can be improved through hiring practices, training programs, feedback, and management systems.
IO psychology was ranked the fastest growing occupation over the next decade according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics's "Occupational Outlook Handbook" in 2014. It is estimated to grow 53% with a mean salary of US$109,030, with those at the top 10 percentile earning $192,150 for 2018.
As of 2020, IO psychology is one of the 17 recognized professional specialties by the American Psychological Association (APA) in the United States. It is represented by Division 14 of the APA and is formally known as the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).
In the United Kingdom, industrial and organizational psychologists are referred to as occupational psychologists. Occupational psychology in the UK is one of nine "protected titles" within the profession "practitioner psychologist" regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council. In the UK, graduate programs in psychology, including occupational psychology, are accredited by the British Psychological Society.
In Australia, the title organizational psychologist is protected by law, and regulated by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). Organizational psychology is one of nine areas of specialist endorsement for psychology practice in Australia.
In Europe, someone with a specialist EuroPsy Certificate in Work and Organisational Psychology is a fully qualified psychologist and a specialist in the work psychology field. Industrial and organizational psychologists reaching the EuroPsy standard are recorded in the Register of European Psychologists and industrial and organizational psychology is one of the three main psychology specializations in Europe.
In South Africa, industrial psychology is a registration category for the profession of psychologist as regulated by the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA).
The historical development of IO psychology was paralleled in the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Eastern European countries such as Romania. The roots of IO psychology trace back nearly to the beginning of psychology as a science, when Wilhelm Wundt founded one of the first psychological laboratories in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany. In the mid 1880s, Wundt trained two psychologists, Hugo Münsterberg and James McKeen Cattell, who had a major influence on the emergence of IO psychology.
Instead of viewing performance differences as human "errors", Cattell was one of the first to recognize the importance of differences among individuals as a way of better understanding work behavior. Walter Dill Scott, who was a contemporary of Cattell, was elected President of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1919, was arguably the most prominent IO psychologist of his time. Scott, along with Walter Van Dyke Bingham, worked at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, developing methods for selecting and training sales personnel.
The "industrial" side of IO psychology originated in research on individual differences, assessment, and the prediction of work performance. Industrial psychology crystallized during World War I. In response to the need to rapidly assign new troops to duty. Scott and Bingham volunteered to help with the testing and placement of more than a million army recruits. In 1917, together with other prominent psychologists, they adapted a well-known intelligence test the Stanford–Binet, which was designed for testing one individual at a time, to make it suitable for group testing. The new test was called the Army Alpha.
After the war, the growing industrial base in the US was a source of momentum for what was then called industrial psychology. Private industry set out to emulate the successful testing of army personnel. Mental ability testing soon became commonplace in the work setting.
Elton Mayo found that rest periods improved morale and reduced turnover in a Philadelphia textile factory. He later joined the ongoing Hawthorne studies, where he became interested in how workers' emotions and informal relationships affected productivity. The results of these studies ushered in the human relations movement.
World War II brought renewed interest in ability testing (to accurately place recruits in new technologically advanced military jobs), the introduction of the assessment center, and concern with morale and fatigue in war industry workers.
The industrial psychology division of the former American Association of Applied Psychology became a division within APA, becoming Division 14 of APA. It was initially called the Industrial and Business Psychology Division. In 1962, the name was changed to the Industrial Psychology Division. In 1973, it was renamed again, this time to the Division of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. In 1982, the unit become more independent of APA, and its name was changed again, this time to the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
The name change of the division from "industrial psychology" to "industrial and organizational psychology" reflected the shift in the work of industrial psychologists who had originally addressed work behavior from the individual perspective, examining performance and attitudes of individual workers. Their work became broader. Group behavior in the workplace became a worthy subject of study. The emphasis on "organizational" underlined the fact that when an individual joins an organization (e.g., the organization that hired him or her), he or she will be exposed to a common goal and a common set of operating procedures. In the 1970s in the UK, references to occupational psychology became more common than IO psychology.
According to Bryan and Vinchur, "while organizational psychology increased in popularity through [the 1960s and 1970s], research and practice in the traditional areas of industrial psychology continued, primarily driven by employment legislation and case law". There was a focus on fairness and validity in selection efforts as well as in the job analyses that undergirded selection instruments. For example, IO psychology showed increased interest in behaviorally anchored rating scales. What critics there were of IO psychology accused the discipline of being responsive only to the concerns of managements.
From the 1980s to 2010s, other changes in IO psychology took place. Researchers increasingly adopted a multi-level approach, attempting to understand behavioral phenomena from both the level of the organization and the level of the individual worker. There was also an increased interest in the needs and expectations of employees as individuals. For example, an emphasis on organizational justice and the psychological contract took root, as well as the more traditional concerns of selection and training. Methodological innovations (e.g., meta-analyses, structural equation modeling) were adopted. With the passage of the American with Disabilities Act in 1990 and parallel legislation elsewhere in the world, IO psychology saw an increased emphasis on "fairness in personnel decisions." Training research relied increasingly on advances in educational psychology and cognitive science.
As described above, IO psychologists are trained in the scientist–practitioner model. IO psychologists rely on a variety of methods to conduct organizational research. Study designs employed by IO psychologists include surveys, experiments, quasi-experiments, and observational studies. IO psychologists rely on diverse data sources including human judgments, historical databases, objective measures of work performance (e.g., sales volume), and questionnaires and surveys.
IO researchers employ quantitative statistical methods. Quantitative methods used in IO psychology include correlation, multiple regression, and analysis of variance. More advanced statistical methods employed in IO research include logistic regression, structural equation modeling, and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM; also known as multilevel modeling). IO research has also employed meta-analysis. IO psychologists also employ psychometric methods including methods associated with classical test theory, generalizability theory, and item response theory (IRT).
IO psychologists have also employed qualitative methods, which largely involve focus groups, interviews, and case studies. IO research on organizational culture research has employed ethnographic techniques and participant observation. A qualitative technique associated with IO psychology is Flanagan's Critical Incident Technique. IO psychologists sometimes use quantitative and qualitative methods in concert. OHP researchers have also combined and coordinated quantitative and qualitative methods within a single study.
Job analysis encompasses a number of different methods including, but not limited to, interviews, questionnaires, task analysis, and observation. It primarily involves the systematic collection of information about a job. A task-oriented job analysis involves an examination of the duties, tasks, and/or competencies required by the job being assessed. By contrast, a worker-oriented job analysis involves an examination of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) required to successfully perform the work. Information obtained from job analyses are used for many purposes, including the creation of job-relevant selection procedures, performance appraisals and the criteria they require, and the development of training programs.
IO psychologists typically work with human resource specialists to design (a) recruitment processes and (b) personnel selection systems. Personnel recruitment is the process of identifying qualified candidates in the workforce and getting them to apply for jobs within an organization. Personnel recruitment processes include developing job announcements, placing ads, defining key qualifications for applicants, and screening out unqualified applicants.
Personnel selection is the systematic process of hiring and promoting personnel. Personnel selection systems employ evidence-based practices to determine the most qualified candidates. Personnel selection involves both the newly hired and individuals who can be promoted from within the organization. Common selection tools include ability tests (e.g., cognitive, physical, or psycho-motor), knowledge tests, personality tests, structured interviews, the systematic collection of biographical data, and work samples. IO psychologists must evaluate evidence regarding the extent to which selection tools predict job performance.
Personnel selection procedures are usually validated, i.e., shown to be job relevant to personnel selection, using one or more of the following types of validity: content validity, construct validity, and/or criterion-related validity. IO psychologists must adhere to professional standards in personnel selection efforts. SIOP (e.g., "Principles for validation and use of personnel selection procedures") and APA together with the National Council on Measurement in Education (e.g., "Standards for educational and psychological testing" are sources of those standards. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's "Uniform guidelines" are also influential in guiding personnel selection decisions.
A meta-analysis of selection methods found that general mental ability was the best overall predictor of job performance and attainment in training.
Performance appraisal or performance evaluation is the process in which an individual's or a group's work behaviors and outcomes are assessed against managers' and others' expectations for the job. Performance appraisal is frequently used in promotion and compensation decisions, to help design and validate personnel selection procedures, and for performance management. Performance management is the process of providing performance feedback relative to expectations, and information relevant to improvement (e.g., coaching, mentoring). Performance management may also include documenting and tracking performance information for organizational evaluation purposes.
An IO psychologist would typically use information from the job analysis to determine a job's performance dimensions, and then construct a rating scale to describe each level of performance for the job. Often, the IO psychologist would be responsible for training organizational personnel how to use the performance appraisal instrument, including ways to minimize bias when using the rating scale, and how to provide effective performance feedback.
Individual assessment involves the measurement of individual differences. IO psychologists perform individual assessments in order to evaluate differences among candidates for employment as well as differences among employees. The constructs measured pertain to job performance. With candidates for employment, individual assessment is often part of the personnel selection process. These assessments can include written tests, aptitude tests, physical tests, psycho-motor tests, personality tests, integrity and reliability tests, work samples, simulations, and assessment centres.
IO psychologists are concerned with occupational health and well-being for well over a century. Developments early in the 20th century occurred in both the UK and the U.S. During World War I Charles Myers in the U.K. studied worker fatigue and other aspects of well-being, discussed in his 1920 IO psychology textbook. In the U.S. Arthur Kornhauser examined the impact on productivity of hiring mentally unstable workers. Kornhauser also examined the link between industrial working conditions and mental health as well as the spillover into a worker's personal life of having an unsatisfying job.
More recently, IO researchers have found that staying vigorous during working hours is associated with better work-related behaviour and subjective well-being as well as more effective functioning in the family domain. Trait vigor and recovery experiences after work were related to vigor at work. Job satisfaction has also been found to be associated with life satisfaction, happiness, well-being and positive affect, and the absence of negative affect. Other research indicates that among older workers activities such as volunteering and participating in social clubs was related to a decrease in depressive symptoms over the next two years. Research on job changing indicates that mobility between, but not within, organizations is associated with burnout. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new discipline, occupational health psychology, emerged out of i/o psychology and both health psychology, and occupational medicine.
IO psychologists are concerned with the related topics of workplace bullying, aggression, and violence. For example, IO research found that exposure to workplace violence elicited ruminative thinking. Ruminative thinking is associated with poor well-being. IO research has found that interpersonal aggressive behaviour is associated with worse team performance.
Compensation includes wages or salary, bonuses, pension/retirement contributions, and employee benefits that can be converted to cash or replace living expenses. IO psychologists may be asked to conduct a job evaluation for the purpose of determining compensation levels and ranges. IO psychologists may also serve as expert witnesses in pay discrimination cases, when disparities in pay for similar work are alleged by employees.
Training involves the systematic teaching of skills, concepts, or attitudes that results in improved performance in another environment. Because many people hired for a job are not already versed in all the tasks the job requires, training may be needed to help the individual perform the job effectively. Evidence indicates that training is often effective, and that it succeeds in terms of higher net sales and gross profitability per employee.
Similar to performance management (see above), an IO psychologist would employ a job analysis in concert with the application of the principles of instructional design to create an effective training program. A training program is likely to include a summative evaluation at its conclusion in order to ensure that trainees have met the training objectives and can perform the target work tasks at an acceptable level. Training programs often include formative evaluations to assess the effect of the training as the training proceeds. Formative evaluations can be used to locate problems in training procedures and help IO psychologists make corrective adjustments while training is ongoing.
The foundation for training programs is learning. Learning outcomes can be organized into three broad categories: cognitive, skill-based, and affective outcomes. Cognitive training is aimed at instilling declarative knowledge or the knowledge of rules, facts, and principles (e.g., police officer training covers laws and court procedures). Skill-based training aims to impart procedural knowledge (e.g., skills needed to use a special tool) or technical skills (e.g., understanding the workings of software program). Affective training concerns teaching individuals to develop specific attitudes or beliefs that predispose trainees to behave a certain way (e.g., show commitment to the organization, appreciate diversity).
A needs assessment, an analysis of corporate and individual goals, is often undertaken prior to the development of a training program. In addition, a careful needs analysis is required in order to develop a systematic understanding of where training is needed, what should be taught, and who will be trained. A training needs analysis typically involves a three-step process that includes organizational analysis, task analysis and person analysis.
An organizational analysis is an examination of organizational goals and resources as well as the organizational environment. The results of an organizational analysis help to determine where training should be directed. The analysis identifies the training needs of different departments or subunits. It systematically assesses manager, peer, and technological support for transfer of training. An organizational analysis also takes into account the climate of the organization and its subunits. For example, if a climate for safety is emphasized throughout the organization or in subunits of the organization (e.g., production), then training needs will likely reflect an emphasis on safety. A task analysis uses the results of a job analysis to determine what is needed for successful job performance, contributing to training content. With organizations increasingly trying to identify "core competencies" that are required for all jobs, task analysis can also include an assessment of competencies. A person analysis identifies which individuals within an organization should receive training and what kind of instruction they need. Employee needs can be assessed using a variety of methods that identify weaknesses that training can address.
Work motivation reflects the energy an individual applies "to initiate work-related behavior, and to determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration" Understanding what motivates an organization's employees is central to IO psychology. Motivation is generally thought of as a theoretical construct that fuels behavior. An incentive is an anticipated reward that is thought to incline a person to behave a certain way. Motivation varies among individuals. Studying its influence on behavior, it must be examined together with ability and environmental influences. Because of motivation's role in influencing workplace behavior and performance, many organizations structure the work environment to encourage productive behaviors and discourage unproductive behaviors.
Motivation involves three psychological processes: arousal, direction, and intensity. Arousal is what initiates action. It is often fueled by a person's need or desire for something that is missing from his or her life, either totally or partially. Direction refers to the path employees take in accomplishing the goals they set for themselves. Intensity is the amount of energy employees put into goal-directed work performance. The level of intensity often reflects the importance and difficulty of the goal. These psychological processes involve four factors. First, motivation serves to direct attention, focusing on particular issues, people, tasks, etc. Second, it serves to stimulate effort. Third, motivation influences persistence. Finally, motivation influences the choice and application of task-related strategies.
IO psychologists have since the 1960s been at the forefront of research and the practice of occupational stress and design of individual and organizational interventions to manage and reduce the stress levels and increase productivity, performance, health and wellbeing. Occupational stress can have implications for organizational performance because of the emotions job stress evokes. For example, a job stressor such as conflict with a supervisor can precipitate anger that in turn motivates counterproductive workplace behaviors. IO research has examined the association between work stressors and aggression, theft, substance abuse, and depressive symptoms. A number of models have been developed to explain the job stress process, including the person-environment (P-E) fit model and the demand-control model.
IO research has also examined occupational stress in specific occupations, including police, general practitioners, and dentists. Another concern has been the relation of occupational stress to family life. Other IO researchers have examined gender differences in leadership style and job stress and strain in the context of male- and female-dominated industries, and unemployment-related distress. IO psychology is also concerned with the relation of occupational stress to career advancement.
Accidents and safety in the workplace are significant areas of interest to IO psychology and IO psychologists. Examples of psychosocial injury hazards of interest to IO psychology include fatigue, workplace violence, workplace bullying, and working night shifts. IO researchers conduct "stress audits" that can help organizations remain compliant with various occupational safety regulations. Psychosocial hazards can affect musculoskeletal disorders. A psychosocial factor related to accident risk is safety climate, which refers to employees' perceptions of the extent to which their work organization prioritizes safety. By contrast, psychosocial safety climate refers to management's "policies, practices, and procedures" aimed at protecting workers' psychological health. Research on safety leadership is also relevant to IO psychology. Research suggests that safety-oriented transformational leadership is associated with a positive safety climate and safe worker practices.
While there is no universal definition for organizational culture, a collective understanding shares the following assumptions:
Organizational culture has been shown to affect important organizational outcomes such as performance, attraction, recruitment, retention, employee satisfaction, and employee well-being. There are three levels of organizational culture: artifacts, shared values, and basic beliefs and assumptions. Artifacts comprise the physical components of the organization that relay cultural meaning. Shared values are individuals' preferences regarding certain aspects of the organization's culture (e.g., loyalty, customer service). Basic beliefs and assumptions include individuals' impressions about the trustworthiness and supportiveness of an organization, and are often deeply ingrained within the organization's culture.
In addition to an overall culture, organizations also have subcultures. Subcultures can be departmental (e.g. different work units) or defined by geographical distinction. While there is no single "type" of organizational culture, some researchers have developed models to describe different organizational cultures.
Group behavior involves the interactions among individuals in a collective. The individuals' opinions, attitudes, and adaptations affect group behavior and group behavior. In turn, affects those opinions, etc. The interactions are thought to fulfill some need satisfaction in an individual who is part of the collective. A specific area of IO research in group behavior is the team dynamics and team effectiveness.
Organizations often organize teams because teams can accomplish a much greater amount of work in a short period of time than an individual can accomplish. IO research has examined the harm workplace aggression does to team performance.
Team composition, or the configuration of team member knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics, fundamentally influences teamwork. Team composition can be considered in the selection and management of teams to increase the likelihood of team success. To achieve high-quality results, teams built with members having higher skill levels are more likely to be effective than teams built around members having lesser skills; teams that include a members with a diversity of skills are also likely to show improved team performance. Team members should also be compatible in terms of personality traits, values, and work styles. There is substantial evidence that personality traits and values can shape the nature of teamwork, and influence team performance.
A fundamental question in team task design is whether or not a task is even appropriate for a team. Those tasks that require predominantly independent work are best left to individuals, and team tasks should include those tasks that consist primarily of interdependent work. When a given task is appropriate for a team, task design can play a key role in team effectiveness.
Job characteristic theory identifies core job dimensions that affect motivation, satisfaction, performance, etc. These dimensions include skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback. The dimensions map well to the team environment. Individual contributors who perform team tasks that are challenging, interesting, and engaging are more likely to be motivated to exert greater effort and perform better than team members who are working on tasks that lack those characteristics.
Organizational support systems affect the team effectiveness and provide resources for teams operating in the multi-team environment. During the chartering of new teams, organizational enabling resources are first identified. Examples of enabling resources include facilities, equipment, information, training, and leadership. Team-specific resources (e.g., budgetary resources, human resources) are typically made available. Team-specific human resources represent the individual contributors who are selected to be team members. Intra-team processes (e.g., task design, task assignment) involve these team-specific resources.
Teams also function in dynamic multi-team environments. Teams often must respond to shifting organizational contingencies. Contingencies affecting teams include constraints arising from conditions in which organizational resources are not exclusively earmarked for certain teams. When resources are scarce, they must be shared by multiple teams.
Organizational reward systems drive the strengthening and enhancing of individual team member efforts; such efforts contribute towards reaching team goals. In other words, rewards that are given to individual team members should be contingent upon the performance of the entire team.
Several design elements are needed to enable organizational reward systems to operate successfully. First, for a collective assessment to be appropriate for individual team members, the group's tasks must be highly interdependent. If this is not the case, individual assessment is more appropriate than team assessment. Second, individual-level reward systems and team-level reward systems must be compatible. For example, it would be unfair to reward the entire team for a job well done if only one team member did most of the work. That team member would most likely view teams and teamwork negatively, and would not want to work on a team in the future. Third, an organizational culture must be created such that it supports and rewards employees who believe in the value of teamwork and who maintain a positive attitude towards team-based rewards.
Goals potentially motivate team members when goals contain three elements: difficulty, acceptance, and specificity. Under difficult goal conditions, teams with more committed members tend to outperform teams with less committed members. When team members commit to team goals, team effectiveness is a function of how supportive members are with each other. The goals of individual team members and team goals interact. Team and individual goals must be coordinated. Individual goals must be consistent with team goals in order for a team to be effective.
Job satisfaction is often thought to reflect the extent to which a worker likes his or her job, or individual aspects or facets of jobs. It is one of the most heavily researched topics in IO psychology. Job satisfaction has theoretical and practical utility for the field. It has been linked to important job outcomes including attitudinal variables (e.g., job involvement, organizational commitment), absenteeism, turnover intentions, actual turnover, job performance, and tension. A meta-analyses found job satisfaction to be related to life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and the absence of negative affect.
Productive behavior is defined as employee behavior that contributes positively to the goals and objectives of an organization. When an employee begins a new job, there is a transition period during which he or she may not contribute significantly. To assist with this transition an employee typically requires job-related training. In financial terms, productive behavior represents the point at which an organization begins to achieve some return on the investment it has made in a new employee. IO psychologists are ordinarily more focused on productive behavior than job or task performance, including in-role "and" extra-role performance. In-role performance tells managers how well an employee performs the required aspects of the job; extra-role performance includes behaviors not necessarily required by job but nonetheless contribute to organizational effectiveness. By taking both in-role and extra-role performance into account, an IO psychologist is able to assess employees' effectiveness (how well they do what they were hired to do), efficiency (outputs to relative inputs), and productivity (how much they help the organization reach its goals). Three forms of productive behavior that IO psychologists often evaluate include job performance, organizational citizenship behavior (see below), and innovation.
Job performance represents behaviors employees engage in while at work which contribute to organizational goals. These behaviors are formally evaluated by an organization as part of an employee's responsibilities. In order to understand and ultimately predict job performance, it is important to be precise when defining the term. Job performance is about behaviors that are within the control of the employee and not about results (effectiveness), the costs involved in achieving results (productivity), the results that can be achieved in a period of time (efficiency), or the value an organization places on a given level of performance, effectiveness, productivity or efficiency (utility).
To model job performance, researchers have attempted to define a set of dimensions that are common to all jobs. Using a common set of dimensions provides a consistent basis for assessing performance and enables the comparison of performance across jobs. Performance is commonly broken into two major categories: in-role (technical aspects of a job) and extra-role (non-technical abilities such as communication skills and being a good team member). While this distinction in behavior has been challenged it is commonly made by both employees and management. A model of performance by Campbell breaks performance into in-role and extra-role categories. Campbell labeled job-specific task proficiency and non-job-specific task proficiency as in-role dimensions, while written and oral communication, demonstrating effort, maintaining personal discipline, facilitating peer and team performance, supervision and leadership and management and administration are labeled as extra-role dimensions. Murphy's model of job performance also broke job performance into in-role and extra-role categories. However, task-orientated behaviors composed the in-role category and the extra-role category included interpersonally-oriented behaviors, down-time behaviors and destructive and hazardous behaviors. However, it has been challenged as to whether the measurement of job performance is usually done through pencil/paper tests, job skills tests, on-site hands-on tests, off-site hands-on tests, high-fidelity simulations, symbolic simulations, task ratings and global ratings. These various tools are often used to evaluate performance on specific tasks and overall job performance. Van Dyne and LePine developed a measurement model in which overall job performance was evaluated using Campbell's in-role and extra-role categories. Here, in-role performance was reflected through how well "employees met their performance expectations and performed well at the tasks that made up the employees' job." Dimensions regarding how well the employee assists others with their work for the benefit of the group, if the employee voices new ideas for projects or changes to procedure and whether the employee attends functions that help the group composed the extra-role category.
To assess job performance, reliable and valid measures must be established. While there are many sources of error with performance ratings, error can be reduced through rater training and through the use of behaviorally-anchored rating scales. Such scales can be used to clearly define the behaviors that constitute poor, average, and superior performance. Additional factors that complicate the measurement of job performance include the instability of job performance over time due to forces such as changing performance criteria, the structure of the job itself and the restriction of variation in individual performance by organizational forces. These factors include errors in job measurement techniques, acceptance and the justification of poor performance and lack of importance of individual performance.
The determinants of job performance consist of factors having to do with the individual worker as well as environmental factors in the workplace. According to Campbell's Model of The Determinants of Job Performance, job performance is a result of the interaction between declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts or things), procedural knowledge (knowledge of what needs to be done and how to do it), and motivation (reflective of an employee's choices regarding whether to expend effort, the level of effort to expend, and whether to persist with the level of effort chosen). The interplay between these factors show that an employee may, for example, have a low level of declarative knowledge, but may still have a high level of performance if the employee has high levels of procedural knowledge and motivation.
Regardless of the job, three determinants stand out as predictors of performance: (1) general mental ability (especially for jobs higher in complexity); (2) job experience (although there is a law of diminishing returns); and (3) the personality trait of conscientiousness (people who are dependable and achievement-oriented, who plan well). These determinants appear to influence performance largely through the acquisition and usage of job knowledge and the motivation to do well. Further, an expanding area of research in job performance determinants includes emotional intelligence.
Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are another form of workplace behavior that IO psychologists are involved with. OCBs tend to be beneficial to both the organization and other workers. Dennis Organ (1988) defines OCBs as "individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization." Behaviors that qualify as OCBs can fall into one of the following five categories: altruism, courtesy, sportsmanship, conscientiousness, and civic virtue. OCBs have also been categorized in other ways too, for example, by their intended targets (individuals, supervisors, and the organization as a whole. Other alternative ways of categorizing OCBs include "compulsory OCBs", which are engaged in owing to coercive persuasion or peer pressure rather than out of good will. The extent to which OCBs are voluntary has been the subject of some debate.
Other research suggests that some employees perform OCBs to influence how they are viewed within the organization. While these behaviors are not formally part of the job description, performing them can influence performance appraisals. Researchers have advanced the view that employees engage in OCBs as a form of "impression management," a term coined by Erving Goffman. Goffman defined impression management as "the way in which the individual ... presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them. Some researchers have hypothesized that OCBs are not performed out of good will, positive affect, etc., but instead as a way of being noticed by others, including supervisors.
Four qualities are generally linked to creative and innovative behaviour by individuals:
At the organizational level, a study by Damanpour identified four specific characteristics that may predict innovation:
Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) can be defined as employee behavior that goes against the goals of an organization. These behaviors can be intentional or unintentional and result from a wide range of underlying causes and motivations. Some CWBs have instrumental motivations (e.g., theft). It has been proposed that a person-by-environment interaction can be utilized to explain a variety of counterproductive behaviors. For instance, an employee who sabotages another employee's work may do so because of lax supervision (environment) and underlying psychopathology (person) that work in concert to result in the counterproductive behavior. There is evidence that an emotional response (e.g., anger) to job stress (e.g., unfair treatment) can motivate CWBs.
The forms of counterproductive behavior with the most empirical examination are ineffective job performance, absenteeism, job turnover, and accidents. Less common but potentially more detrimental forms of counterproductive behavior have also been investigated including violence and sexual harassment.
In IO psychology, leadership can be defined as a process of influencing others to agree on a shared purpose, and to work towards shared objectives. A distinction should be made between leadership and management. Managers process administrative tasks and organize work environments. Although leaders may be required to undertake managerial duties as well, leaders typically focus on inspiring followers and creating a shared organizational culture and values. Managers deal with complexity, while leaders deal with initiating and adapting to change. Managers undertake the tasks of planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling and problem solving. In contrast, leaders undertake the tasks of setting a direction or vision, aligning people to shared goals, communicating, and motivating.
Approaches to studying leadership in IO psychology can be broadly classified into three categories: Leader-focused approaches, contingency-focused approaches, and follower-focused approaches.
Leader-focused approaches look to organizational leaders to determine the characteristics of effective leadership. According to the trait approach, more effective leaders possess certain traits that less effective leaders lack. More recently, this approach is being used to predict leader emergence. The following traits have been identified as those that predict leader emergence when there is no formal leader: high intelligence, high needs for dominance, high self-motivation, and socially perceptive. Another leader-focused approached is the "behavioral approach", which focuses on the behaviors that distinguish effective from ineffective leaders. There are two categories of leadership behaviors: "consideration and initiating structure". Behaviors associated with the category of consideration include showing subordinates they are valued and that the leader cares about them. An example of a consideration behavior is showing compassion when problems arise in or out of the office. Behaviors associated with the category of initiating structure include facilitating the task performance of groups. One example of an initiating structure behavior is meeting one-on-one with subordinates to explain expectations and goals. The final leader-focused approach is "power and influence". To be most effective, a leader should be able to influence others to behave in ways that are in line with the organization's mission and goals. How influential a leader can be depends on their social power – their potential to influence their subordinates. There are six bases of power: French and Raven's classic five bases of coercive, reward, legitimate, expert, and referent power, plus informational power. A leader can use several different tactics to influence others within an organization. These include: rational persuasion, inspirational appeal, consultation, ingratiation, exchange, personal appeal, coalition, legitimating, and pressure.
Of the 3 approaches to leadership, contingency-focused approaches have been the most prevalent over the past 30 years. Contingency-focused theories base a leader's effectiveness on their ability to assess a situation and adapt their behavior accordingly. These theories assume that an effective leader can accurately "read" a situation and skillfully employ a leadership style that meets the needs of the individuals involved and the task at hand. A brief introduction to the most prominent contingency-focused theories will follow.
The Fiedler contingency model holds that a leader's effectiveness depends on the interaction between their characteristics and the characteristics of the situation. Path–goal theory asserts that the role of the leader is to help his or her subordinates achieve their goals. To effectively do this, leaders must skillfully select from four different leadership styles to meet the situational factors. The situational factors are a product of the characteristics of subordinates and the characteristics of the environment. The leader–member exchange theory (LMX) focuses on how leader–subordinate relationships develop. Generally speaking, when a subordinate performs well or when there are positive exchanges between a leader and a subordinate, their relationship is strengthened, performance and job satisfaction are enhanced, and the subordinate will feel more commitment to the leader and the organization as a whole. Vroom-Yetton-Jago model focuses on decision-making with respect to a "feasibility set" which is composed of the situational attributes.
In addition to the contingency-focused approaches mentioned, there has been a high degree of interest paid to three novel approaches that have recently emerged. The first is transformational leadership, which posits that there are certain leadership traits that inspire subordinates to perform beyond their capabilities. The second is transactional leadership, which is most concerned with keeping subordinates in-line with deadlines and organizational policy. This type of leader fills more of a managerial role and lacks qualities necessary to inspire subordinates and induce meaningful change. And the third is authentic leadership which is centered around empathy and a leader's values or character. If the leader understands their followers, they can inspire subordinates by cultivating a personal connection and leading them to share in the vision and goals of the team. Although there has been a limited amount of research conducted on these theories, they are sure to receive continued attention as the field of IO psychology matures.
Follower-focused approaches look at the processes by which leaders motivate followers, and lead teams to achieve shared goals. Understandably, the area of leadership motivation draws heavily from the abundant research literature in the domain of motivation in IO psychology. Because leaders are held responsible for their followers' ability to achieve the organization's goals, their ability to motivate their followers is a critical factor of leadership effectiveness. Similarly, the area of team leadership draws heavily from the research in teams and team effectiveness in IO psychology. Because organizational employees are frequently structured in the form of teams, leaders need to be aware of the potential benefits and pitfalls of working in teams, how teams develop, how to satisfy team members' needs, and ultimately how to bring about team effectiveness and performance.
An emerging area of IO research in the area of team leadership is in leading virtual teams, where people in the team are geographically-distributed across various distances and sometimes even countries. While technological advances have enabled the leadership process to take place in such virtual contexts, they present new challenges for leaders as well, such as the need to use technology to build relationships with followers, and influencing followers when faced with limited (or no) face-to-face interaction.
IO psychologists are also concerned with organizational change. This effort, called organizational development (OD). Tools used to advance organization development include the survey feedback technique. The technique involves the periodic assessment (with surveys) of employee attitudes and feelings. The results are conveyed to organizational stakeholders, who may want to take the organization in a particular direction. Another tool is the team building technique. Because many if not most tasks within the organization are completed by small groups and/or teams, team building is important to organizational success. In order to enhance a team's morale and problem-solving skills, IO psychologists help the groups to build their self-confidence, group cohesiveness, and working effectiveness.
The IO psychology and organizational behavior have manifested some overlap. The overlap has led to some confusion regarding how the two disciplines differ. There is also much confusion about the differences between IO psychology and human resources, or human resource management
The minimum requirement for working as an IO psychologist is a master's degree. Normally, this degree requires about two to three years of postgraduate work to complete. Of all the degrees granted in IO psychology each year, approximately two thirds are at the master's level.
A comprehensive list of US and Canadian master's and doctoral programs can be found at the web site of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). Admission into IO psychology PhD programs is highly competitive; many programs accept only a small number of applicants each year.
There are graduate degree programs in IO psychology outside of the US and Canada. The SIOP web site also provides a comprehensive list of IO programs in many other countries.
In Australia, organizational psychologists must be accredited by the Australian Psychological Society (APS). To become an organizational psychologist, one must meet the criteria for a general psychologist's licence: three years studying bachelor's degree in psychology, 4th year honours degree or postgraduate diploma in psychology, and two-year full-time supervised practice plus 80 hours of professional development. There are other avenues available, such as a two-year supervised training program after honours (i.e. 4+2 pathway), or one year of postgraduate coursework and practical placements followed by a one-year supervised training program (i.e. 5+1 pathway). After this, psychologists can elect to specialize as Organizational Psychologists.
There are many different sets of competencies for different specializations within IO psychology and IO psychologists are versatile behavioral scientists. For example, an IO psychologist specializing in selection and recruiting should have expertise in finding the best talent for the organization and getting everyone on board while he or she might not need to know much about executive coaching. Some IO psychologists specialize in specific areas of consulting whereas others tend to generalize their areas of expertise. There are basic skills and knowledge an individual needs in order to be an effective IO psychologist, which include being an independent learner, interpersonal skills (e.g., listening skills), and general consultation skills (e.g., skills and knowledge in the problem area).
According to the United States Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, IO psychology is the fastest growing occupation in the United States, based on projections between 2012 and 2022.
In a 2006 salary survey, the median salary for a PhD in IO psychology was $98,000; for a master's level IO psychologist was $72,000. The highest paid PhD IO psychologists in private industry worked in pharmaceuticals and averaged approximately $151,000 per year; the earnings median of self-employed consultants was $150,000; those employed in retail, energy, and manufacturing followed closely behind, averaging approximately $133,000. The lowest earners were found in state and local government positions, averaging approximately $77,000. In 2005, IO psychologists whose primary responsibility is teaching at private and public colleges and universities often earn additional income from consulting with government and industry.
An IO psychologist, whether an academic, a consultant, or an employee, is expected to maintain high ethical standards. The APA's ethical principles apply to IO psychologists. For example, ethically, the IO psychologist should only accept projects for which he or she is qualified. With more organizations becoming global, it is important that when an IO psychologist works outside her or his home country, the psychologist is aware of rules, regulations, and cultures of the organizations and countries in which the psychologist works, while also adhering to the ethical standards set at home.
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International Council of Unitarians and Universalists
The International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU) is an umbrella organization founded in 1995 comprising many Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist organizations. Some groups represent only a few hundred people; while the largest, the Unitarian Universalist Association, had more than 160,000 members —including over 150,000 in the United States.
The original initiative for its establishment was contained in a resolution of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (British Unitarians) in 1987. This led to the establishment of the Advocates for the Establishment of an International Organization of Unitarians (AEIOU), which worked towards creating the council. However, the General Assembly resolution provided no funding.
The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) became particularly interested in the establishment of a council when it had to deal with an increasing number of applications for membership from congregations outside North America. It had already granted membership to congregations in Adelaide, Auckland, the Philippines and Pakistan, and congregations in Sydney, Russia and Spain had applied for membership. Rather than admit congregations from all over the world, the UUA hoped that they would join a world council instead. The UUA thus became willing to provide funding for the council's establishment.
As a result, the council was finally established at a meeting in Essex, Massachusetts, United States on 23–26 March 1995.
The Preamble to the Constitution of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists reads:
We, the member groups of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, affirming our belief in religious community based on:
declare our purposes to be:
Polish Unitarians have reported a need for a period of reorganization, and that at this time they are unable to maintain the level of activity needed to be full Council members, be it moved that membership of these groups be suspended. This action is taken with regret and the ICUU looks forward to welcoming Poland back into membership at the earliest possible date.
Churches and religious associations which have expressed their will to become members of the Council may be admitted as "Provisional Members" for a period of time (generally two or four years), until the Council decides that they have shown their organizational stability, affinity with the ICUU principles and commitment to deserve becoming Full Members of the Council. Provisional Members are invited to Council meetings through a delegate but cannot vote.
According to the Bylaws of the ICUU, Emerging Groups are ""applicants that are deemed to be reasonable prospects for membership, but do not fulfil the conditions of either Provisional membership or Full Membership"". These groups may be designated as Emerging Groups by the Executive Committee upon its sole discretion. Emerging Groups may be invited as observers to General Meetings.
The current list of Emerging Groups after the last meeting of the Executive Committee (London, 22–25 November 2008) is as follows:
Organizations with beliefs and purposes closely akin to those of ICUU but which by nature of their constitution are not eligible for full membership or which do not wish to become full members now or in the foreseeable future, may become Associates of the ICUU. The application must be approved by the ICUU Council Meeting.
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Itanium
Itanium ( ) is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel.
Itanium-based systems have been produced by HP (the HP Integrity Servers line) and several other manufacturers. In 2008, Itanium was the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, Power ISA, and SPARC.
In February 2017, Intel released the current generation, , to test customers, and in May began shipping in volume. It is the last processor of the Itanium family.
Intel officially announced the discontinuation of the Itanium CPU family on January 30, 2019.
In 1989, HP determined that Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architectures were approaching a processing limit at one instruction per cycle. HP researchers investigated a new architecture, later named Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC), that allows the processor to execute multiple instructions in each clock cycle. EPIC implements a form of very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture, in which a single instruction word contains multiple instructions. With EPIC, the compiler determines in advance which instructions can be executed at the same time, so the microprocessor simply executes the instructions and does not need elaborate mechanisms to determine which instructions to execute in parallel.
The goal of this approach is twofold: to enable deeper inspection of the code at compile time to identify additional opportunities for parallel execution, and to simplify processor design and reduce energy consumption by eliminating the need for runtime scheduling circuitry.
HP believed that it was no longer cost-effective for individual enterprise systems companies such as itself to develop proprietary microprocessors, so it partnered with Intel in 1994 to develop the IA-64 architecture, derived from EPIC. Intel was willing to undertake a very large development effort on IA-64 in the expectation that the resulting microprocessor would be used by the majority of enterprise systems manufacturers. HP and Intel initiated a large joint development effort with a goal of delivering the first product, Merced, in 1998.
During development, Intel, HP, and industry analysts predicted that IA-64 would dominate in servers, workstations, and high-end desktops, and eventually supplant RISC and complex instruction set computing (CISC) architectures for all general-purpose applications.
Compaq and Silicon Graphics decided to abandon further development of the Alpha and MIPS architectures respectively in favor of migrating to IA-64.
Several groups ported operating systems for the architecture, including Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris,
Tru64 UNIX, and Monterey/64.
The latter three were canceled before reaching the market. By 1997, it was apparent that the IA-64 architecture and the compiler were much more difficult to implement than originally thought, and the delivery timeframe of Merced began slipping.
Intel announced the official name of the processor, "Itanium", on October 4, 1999.
Within hours, the name "Itanic" had been coined on a Usenet newsgroup, a reference to the RMS "Titanic", the "unsinkable" ocean liner that sank on her maiden voyage in 1912. "Itanic" has since often been used by "The Register", and others, to imply that the multibillion-dollar investment in Itanium—and the early hype associated with it—would be followed by its relatively quick demise.
By the time Itanium was released in June 2001, its performance was not superior to competing RISC and CISC processors.
Itanium competed at the low-end (primarily four-CPU and smaller systems) with servers based on x86 processors, and at the high-end with IBM POWER and Sun Microsystems SPARC processors. Intel repositioned Itanium to focus on high-end business and HPC computing, attempting to duplicate x86's successful "horizontal" market (i.e., single architecture, multiple systems vendors). The success of this initial processor version was limited to replacing PA-RISC in HP systems, Alpha in Compaq systems and MIPS in SGI systems, though IBM also delivered a supercomputer based on this processor.
POWER and SPARC remained strong, while the 32-bit x86 architecture continued to grow into the enterprise space, building on economies of scale fueled by its enormous installed base.
Only a few thousand systems using the original "Merced" Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability. Recognizing that the lack of software could be a serious problem for the future, Intel made thousands of these early systems available to independent software vendors (ISVs) to stimulate development. HP and Intel brought the next-generation Itanium 2 processor to market a year later.
The Itanium 2 processor was released in 2002, and was marketed for enterprise servers rather than for the whole gamut of high-end computing. The first Itanium 2, code-named "McKinley", was jointly developed by HP and Intel. It relieved many of the performance problems of the original Itanium processor, which were mostly caused by an inefficient memory subsystem. "McKinley" contains 221 million transistors (of which 25 million are for logic), measured 19.5 mm by 21.6 mm (421 mm2) and was fabricated in a 180 nm, bulk CMOS process with six layers of aluminium metallization.
In 2003, AMD released the Opteron CPU, which implements its own 64-bit architecture called AMD64. Opteron gained rapid acceptance in the enterprise server space because it provided an easy upgrade from x86. Under influence by Microsoft, Intel responded by implementing AMD's x86-64 instruction set architecture instead of IA-64 in its Xeon microprocessors in 2004, resulting in a new industry-wide "de facto" standard.
Intel released a new Itanium 2 family member, codenamed "Madison", in 2003. Madison used a 130 nm process and was the basis of all new Itanium processors until Montecito was released in June 2006.
In March 2005, Intel announced that it was working on a new Itanium processor, codenamed "Tukwila", to be released in 2007. Tukwila would have four processor cores and would replace the Itanium bus with a new Common System Interface, which would also be used by a new Xeon processor.
Later that year, Intel revised Tukwila's delivery date to late 2008.
In November 2005, the major Itanium server manufacturers joined with Intel and a number of software vendors to form the Itanium Solutions Alliance to promote the architecture and accelerate software porting.
The Alliance announced that its members would invest $10 billion in Itanium solutions by the end of the decade.
In 2006, Intel delivered "Montecito" (marketed as the Itanium 2 9000 series), a dual-core processor that roughly doubled performance and decreased energy consumption by about 20 percent.
Intel released the Itanium 2 9100 series, codenamed "Montvale", in November 2007.
In May 2009, the schedule for Tukwila, its follow-on, was revised again, with release to OEMs planned for the first quarter of 2010.
The Itanium 9300 series processor, codenamed "Tukwila", was released on February 8, 2010, with greater performance and memory capacity.
The device uses a 65 nm process, includes two to four cores, up to 24 MB on-die caches, Hyper-Threading technology and integrated memory controllers. It implements double-device data correction, which helps to fix memory errors. Tukwila also implements Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) to replace the Itanium bus-based architecture. It has a peak interprocessor bandwidth of 96 GB/s and a peak memory bandwidth of 34 GB/s. With QuickPath, the processor has integrated memory controllers and interfaces the memory directly, using QPI interfaces to directly connect to other processors and I/O hubs. QuickPath is also used on Intel processors using the "Nehalem" microarchitecture, which possibly enabled Tukwila and Nehalem to use the same chipsets.
Tukwila incorporates four memory controllers, each of which supports multiple DDR3 DIMMs via a separate memory controller,
much like the Nehalem-based Xeon processor code-named "Beckton".
The Itanium 9500 series processor, codenamed "Poulson", is the follow-on processor to Tukwila and was released on November 8, 2012.
According to Intel, it skips the 45 nm process technology and uses a 32 nm process technology. It features eight cores and has a 12-wide issue architecture, multithreading enhancements, and new instructions to take advantage of parallelism, especially in virtualization.
The Poulson L3 cache size is 32 MB. L2 cache size is 6 MB, 512 I KB, 256 D KB per core. Die size is 544 mm², less than its predecessor Tukwila (698.75 mm²).
At ISSCC 2011, Intel presented a paper called "A 32nm 3.1 Billion Transistor 12-Wide-Issue Itanium Processor for Mission Critical Servers."
Given Intel's history of disclosing details about Itanium microprocessors at ISSCC, this paper most likely referred to Poulson. Analyst David Kanter speculated that Poulson would use a new microarchitecture, with a more advanced form of multithreading that uses up to two threads, to improve performance for single threaded and multithreaded workloads.
Some information was also released at the Hot Chips conference.
Information presented improvements in multithreading, resiliency improvements (Intel Instruction Replay RAS) and few new instructions (thread priority, integer instruction, cache prefetching, and data access hints).
Intel's Product Change Notification (PCN) 111456-01 lists four models of Itanium 9500 series CPU, which was later removed in a revised document. The parts were later listed in Intel's Material Declaration Data Sheets (MDDS) database. Intel later posted Itanium 9500 reference manual.
The models are the following:
During the 2012 "Hewlett-Packard Co. v. Oracle Corp." support lawsuit, court documents unsealed by a Santa Clara County Court judge revealed that in 2008, Hewlett-Packard had paid Intel around $440 million to keep producing and updating Itanium microprocessors from 2009 to 2014. In 2010, the two companies signed another $250 million deal, which obliged Intel to continue making Itanium CPUs for HP's machines until 2017. Under the terms of the agreements, HP has to pay for chips it gets from Intel, while Intel launches Tukwila, Poulson, Kittson, and Kittson+ chips in a bid to gradually boost performance of the platform.
Rumors of a successor to Poulson (code named "Kittson") began to circulate in 2012–2013. This was at first associated with a forthcoming 22 nm process shrink, and later revised in the face of declining Itanium sales to a less-ambitious 32 nm node. In April 2015, Intel, although it had not yet confirmed formal specifications, did confirm that it continued to work on the project. Meanwhile, the aggressively multicore Xeon E7 platform displaced Itanium-based solutions in the Intel roadmap.
In July 2016, the HP spin-off Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced in "Computer World" that Kittson would be released mid-2017. In February 2017, Intel reported that it was shipping Kittson to test customers, with plans to ship in volume later that year.
Intel officially launched the Itanium 9700 series processor family on May 11, 2017. Notably, Kittson has no microarchitecture improvements over Poulson, only higher clock speeds.
Intel has announced that the 9700 series will be the last Itanium chips produced.
The models are:
In comparison with its Xeon family of server processors, Itanium has never been a high-volume product for Intel. Intel does not release production numbers. One industry analyst estimated that the production rate was 200,000 processors per year in 2007.
According to Gartner Inc., the total number of Itanium servers (not processors) sold by all vendors in 2007, was about 55,000. (It is unclear whether clustered servers counted as a single server or not.) This compares with 417,000 RISC servers (spread across all RISC vendors) and 8.4 million x86 servers. IDC reports that a total of 184,000 Itanium-based systems were sold from 2001 through 2007. For the combined POWER/SPARC/Itanium systems market, IDC reports that POWER captured 42% of revenue and SPARC captured 32%, while Itanium-based system revenue reached 26% in the second quarter of 2008.
According to an IDC analyst, in 2007, HP accounted for perhaps 80% of Itanium systems revenue.
According to Gartner, in 2008, HP accounted for 95% of Itanium sales. HP's Itanium system sales were at an annual rate of $4.4Bn at the end of 2008, and declined to $3.5Bn by the end of 2009,
compared to a 35% decline in UNIX system revenue for Sun and an 11% drop for IBM, with an x86-64 server revenue increase of 14% during this period.
In December 2012, IDC released a research report stating that Itanium server shipments would remain flat through 2016, with annual shipment of 26,000 systems (a decline of over 50% compared to shipments in 2008).
By 2006, HP manufactured at least 80% of all Itanium systems, and sold 7,200 in the first quarter of 2006.
The bulk of systems sold were enterprise servers and machines for large-scale technical computing, with an average selling price per system in excess of US$200,000. A typical system uses eight or more Itanium processors.
By 2012, only a few manufacturers offered Itanium systems, including HP, Bull, NEC, Inspur and Huawei. In addition, Intel offered a chassis that could be used by system integrators to build Itanium systems.
By 2015, only HP supplied Itanium-based systems. With HP split in late 2015, Itanium systems (branded as Integrity) are handled by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), with recent major update in 2017 (Integrity i6, and HP-UX 11i v3 Update 16). HPE also supports a few other operating systems, including Windows up to Server 2008 R2, Linux, OpenVMS and NonStop. Itanium is not affected by Spectre and Meltdown.
The Itanium bus interfaces to the rest of the system via a chipset. Enterprise server manufacturers differentiate their systems by designing and developing chipsets that interface the processor to memory, interconnections, and peripheral controllers. The chipset is the heart of the system-level architecture for each system design. Development of a chipset costs tens of millions of dollars and represents a major commitment to the use of the Itanium. IBM created a chipset in 2003, and Intel in 2002, but neither of them developed chipsets to support newer technologies such as DDR2 or PCI Express.
Before "Tukwila" moved away from the FSB, chipsets supporting such technologies were manufactured by all Itanium server vendors, such as HP, Fujitsu, SGI, NEC, and Hitachi.
The "Tukwila" Itanium processor model had been designed to share a common chipset with the Intel Xeon processor EX (Intel's Xeon processor designed for four processor and larger servers). The goal was to streamline system development and reduce costs for server OEMs, many of which develop both Itanium- and Xeon-based servers. However, in 2013, this goal was pushed back to be "evaluated for future implementation opportunities".
Itanium is currently supported by the following operating systems:
Previously supported:
HP sells a virtualization technology for Itanium called Integrity Virtual Machines.
Emulation is a technique that allows a computer to execute binary code that was compiled for a different type of computer. Before IBM's acquisition of QuickTransit in 2009, application binary software for IRIX/MIPS and Solaris/SPARC could run via type of emulation called "dynamic binary translation" on Linux/Itanium. Similarly, HP implemented a method to execute PA-RISC/HP-UX on the Itanium/HP-UX via emulation, to simplify migration of its PA-RISC customers to the radically different Itanium instruction set. Itanium processors can also run the mainframe environment GCOS from Groupe Bull and several x86 operating systems via instruction set simulators.
Itanium is aimed at the enterprise server and high-performance computing (HPC) markets. Other enterprise- and HPC-focused processor lines include Oracle's and Fujitsu's SPARC processors and IBM's POWER microprocessors. Measured by quantity sold, Itanium's most serious competition comes from x86-64 processors including Intel's own Xeon line and AMD's Opteron line. Since 2009, most servers were being shipped with x86-64 processors.
In 2005, Itanium systems accounted for about 14% of HPC systems revenue, but the percentage has declined as the industry shifted to x86-64 clusters for this application.
An October 2008 Gartner report on the Tukwila processor, stated that "...the future roadmap for Itanium looks as strong as that of any RISC peer like Power or SPARC."
An Itanium-based computer first appeared on the list of the TOP500 supercomputers in November 2001. The best position ever achieved by an "Itanium 2" based system in the list was #2, achieved in June 2004, when Thunder (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) entered the list with an Rmax of 19.94 Teraflops. In November 2004, Columbia entered the list at #2 with 51.8 Teraflops, and there was at least one Itanium-based computer in the top 10 from then until June 2007. The peak number of Itanium-based machines on the list occurred in the November 2004 list, at 84 systems (16.8%); by June 2012, this had dropped to one system (0.2%), and no Itanium system remained on the list in November 2012.
The Itanium processors show a progression in capability. Merced was a proof of concept. McKinley dramatically improved the memory hierarchy and allowed Itanium to become reasonably competitive. Madison, with the shift to a 130 nm process, allowed for enough cache space to overcome the major performance bottlenecks. Montecito, with a 90 nm process, allowed for a dual-core implementation and a major improvement in performance per watt. Montvale added three new features: core-level lockstep, demand-based switching and front-side bus frequency of up to 667 MHz.
When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. Emulation to run existing x86 applications and operating systems was particularly poor, with one benchmark in 2001 reporting that it was equivalent at best to a 100 MHz Pentium in this mode (1.1 GHz Pentiums were on the market at that time).
Itanium failed to make significant inroads against IA-32 or RISC, and suffered further following the arrival of x86-64 systems which offered greater compatibility with older x86 applications.
In a 2009 article on the history of the processor — "How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry" — journalist John C. Dvorak reported "This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years". Tech columnist Ashlee Vance commented that the delays and underperformance "turned the product into a joke in the chip industry". In an interview, Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."
Both Red Hat and Microsoft announced plans to drop Itanium support in their operating systems due to lack of market interest; however, other Linux distributions such as Gentoo and Debian remain available for Itanium. On March 22, 2011, Oracle Corporation announced that it would no longer develop new products for HP-UX on Itanium, although it would continue to provide support for existing products. Following this announcement, HP sued Oracle for breach of contract, arguing that Oracle had violated conditions imposed during settlement over Oracle's hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd as its co-CEO, requiring the vendor to support Itanium on its software "until such time as HP discontinues the sales of its Itanium-based servers", and that the breach had harmed its business. In 2012, a court ruled in favor of HP, and ordered Oracle to resume its support for Itanium. In June 2016, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (the corporate successor to HP's server business) was awarded $3 billion in damages from the lawsuit.
A former Intel official reported that the Itanium business had become profitable for Intel in late 2009. By 2009, the chip was almost entirely deployed on servers made by HP, which had over 95% of the Itanium server market share, making the main operating system for Itanium HP-UX. On March 22, 2011, Intel reaffirmed its commitment to Itanium with multiple generations of chips in development and on schedule.
Although Itanium did attain limited success in the niche market of high-end computing, Intel had originally hoped it would find broader acceptance as a replacement for the original x86 architecture.
AMD chose a different direction, designing the less radical x86-64, a 64-bit extension to the existing x86 architecture, which Microsoft then supported, forcing Intel to introduce the same extensions in its own x86-based processors. These designs can run existing 32-bit applications at native hardware speed, while offering support for 64-bit memory addressing and other enhancements to new applications. This architecture has now become the predominant 64-bit architecture in the desktop and portable market. Although some Itanium-based workstations were initially introduced by companies such as SGI, they are no longer available.
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International Classification of Diseases
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a globally used diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes. The ICD is maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations System. The ICD is originally designed as a health care classification system, providing a system of diagnostic codes for classifying diseases, including nuanced classifications of a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or disease. This system is designed to map health conditions to corresponding generic categories together with specific variations, assigning for these a designated code, up to six characters long. Thus, major categories are designed to include a set of similar diseases.
The ICD is published by the WHO and used worldwide for morbidity and mortality statistics, reimbursement systems, and automated decision support in health care. This system is designed to promote international comparability in the collection, processing, classification, and presentation of these statistics. Like the analogous "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (which is limited to psychiatric disorders and almost exclusive to the United States), the ICD is a major project to statistically classify all health disorders, and provide diagnostic assistance. The ICD is a core statistically based classificatory diagnostic system for health care related issues of the WHO Family of International Classifications (WHO-FIC).
The ICD is revised periodically and is currently in its 10th revision. The ICD-10, as it is therefore known, was first released in 1992, and the WHO publishes annual minor updates and triennial major updates. The eleventh revision of the ICD, the ICD-11, was accepted by WHO's World Health Assembly (WHA) on 25 May 2019 and will officially come into effect on 1 January 2022. The version for preparation of approval at the WHA was released on 18 June 2018.
The ICD is part of a "family" of international classifications (WHOFIC) that complement each other, also including the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) which focuses on the domains of functioning (disability) associated with health conditions, from both medical and social perspectives, and the International Classification of Health Interventions (ICHI) that classifies the whole range of medical, nursing, functioning and public health interventions.
In 1860, during the international statistical congress held in London, Florence Nightingale made a proposal that was to result in the development of the first model of systematic collection of hospital data. In 1893, a French physician, Jacques Bertillon, introduced the "Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death" at a congress of the International Statistical Institute in Chicago.
A number of countries adopted Bertillon's system, which was based on the principle of distinguishing between general diseases and those localized to a particular organ or anatomical site, as used by the City of Paris for classifying deaths. Subsequent revisions represented a synthesis of English, German, and Swiss classifications, expanding from the original 44 titles to 161 titles. In 1898, the American Public Health Association (APHA) recommended that the registrars of Canada, Mexico, and the United States also adopt it. The APHA also recommended revising the system every 10 years to ensure the system remained current with medical practice advances. As a result, the first international conference to revise the International Classification of Causes of Death took place in 1900, with revisions occurring every ten years thereafter. At that time, the classification system was contained in one book, which included an Alphabetic Index as well as a Tabular List. The book was small compared with current coding texts.
The revisions that followed contained minor changes, until the sixth revision of the classification system. With the sixth revision, the classification system expanded to two volumes. The sixth revision included morbidity and mortality conditions, and its title was modified to reflect the changes: International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death (ICD). Prior to the sixth revision, responsibility for ICD revisions fell to the Mixed Commission, a group composed of representatives from the International Statistical Institute and the Health Organization of the League of Nations. In 1948, the WHO assumed responsibility for preparing and publishing the revisions to the ICD every ten years. WHO sponsored the seventh and eighth revisions in 1957 and 1968, respectively. It later became clear that the established ten year interval between revisions was too short.
The ICD is currently the most widely used statistical classification system for diseases in the world. In addition, some countries—including Australia, Canada, and the United States—have developed their own adaptations of ICD, with more procedure codes for classification of operative or diagnostic procedures.
The ICD-6, published in 1949, was the first to be shaped to become suitable for morbidity reporting. Accordingly, the name changed from International List of Causes of Death to International Statistical Classification of Diseases. The combined code section for injuries and their associated accidents was split into two, a chapter for injuries, and a chapter for their external causes. With use for morbidity there was a need for coding mental conditions, and for the first time a section on mental disorders was added .
The international Conference for the Seventh Revision of the International Classification of Diseases was held in Paris under the auspices of WHO in February 1955. In accordance with a recommendation of the WHO Expert Committee on Health Statistics, this revision was limited to essential changes and amendments of errors and inconsistencies.
The 8th Revision Conference convened by WHO met in Geneva, from 6 to 12 July 1965. This revision was more radical than the Seventh but left unchanged the basic structure of the Classification and the general philosophy of classifying diseases, whenever possible, according to their etiology rather than a particular manifestation.
During the years that the Seventh and Eighth Revisions of the ICD were in force, the use of the ICD for indexing hospital medical records increased rapidly and some countries prepared national adaptations which provided the additional detail needed for this application of the ICD.
In the US, a group of consultants was asked to study the 8th revision of ICD (ICD-8a) for its applicability to various users in the United States. This group recommended that further detail be provided for coding hospital and morbidity data. The American Hospital Association's "Advisory Committee to the Central Office on ICDA" developed the needed adaptation proposals, resulting in the publication of the International Classification of Diseases, Adapted (ICDA). In 1968, the United States Public Health Service published the International Classification of Diseases, Adapted, 8th Revision for use in the United States (ICDA-8a). Beginning in 1968, ICDA-8a served as the basis for coding diagnostic data for both official morbidity [and mortality] statistics in the United States.
The International Conference for the Ninth Revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries, and Causes of Death, convened by WHO, met in Geneva from 30 September to 6 October 1975. In the discussions leading up to the conference, it had originally been intended that there should be little change other than updating of the classification. This was mainly because of the expense of adapting data processing systems each time the classification was revised.
There had been an enormous growth of interest in the ICD and ways had to be found of responding to this, partly by modifying the classification itself and partly by introducing special coding provisions. A number of representations were made by specialist bodies which had become interested in using the ICD for their own statistics. Some subject areas in the classification were regarded as inappropriately arranged and there was considerable pressure for more detail and for adaptation of the classification to make it more relevant for the evaluation of medical care, by classifying conditions to the chapters concerned with the part of the body affected rather than to those dealing with the underlying generalized disease.
At the other end of the scale, there were representations from countries and areas where a detailed and sophisticated classification was irrelevant, but which nevertheless needed a classification based on the ICD in order to assess their progress in health care and in the control of disease. A field test with a bi-axial classification approach—one axis (criterion) for anatomy, with another for etiology—showed the impracticability of such approach for routine use.
The final proposals presented to and accepted by the Conference in 1978 retained the basic structure of the ICD, although with much additional detail at the level of the four digit subcategories, and some optional five digit subdivisions. For the benefit of users not requiring such detail, care was taken to ensure that the categories at the three digit level were appropriate.
For the benefit of users wishing to produce statistics and indexes oriented towards medical care, the 9th Revision included an optional alternative method of classifying diagnostic statements, including information about both an underlying general disease and a manifestation in a particular organ or site. This system became known as the 'dagger and asterisk system' and is retained in the Tenth Revision. A number of other technical innovations were included in the Ninth Revision, aimed at increasing its flexibility for use in a variety of situations.
It was eventually replaced by ICD-10, the version currently in use by the WHO and most countries. Given the widespread expansion in the tenth revision, it is not possible to convert ICD-9 data sets directly into ICD-10 data sets, although some tools are available to help guide users.
Publication of ICD-9 without IP restrictions in a world with evolving electronic data systems led to a range of products based on ICD-9, such as MeDRA or the Read directory.
ICPM
When ICD-9 was published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Classification of Procedures in Medicine (ICPM) was also developed (1975) and published (1978). The ICPM surgical procedures fascicle was originally created by the United States, based on its adaptations of ICD (called ICDA), which had contained a procedure classification since 1962. ICPM is published separately from the ICD disease classification as a series of supplementary documents called fascicles (bundles or groups of items). Each fascicle contains a classification of modes of laboratory, radiology, surgery, therapy, and other diagnostic procedures. Many countries have adapted and translated the ICPM in parts or as a whole and are using it with amendments since then.
ICD-9-CM
"International Classification of Diseases, Clinical Modification" (ICD-9-CM) is an adaption created by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and used in assigning diagnostic and procedure codes associated with inpatient, outpatient, and physician office utilization in the United States. The ICD-9-CM is based on the ICD-9 but provides for additional morbidity detail. It is updated annually on October 1.
It consists of two or three volumes:
The NCHS and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are the U.S. governmental agencies responsible for overseeing all changes and modifications to the ICD-9-CM.
Work on ICD-10 began in 1983, and the new revision was endorsed by the Forty-third World Health Assembly in May 1990. The latest version came into use in WHO Member States starting in 1994. The classification system allows more than 155,000 different codes and permits tracking of many new diagnoses and procedures, a significant expansion on the 17,000 codes available in ICD-9.
Adoption was relatively swift in most of the world. Several materials are made available online by WHO to facilitate its use, including a manual, training guidelines, a browser, and files for download. Some countries have adapted the international standard, such as the "ICD-10-AM" published in Australia in 1998 (also used in New Zealand), and the "ICD-10-CA" introduced in Canada in 2000.
ICD-10-CM
Adoption of ICD-10-CM was slow in the United States. Since 1979, the US had required ICD-9-CM codes for Medicare and Medicaid claims, and most of the rest of the American medical industry followed suit. On 1 January 1999 the ICD-10 (without clinical extensions) was adopted for reporting mortality, but ICD-9-CM was still used for morbidity. Meanwhile, NCHS received permission from the WHO to create a clinical modification of the ICD-10, and has production of all these systems:
On 21 August 2008, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed new code sets to be used for reporting diagnoses and procedures on health care transactions. Under the proposal, the ICD-9-CM code sets would be replaced with the ICD-10-CM code sets, effective 1 October 2013. On 17 April 2012 the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a proposed rule that would delay, from 1 October 2013 to 1 October 2014, the compliance date for the ICD-10-CM and PCS. Once again, Congress delayed implementation date to 1 October 2015, after it was inserted into "Doc Fix" Bill without debate over objections of many.
Revisions to ICD-10-CM Include:
ICD-10-CA
ICD-10-CA is a clinical modification of ICD-10 developed by the Canadian Institute for Health Information for morbidity classification in Canada. ICD-10-CA applies beyond acute hospital care, and includes conditions and situations that are not diseases but represent risk factors to health, such as occupational and environmental factors, lifestyle and psycho-social circumstances.
The eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, or the ICD-11, is almost five times as big as the ICD-10. It was created following a decade of development involving over 300 specialists from 55 countries. Following an alpha version in May 2011 and a beta draft in May 2012, a stable version of the ICD-11 was released on 18 June 2018, and officially endorsed by all WHO members during the 72nd World Health Assembly on 25 May 2019.
For the ICD-11, the WHO decided to differentiate between the core of the system and its derived specialty versions, such as the ICD-O for oncology. As such, the collection of all ICD entities is called the Foundation Component. From this common core, subsets can be derived. The primary derivative of the Foundation is called the ICD-11 MMS, and it is this system that is commonly referred to and recognized as "the ICD-11". MMS stands for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics.
ICD-11 comes with an implementation package that includes transition tables from and to ICD-10, a translation tool, a coding tool, web-services, a manual, training material, and more. All tools are accessible after self-registration from the Maintenance Platform.
The ICD-11 will "officially" come into effect on 1 January 2022, although the WHO admitted that "not many countries are likely to adapt that quickly". In the United States, the advisory body of the Secretary of Health and Human Services has given an expected release year of 2025, but if a clinical modification is determined to be needed (similar to the ICD-10-CM), this could become 2027.
In the United States, the U.S. Public Health Service published "The International Classification of Diseases, Adapted for Indexing of Hospital Records and Operation Classification (ICDA)," completed in 1962 and expanding the ICD-7 in a number of areas to more completely meet the indexing needs of hospitals. The U.S. Public Health Service later published the "Eighth Revision, International Classification of Diseases, Adapted for Use in the United States," commonly referred to as ICDA-8, for official national morbidity and mortality statistics. This was followed by the "ICD, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification", known as ICD-9-CM, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and used by hospitals and other healthcare facilities to better describe the clinical picture of the patient. The diagnosis component of ICD-9-CM is completely consistent with ICD-9 codes, and remains the data standard for reporting morbidity. National adaptations of the ICD-10 progressed to incorporate both clinical code (ICD-10-CM) and procedure code (ICD-10-PCS) with the revisions completed in 2003. In 2009, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it would begin using ICD-10 on April 1, 2010, with full compliance by all involved parties by 2013.
However, the US extended the deadline twice and did not formally require transitioning to ICD-10-CM (for most clinical encounters) until October 1, 2015.
The years for which causes of death in the United States have been classified by each revision as follows:
Cause of death on United States death certificates, statistically compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), are coded in the ICD, which does not include codes for human and system factors commonly called medical errors.
The ICD includes a section classifying mental and behavioral disorders (). This has developed alongside the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association and the two manuals seek to use the same codes. The WHO is revising their classifications in these sections as part the development of the ICD-11 (scheduled for 2018), and an "International Advisory Group" has been established to guide this. Section F66 of the ICD-10 deals with classifications of psychological and behavioural disorders that are associated with sexual development and orientation. It explicitly states that "sexual orientation by itself is not to be considered a disorder," in line with the DSM and other classifications that recognise homosexuality as a normal variation in human sexuality. The Working Group has reported that there is "no evidence that [these classifications] are clinically useful" and recommended that section F66 be deleted for the ICD-11.
An international survey of psychiatrists in 66 countries comparing use of the ICD-10 and DSM-IV found that the former was more often used for clinical diagnosis while the latter was more valued for research. The ICD is actually the official system for the US, although many mental health professionals do not realize this due to the dominance of the DSM. A psychologist has stated: "Serious problems with the clinical utility of both the ICD and the DSM are widely acknowledged."
Note: Since adoption of ICD-10 CM in the US, several online tools have been mushrooming. They all refer to that particular modification and thus are not linked here.
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Integral domain
In mathematics, specifically abstract algebra, an integral domain is a nonzero commutative ring in which the product of any two nonzero elements is nonzero. Integral domains are generalizations of the ring of integers and provide a natural setting for studying divisibility. In an integral domain, every nonzero element "a" has the cancellation property, that is, if , an equality implies .
"Integral domain" is defined almost universally as above, but there is some variation. This article follows the convention that rings have a multiplicative identity, generally denoted 1, but some authors do not follow this, by not requiring integral domains to have a multiplicative identity. Noncommutative integral domains are sometimes admitted. This article, however, follows the much more usual convention of reserving the term "integral domain" for the commutative case and using "domain" for the general case including noncommutative rings.
Some sources, notably Lang, use the term entire ring for integral domain.
Some specific kinds of integral domains are given with the following chain of class inclusions:
An "integral domain" is basically defined as a nonzero commutative ring in which the product of any two nonzero elements is nonzero. This definition may be reformulated in a number of equivalent definitions :
A fundamental property of integral domains is that every subring of a field is an integral domain, and that, conversely, given any integral domain, one may construct a field that contains it as a subring, the field of fractions. This characterization may be viewed as a further equivalent definition:
The following rings are "not" integral domains.
In this section, "R" is an integral domain.
Given elements "a" and "b" of "R", one says that "a" "divides" "b", or that "a" is a "divisor" of "b", or that "b" is a "multiple" of "a", if there exists an element "x" in "R" such that "ax" = "b".
The "units" of "R" are the elements that divide 1; these are precisely the invertible elements in "R". Units divide all other elements.
If "a" divides "b" and "b" divides "a", then "a" and "b" are associated elements or associates. Equivalently, "a" and "b" are associates if "a" = "ub" for some unit "u".
An "irreducible element" is a nonzero non-unit that cannot be written as a product of two non-units.
A nonzero non-unit "p" is a "prime element" if, whenever "p" divides a product "ab", then "p" divides "a" or "p" divides "b". Equivalently, an element "p" is prime if and only if the principal ideal ("p") is a nonzero prime ideal.
Both notions of irreducible elements and prime elements generalize the ordinary definition of prime numbers in the ring formula_58 if one considers as prime the negative primes.
Every prime element is irreducible. The converse is not true in general: for example, in the quadratic integer ring formula_59 the element 3 is irreducible (if it factored nontrivially, the factors would each have to have norm 3, but there are no norm 3 elements since formula_60 has no integer solutions), but not prime (since 3 divides formula_61 without dividing either factor). In a unique factorization domain (or more generally, a GCD domain), an irreducible element is a prime element.
While unique factorization does not hold in formula_59, there is unique factorization of ideals. See Lasker–Noether theorem.
The field of fractions "K" of an integral domain "R" is the set of fractions "a"/"b" with "a" and "b" in "R" and "b" ≠ 0 modulo an appropriate equivalence relation, equipped with the usual addition and multiplication operations. It is "the smallest field containing "R" " in the sense that there is an injective ring homomorphism such that any injective ring homomorphism from "R" to a field factors through "K". The field of fractions of the ring of integers formula_1 is the field of rational numbers formula_92 The field of fractions of a field is isomorphic to the field itself.
Integral domains are characterized by the condition that they are reduced (that is "x"2 = 0 implies "x" = 0) and irreducible (that is there is only one minimal prime ideal). The former condition ensures that the nilradical of the ring is zero, so that the intersection of all the ring's minimal primes is zero. The latter condition is that the ring have only one minimal prime. It follows that the unique minimal prime ideal of a reduced and irreducible ring is the zero ideal, so such rings are integral domains. The converse is clear: an integral domain has no nonzero nilpotent elements, and the zero ideal is the unique minimal prime ideal.
This translates, in algebraic geometry, into the fact that the coordinate ring of an affine algebraic set is an integral domain if and only if the algebraic set is an algebraic variety.
More generally, a commutative ring is an integral domain if and only if its spectrum is an integral affine scheme.
The characteristic of an integral domain is either 0 or a prime number.
If "R" is an integral domain of prime characteristic "p", then the Frobenius endomorphism "f"("x") = "x""p" is injective.
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Interrupt latency
In computing, interrupt latency is the time that elapses from when an interrupt is generated to when the source of the interrupt is serviced. For many operating systems, devices are serviced as soon as the device's interrupt handler is executed. Interrupt latency may be affected by microprocessor design, interrupt controllers, interrupt masking, and the operating system's (OS) interrupt handling methods.
There is usually a trade-off between interrupt latency, throughput, and processor utilization. Many of the techniques of CPU and OS design that improve interrupt latency will decrease throughput and increase processor utilization. Techniques that increase throughput may increase interrupt latency and increase processor utilization. Lastly, trying to reduce processor utilization may increase interrupt latency and decrease throughput.
Minimum interrupt latency is largely determined by the interrupt controller circuit and its configuration. They can also affect the jitter in the interrupt latency, which can drastically affect the real-time schedulability of the system. The Intel APIC architecture is well known for producing a huge amount of interrupt latency jitter.
Maximum interrupt latency is largely determined by the methods an OS uses for interrupt handling. For example, most processors allow programs to disable interrupts, putting off the execution of interrupt handlers, in order to protect critical sections of code. During the execution of such a critical section, all interrupt handlers that cannot execute safely within a critical section are blocked (they save the minimum amount of information required to restart the interrupt handler after all critical sections have exited). So the interrupt latency for a blocked interrupt is extended to the end of the critical section, plus any interrupts with equal and higher priority that arrived while the block was in place.
Many computer systems require low interrupt latencies, especially embedded systems that need to control machinery in real-time. Sometimes these systems use a real-time operating system (RTOS). An RTOS makes the promise that no more than a specified maximum amount of time will pass between executions of subroutines. In order to do this, the RTOS must also guarantee that interrupt latency will never exceed a predefined maximum.
Advanced interrupt controllers implement a multitude of hardware features in order to minimize the overhead during context switches and the effective interrupt latency. These include features like:
Also, there are many other methods hardware may use to help lower the requirements for shorter interrupt latency in order to make a given interrupt latency tolerable in a situation. These include buffers, and flow control. For example, most network cards implement transmit and receive ring buffers, interrupt rate limiting, and hardware flow control. Buffers allow data to be stored until it can be transferred, and flow control allows the network card to pause communications without having to discard data if the buffer is full.
Modern hardware also implements interrupt rate limiting. This helps prevent interrupt storms or live-locks by having the hardware wait a programmable minimum amount of time between each interrupt it generates. Interrupt rate limiting reduces the amount of time spent servicing interrupts, allowing the processor to spend more time doing useful work. Exceeding this time results in a soft (recoverable) or hard (non-recoverable) error.
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LGBT in Islam
Attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and their experiences in the Muslim world have been influenced by its religious, legal, social, political, and cultural history.
The Quran narrates the story of the "people of Lot" destroyed by the wrath of God because the men engaged in lustful carnal acts between themselves. Some hadith collections also condemn homosexual and transgender acts, prescribing death penalty for male homosexual intercourse.
Homosexual acts are forbidden in traditional Islamic jurisprudence and are liable to different punishments, including the death penalty, depending on the situation and legal school. However, homosexual relationships were generally tolerated in pre-modern Islamic societies, and historical records suggest that these laws were invoked infrequently, mainly in cases of rape or other "exceptionally blatant infringement on public morals". There is little evidence of homosexual practice in Islamic societies for the first century and a half of the Islamic era. Homoerotic themes were cultivated in poetry and other literary genres written in major languages of the Muslim world from the eighth century into the modern era. The conceptions of homosexuality found in classical Islamic texts resemble the traditions of Graeco-Roman antiquity rather than the modern understanding of sexual orientation. Public attitudes toward homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere in the Muslim world underwent a marked negative change starting from the 19th century through the gradual spread of Islamic fundamentalism such as Wahhabism and under the influence of the sexual notions and restrictive norms prevalent in Europe at the time: a number of Muslim-majority countries have retained criminal penalties for homosexual acts enacted under British and Soviet rule.
In recent times, extreme prejudice against homosexuals persists, both socially and legally, in much of the Islamic world, exacerbated by increasingly conservative attitudes and the rise of Islamist movements. In Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, parts of Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, homosexual activity carries the death penalty or prison sentences. In other countries, such as Algeria, Bangladesh, Chad, Malaysia, Maldives, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, and Syria, it is illegal, and penalties may be imposed. Same-sex sexual intercourse is legal in Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Mali, Niger, Tajikistan, Turkey, most of Indonesia, the West Bank (State of Palestine), and Northern Cyprus. Homosexual relations between females are legal in Kuwait, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, but homosexual acts between males are illegal.
Most Muslim-majority countries and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have opposed moves to advance LGBT rights at the United Nations, in the General Assembly or the UNHRC. In May 2016, a group of 51 Muslim majority states blocked 11 gay and transgender organizations from attending the 2016 High Level Meeting on Ending AIDS. However, Albania and Sierra Leone have signed a UN Declaration supporting LGBT rights. LGBT anti-discrimination laws have been enacted in Albania, Kosovo, and Northern Cyprus. There are also several organizations for LGBT Muslims either to reform their sexual orientations or to support LGBT rights for them.
The Quran contains several allusions to homosexual activity, which has prompted considerable exegetical and legal commentary over the centuries. The subject is most clearly addressed in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (seven verses) after the city inhabitants demand sexual access to the messengers sent by God to the prophet Lot (or Lut). The Quranic narrative largely conforms to that found in Genesis. In one passage the Quran says that the men "solicited his guests of him" (), using an expression that parallels phrasing used to describe the attempted seduction of Joseph, and in multiple passages they are accused of "coming with lust" to men instead of women (or their wives). The Quran terms this an abomination or fahisha () unprecedented in the history of the world:
Later exegetical literature built on these verses as writers attempted to give their own views as to what went on; and there was general agreement among exegetes that the "abomination" alluded to by the Quranic passages was attempted sodomy (specifically anal intercourse) between men. Some Muslim academics disagree with this interpretation, arguing that the people of Lot were destroyed not because of participation in same-sex acts, but because of misdeeds which included refusing to worship one God, disregarding the authority of the Prophets, and attempting to rape the travelers, a crime made even worse by the fact that the travelers were under Lot's protection and hospitality.
The sins of the people of Lut () subsequently became proverbial and the Arabic words for the act of anal sex between men such as liwat () and for a person who performs such acts () both derive from his name, although Lut was not the one demanding sex.
Only one passage in the Quran prescribes a strictly legal position. It is not restricted to homosexual behaviour, however, and deals more generally with "zina" (illicit sexual intercourse):
Most exegetes hold that these verses refer to illicit heterosexual relationships, although a minority view attributed to the Mu'tazilite scholar Abu Muslim al-Isfahani interpreted them as referring to homosexual relations. This view was widely rejected by medieval scholars, but has found some acceptance in modern times.
Some Quranic verses describing the paradise refer to "immortal boys" (56:17, 76:19) or "young men" (52:24) who serve wine to the blessed. Although the "tafsir" literature does not interpret this as a homoerotic allusion, the connection was made in other literary genres, mostly humorously. For example, the Abbasid-era poet Abu Nuwas wrote:
Jurists of the Hanafi school took up the question seriously, considering, but ultimately rejecting the suggestion that homosexual pleasures were, like wine, forbidden in this world but enjoyed in the afterlife.
The hadith (sayings and actions attributed to Muhammad) show that homosexual behaviour was not unknown in seventh-century Arabia. However, given that the Quran did not specify the punishment of homosexual sodomy, Islamic jurists increasingly turned to several "more explicit" hadiths in an attempt to find guidance on appropriate punishment.
While there are no reports relating to homosexuality in the best known hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim, other canonical collections record a number of condemnations of the "act of the people of Lot" (male-to-male anal intercourse). For example, Abu `Isa Muhammad ibn `Isa at-Tirmidhi (compiling the Sunan al-Tirmidhi around C.E.884) wrote that Muhammad had indeed prescribed the death penalty for both the active and also the passive partner:
Ibn al-Jawzi (1114–1200) writing in the 12th century claimed that Muhammad had cursed "sodomites" in several hadith, and had recommended the death penalty for both the active and passive partners in homosexual acts.
Al-Nuwayri (1272–1332) in his "Nihaya" reports that Muhammad is "alleged to have said what he feared most for his community were the practices of the people of Lot (he seems to have expressed the same idea in regard to wine and female seduction)."
Other hadiths seem to permit homoerotic feelings as long as they are not translated into action. One hadith acknowledges homoerotic temptation and warns against it: "Do not gaze at the beardless youths, for verily they have eyes more tempting than the "houris"" or "... for verily they resemble the "houris"". These beardless youths are also described as wearing sumptuous robes and having perfumed hair.
In addition, there is a number of "purported (but mutually inconsistent) reports" ("athar") of punishments of sodomy ordered by early caliphs. Abu Bakr apparently recommended toppling a wall on the culprit, or else burning him alive, while Ali bin Abi Talib is said to have ordered death by stoning for one sodomite and had another thrown head-first from the top of a minaret—according to Ibn Abbas, the latter punishment must be followed by stoning.
There are, however, fewer hadith mentioning homosexual behavior in women;
but punishment (if any) for lesbianism was not clarified.
In Islam, the term mukhannathun is used to describe gender-variant people, usually male-to-female transgender. Neither this term nor the equivalent for "eunuch" occurs in the Quran, but the term does appear in the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad, which have a secondary status to the central text. Moreover, within Islam, there is a tradition of the elaboration and refinement of extended religious doctrines through scholarship. This doctrine contains a passage by the scholar and hadith collector An-Nawawi:A mukhannath is the one ("male") who carries in his movements, in his appearance and in his language the characteristics of a woman. There are two types; the first is the one in whom these characteristics are innate, he did not put them on by himself, and therein is no guilt, no blame and no shame, as long as he does not perform any (illicit) act or exploit it for money (prostitution etc.). The second type acts like a woman out of immoral purposes and he is the sinner and blameworthy.The hadith collection of Bukhari (compiled in the 9th century from earlier oral traditions) includes a report regarding "mukhannathun", effeminate men who were granted access to secluded women's quarters and engaged in other non-normative gender behavior: This hadiths attributed to Muhammad's wives, a "mukhannath" in question expressed his appreciation of a woman's body and described it for the benefit of another man. According to one hadith, this incident was prompted by a "mukhannath" servant of Muhammad's wife Umm Salama commenting upon the body of a woman and following that, Muhammad cursed the "mukhannathun" and their female equivalents, "mutarajjilat" and ordered his followers to remove them from their homes.
According to Everett Rowson, none of the sources state that Muhammad banished more than two "mukhannathun", and it is not clear to what extent the action was taken because of their breaking of gender rules in itself or because of the "perceived damage to social institutions from their activities as matchmakers and their corresponding access to women".
The paucity of concrete prescriptions to be derived from hadith and the contradictory nature of information about the actions of early authorities resulted in lack of agreement among classical jurists as to how homosexual activity should be treated.
Broadly, traditional Islamic law took the view that homosexual activity could not be legally sanctioned because it takes place outside religiously-recognised marriages.
Most legal schools treat homosexual intercourse with penetration similarly to unlawful heterosexual intercourse under the rubric of "zina", but there are differences of opinion with respect to methods of punishment. Some legal schools "prescribed capital punishment for sodomy, but others opted only for a relatively mild discretionary punishment." The Hanbalites are the most severe among Sunni schools, insisting on capital punishment for anal sex in all cases, while the other schools generally restrict punishment to flagellation with or without banishment, unless the culprit is "muhsan" (Muslim free married adult), and Hanafis often suggest no physical punishment at all, leaving the choice to the judge's discretion. The founder of the Hanafi school Abu Hanifa refused to recognize the analogy between sodomy and "zina", although his two principal students disagreed with him on this point. The Hanafi scholar Abu Bakr Al-Jassas (d. 981 AD/370 AH) argued that the two hadiths on killing homosexuals "are not reliable by any means and no legal punishment can be prescribed based on them". Where capital punishment is prescribed and a particular method is recommended, the methods range from stoning (Hanbali, Maliki), to the sword (some Hanbalites and Shafi'ites), or leaving it to the court to choose between several methods, including throwing the culprit off a high building (Shi'ite).
For unclear reasons, the treatment of homosexuality in Twelver Shia jurisprudence is generally harsher than in Sunni fiqh, while Zaydi and Isma'ili Shia jurists took positions similar to the Sunnis. Where flogging is prescribed, there is a tendency for indulgence and some recommend that the prescribed penalty should not be applied in full, with Ibn Hazm reducing the number of strokes to 10. There was debate as to whether the active and passive partners in anal sex should be punished equally. Beyond penetrative anal sex, there was "general agreement" that "other homosexual acts (including any between females) were lesser offenses, subject only to discretionary punishment." Some jurists viewed sexual intercourse as possible only for an individual who possesses a phallus; hence those definitions of sexual intercourse that rely on the entry of as little of the corona of the phallus into a partner's orifice. Since women do not possess a phallus and cannot have intercourse with one another, they are, in this interpretation, physically incapable of committing zinā.
Since a "hadd" punishment for "zina" requires testimony from four witnesses to the actual act of penetration or a confession from the accused repeated four times, the legal criteria for the prescribed harsh punishments of homosexual acts were very difficult to fulfill. The debates of classical jurists are "to a large extent theoretical, since homosexual relations have always been tolerated" in pre-modern Islamic societies. While it is difficult to ascertain to what extent the legal sanctions were enforced in different times and places, historical record suggests that the laws were invoked mainly in cases of rape or other "exceptionally blatant infringement on public morals". Documented instances of prosecution for homosexual acts are rare, and those which followed legal procedure prescribed by Islamic law are even rarer.
Quranists or Ahle Quran are Muslims who are Quran-centric or view the Qur'an as the sole Islamic source which is canonical. Although individual adherents of Ahl al-Qur'an may not have a collective stance on interpretations, there is some synchroneity that although suras such as Ash-Shu'ara which castigate physical gay acts, adjucation on the matter is transmundane. However, there are also Quranist LGBT rights advocates such as Irshad Manji.
In Kecia Ali's book, she cites that "contemporary scholars disagree sharply about the Qur'anic perspective on same-sex intimacy." One scholar represents the conventional perspective by arguing that the Qur'an "is very explicit in its condemnation of homosexuality leaving scarcely any loophole for a theological accommodation of homosexuality in Islam." Another scholar argues that "the Qur'an does not address homosexuality or homosexuals explicitly." Overall, Ali says that "there is no one Muslim perspective on anything."
Many Muslim scholars have followed a "don't ask, don't tell" policy in regards to homosexuality in Islam, by treating the subject with passivity.
Mohamed El-Moctar El-Shinqiti, director of the Islamic Center of South Plains in Texas, has argued that "[even though] homosexuality is a grievous sin...[a] no legal punishment is stated in the Qur'an for homosexuality...[b] it is not reported that Prophet Muhammad has punished somebody for committing homosexuality...[c] there is no authentic hadith reported from the Prophet prescribing a punishment for the homosexuals..." Classical hadith scholars such as Al-Bukhari, Yahya ibn Ma'in, Al-Nasa'i, Ibn Hazm, Al-Tirmidhi, and others have impugned the authenticity of hadith reporting these statements.
Egyptian Islamist journalist Muhammad Jalal Kishk also found no punishment for homosexual acts prescribed in the Quran, regarding the hadith that mentioned it as poorly attested. He did not approve of such acts, but believed that Muslims who abstained from sodomy would be rewarded by sex with youthful boys in paradise.
Faisal Kutty, a professor of Islamic law at Indiana-based Valparaiso University Law School and Toronto-based Osgoode Hall Law School, commented on the contemporary same-sex marriage debate in a March 27, 2014, essay in the Huffington Post. He acknowledged that while Islamic law iterations prohibits pre- and extra-marital as well as same-sex sexual activity, it does not attempt to "regulate feelings, emotions and urges, but only its translation into action that authorities had declared unlawful". Kutty, who teaches comparative law and legal reasoning, also wrote that many Islamic scholars have "even argued that homosexual tendencies themselves were not haram [prohibited] but had to be suppressed for the public good". He claimed that this may not be "what the LGBTQ community wants to hear", but that, "it reveals that even classical Islamic jurists struggled with this issue and had a more sophisticated attitude than many contemporary Muslims". Kutty, who in the past wrote in support of allowing Islamic principles in dispute resolution, also noted that "most Muslims have no problem extending full human rights to those—even Muslims—who live together 'in sin'". He argued that it therefore seems hypocritical to deny fundamental rights to same-sex couples. Moreover, he concurred with Islamic legal scholar Mohamed Fadel in arguing that this is not about changing Islamic marriage (nikah), but about making "sure that all citizens have access to the same kinds of public benefits".
Some modern day Muslim scholars, such as Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, argue for a different interpretation of the Lot narrative focusing not on the sexual act but on the infidelity of the tribe and their rejection of Lot's Prophethood. According to Kugle, "where the Qur'an treats same-sex acts, it condemns them only so far as they are exploitive or violent." More generally, Kugle notes that the Quran refers to four different levels of personality. One level is "genetic inheritance." The Qur'an refers to this level as one's "physical stamp" that "determines one's temperamental nature" including one's sexuality. One the basis of this reading of the Qur'an, Kugle asserts that homosexuality is "caused by divine will," so "homosexuals have no rational choice in their internal disposition to be attracted to same-sex mates." Kugle argues that if the classical commentators had seen "sexual orientation as an integral aspect of human personality," they would have read the narrative of Lot and his tribe "as addressing male rape of men in particular" and not as "addressing homosexuality in general." Kugle furthermore reads the Qur'an as holding "a positive assessment of diversity." Under this reading, Islam can be described as "a religion that positively assesses diversity in creation and in human societies," allowing gay and lesbian Muslims to view homosexuality as representing the "natural diversity in sexuality in human societies." A critique of Kugle's approach, interpretations and conclusions was published in 2016 by Mobeen Vaid.
In a 2012 book, Aisha Geissinger writes that there are "apparently irreconcilable Muslim standpoints on same-sex desires and acts," all of which claim "interpretative authenticity." One of these standpoints results from "queer-friendly" interpretations of the Lot story and the Quran. The Lot story is interpreted as condemning "rape and inhospitality rather than today's consensual same-sex relationships."
In their book "Islamic Law and Muslim Same-Sex Unions", Junaid Jahangir and Hussein Abdullatif argue that interpretations which view the Quranic narrative of the people of Lot and the derived classical notion of "liwat" as applying to same-sex relationships reflect the sociocultural norms and medical knowledge of societies that produced those interpretations. They further argue that the notion of "liwat" is compatible with the Quranic narrative, but not with the contemporary understanding of same-sex relationships based on love and shared responsibilities.
Abdessamad Dialmy in his 2010 article, "Sexuality and Islam," addressed "sexual norms defined by the sacred texts (Koran and Sunna)." He wrote that "sexual standards in Islam are paradoxical." The sacred texts "allow and actually are an enticement to the exercise of sexuality." However, they also "discriminate . . . between heterosexuality and homosexuality." Islam's paradoxical standards result in "the current back and forth swing of sexual practices between repression and openness." Dialmy sees a solution to this back and forth swing by a "reinterpretation of repressive holy texts."
Some Islamic & Western scholars argue that in the course of the Quranic Lot story, homosexuality in the modern sense is not addressed, but that the destruction of the "people of Lot" was a result of breaking the ancient hospitality law and sexual violence, in this case the attempted rape of men.
Societies in Islam have recognized "both erotic attraction and sexual behavior between members of the same sex". However, their attitudes about them have often been contradictory: "severe religious and legal sanctions" against homosexual behavior and at the same time "celebratory expressions" of erotic attraction. Homoeroticism was idealized in the form of poetry or artistic declarations of love from one man to another. Accordingly, the Arabic language had an appreciable vocabulary of homoerotic terms, with dozens of words just to describe types of male prostitutes. Schmitt (1992) identifies some twenty words in Arabic, Persian and Turkish to identify those who are penetrated. Other related Arabic words includes "Mukhannathun", "ma'bûn", "halaqī", "baghghā".
There is little evidence of homosexual practice in Islamic societies for the first century and a half of the Islamic era. Homoerotic poetry appears suddenly at the end of the 8th century CE, particularly in Baghdad in the work of Abu Nuwas (756–814), who became a master of all the contemporary genres of Arabic poetry. The famous author Jahiz tried to explain the abrupt change in attitudes toward homosexuality after the Abbasid Revolution by the arrival of the Abbasid army from Khurasan, who are said to have consoled themselves with male pages when they were forbidden to take their wives with them. The increased prosperity following the early conquests was accompanied by a "corruption of morals" in the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and it can be inferred that homosexual practice became more widespread during this time as a result of acculturation to foreign customs, such as the music and dance practiced by "mukhannathun", who were mostly foreign in origin. The Abbasid ruler Al-Amin (809–813) was said to have required slave women to be dressed in masculine clothing so he could be persuaded to have sex with them, and a broader fashion for "ghulamiyyat" (boy-like girls) is reflected in literature of the period. The same was said of Andalusian caliph al-Hakam II (915–976).
The conceptions of homosexuality found in classical Islamic texts resemble the traditions of classical Greece and those of ancient Rome, rather than the modern understanding of sexual orientation. It was expected that many mature men would be sexually attracted to both women and adolescent boys (with different views about the appropriate age range for the latter), and such men were expected to wish to play only an active role in homosexual intercourse once they reached adulthood. However, any confident assessment of the actual incidence of homosexual behavior remains elusive. Preference for homosexual over heterosexual relations was regarded as a matter of personal taste rather than a marker of homosexual identity in a modern sense. While playing an active role in homosexual relations carried no social stigma beyond that of licentious behavior, seeking to play a passive role was considered both unnatural and shameful for a mature man. Following Greek precedents, the Islamic medical tradition regarded as pathological only this latter case, and showed no concern for other forms of homosexual behavior.
During the early period, growth of a beard was considered to be the conventional age when an adolescent lost his homoerotic appeal, as evidenced by poetic protestations that the author still found his lover beautiful despite the growing beard. During later periods, the age of the stereotypical beloved became more ambiguous, and this prototype was often represented in Persian poetry by Turkish soldiers. This trend is illustrated by the story of Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030), the ruler of the Ghaznavid Empire, and his cupbearer Malik Ayaz. Their relationship, which was sketchily attested in contemporary sources, became a staple of Persian literature comparable to the story of Layla and Majnun. Poets used it to illustrate the power of love, pointing to Mahmud as an example of a man who becomes "a slave to his slave", while Malik Ayaz served as an example of the ideal beloved, and a model for purity in Sufi literature.
Other famous examples of homosexuality include the Aghlabid Emir Ibrahim II of Ifriqiya (ruled 875–902), who was said to have been surrounded by some sixty catamites, yet whom he was said to have treated in a most horrific manner. Caliph al-Mutasim in the 9th century and some of his successors were accused of homosexuality. The Christian martyr Pelagius of Córdoba was executed by Andalusian ruler Abd al-Rahman III because the boy refused his advances.
The 14th-century Iranian poet Obeid Zakani, in his scores of satirical stories and poems, has ridiculed the contradiction between the strict prohibitions of homosexuality on the one hand and its common practice on the other. Following is just an example from his Ressaleh Delgosha: “Two old men, who used to exchange sex since their very childhood, were making love on the top of a mosque’s minaret in the holy city of Qom. When both finished their turns, one told the other: “shameless practices have ruined our city.” The other man nodded and said, “You and I are the city’s blessed seniors, what then do you expect from others?”
Mehmed the Conqueror, the Ottoman sultan living in the 15th century, European sources say "who was known to have ambivalent sexual tastes, sent a eunuch to the house of Notaras, demanding that he supply his good-looking fourteen-year-old son for the Sultan's pleasure. When he refused, the Sultan instantly ordered the decapitation of Notaras, together with that of his son and his son-in-law; and their three heads … were placed on the banqueting table before him". Another youth Mehmed found attractive, and who was presumably more accommodating, was Radu III the Fair, the brother of the famous Vlad the Impaler, "Radu, a hostage in Istanbul whose good looks had caught the Sultan's fancy, and who was thus singled out to serve as one of his most favored pages." After the defeat of Vlad, Mehmed placed Radu on the throne of Wallachia as a vassal ruler. However, Turkish sources deny these stories.
According to the "Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World":
Whatever the legal strictures on sexual activity, the positive expression of male homoerotic sentiment in literature was accepted, and assiduously cultivated, from the late eighth century until modern times. First in Arabic, but later also in Persian, Turkish and Urdu, love poetry by men about boys more than competed with that about women, it overwhelmed it. Anecdotal literature reinforces this impression of general societal acceptance of the public celebration of male-male love (which hostile Western caricatures of Islamic societies in medieval and early modern times simply exaggerate).
European travellers remarked on the taste that Shah Abbas of Iran (1588-1629) had for wine and festivities, but also for attractive pages and cup-bearers. A painting by Riza Abbasi with homo-erotic qualities shows the ruler enjoying such delights.
"Homosexuality was a key symbolic issue throughout the Middle Ages in [Islamic] Iberia. As was customary everywhere until the nineteenth century, homosexuality was not viewed as a congenital disposition or 'identity'; the focus was on nonprocreative sexual practices, of which sodomy was the most controversial." For example, in "al-Andalus homosexual pleasures were much indulged by the intellectual and political elite. Evidence includes the behavior of rulers . . . who kept male harems." Although early Islamic writings such as the Quran expressed a mildly negative attitude towards homosexuality, laypersons usually apprehended the idea with indifference, if not admiration. Few literary works displayed hostility towards non-heterosexuality, apart from partisan statements and debates about types of love (which also occurred in heterosexual contexts). Khaled el-Rouayheb (2014) maintain that "much if not most of the extant love poetry of the period [16th to 18th century] is pederastic in tone, portraying an adult male poet's passionate love for a teenage boy".
El-Rouayheb suggests that even though religious scholars considered sodomy as an abhorrent sin, most of them did not genuinely believe that it was illicit to merely fall in love with a boy or expressing this love via poetry. In the secular society however, a male's desire to penetrate a desirable youth was seen as understandable, even if not lawful. On the other hand, men adopting the passive role were more subjected to stigma. The medical term "ubnah" qualified the pathological desire of a male to exclusively be on the receiving end of anal intercourse. Physician that theorized on "ubnah" includes Rhazes, who thought that it was correlated with small genitals and that a treatment was possible provided that the subject was deemed to be not too effeminate and the behavior not "prolonged". Dawud al-Antaki advanced that it could have been caused by an acidic substance embedded in the veins of the anus, causing itchiness and thus the need to seek relief.
In mystic writings of the medieval era, such as Sufi texts, it is "unclear whether the beloved being addressed is a teenage boy or God." European chroniclers censured "the indulgent attitudes to gay sex in the Caliphs' courts." Mustafa Akyol writes that "The Ottoman sultans, arguably, were social liberals compared with the contemporary Islamists of Turkey, let alone the Arab World."
The 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism such as Wahhabism, which came to call for stricter adherence to the Hadith. In 1744, Muhammad bin Saud, the tribal ruler of the town of Diriyah, endorsed ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s mission and the two swore an oath to establish together a state run according to true Islamic principles. For the next seventy years, until the dismantlement of the first state in 1818, the Wahhabis struck terror into people from Damascus to Baghdad. Homosexuality, which had been largely tolerated in the Ottoman Empire, also became criminalized, and those found guilty were thrown to their deaths from the top of the minarets.
Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire was decriminalized in 1858, as part of wider reforms during the Tanzimat. However, authors Lapidus and Salaymeh write that before the 19th century Ottoman society had been open and welcoming to homosexuals and that by the 1850s via European influence they began censoring homosexuality in their society. In Iran, several hundred political opponents were executed in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution on accusations of homosexuality, and homosexual intercourse is declared a capital offense in Iran's "Islamic Penal Code", enacted in 1991. Though the grounds for execution in Iran are difficult to track, there is evidence that several people were hanged for homosexual behavior in 2005-2006 and in 2016, in some cases on dubious charges of rape. In some countries like Iran and Iraq the dominant discourse is that Western imperialism has spread homosexuality. In Egypt, though homosexuality is not explicitly criminalized, it has been widely prosecuted under vaguely formulated "morality" laws, and under the current rule of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi arrests of LGBT individuals have risen fivefold, apparently reflecting an effort to appeal to conservatives. In Uzbekistan, an anti-sodomy law, passed after World War II with the goal of increasing the birth rate, was invoked in 2004 against a gay rights activist, who was imprisoned and subjected to extreme abuse. In Iraq, where homosexuality is legal, the breakdown of law and order following the Second Gulf War allowed Islamist militias and vigilantes to act on their prejudice against gays, with ISIS gaining particular notoritety for the gruesome acts of anti-LGBT violence committed under its rule of parts of Syria and Iraq. Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle has argued that, while "Muslims commemorate the early days of Islam when they were oppressed as a marginalized few," many of them now forget their history and fail to protect "Muslims who are gay, transgender and lesbian."
According to Georg Klauda, in the 19th and early 20th century, homosexual sexual contact was viewed as relatively commonplace in parts of the Middle East, owing in part to widespread sex segregation, which made heterosexual encounters outside marriage more difficult. Klauda states that "Countless writers and artists such as André Gide, Oscar Wilde, Edward M. Forster, and Jean Genet made pilgrimages in the 19th and 20th centuries from homophobic Europe to Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, and various other Arab countries, where homosexual sex was not only met without any discrimination or subcultural ghettoization whatsoever, but rather, additionally as a result of rigid segregation of the sexes, seemed to be available on every corner." Views about homosexuality have never been universal all across the Islamic world. With reference to the Muslim world more broadly, Tilo Beckers writes that "Besides the endogenous changes in the interpretation of scriptures having a deliberalizing influence that came from within Islamic cultures, the rejection of homosexuality in Islam gained momentum through the exogenous effects of European colonialism, that is, the import of Western cultural understandings of homosexuality as a perversion." University of Münster professor Thomas Bauer points that even though there were many orders of stoning for homosexuality, there is not a single proven case of it being carried out. Bauer continues that "Although contemporary Islamist movements decry homosexuality as a form of Western decadence, the current prejudice against it among Muslim publics stems from an amalgamation of traditional Islamic legal theory with popular notions that were imported from Europe during the colonial era, when Western military and economic superiority made Western notions of sexuality particularly influential in the Muslim world."
In some Muslim-majority countries, current anti-LGBT laws were enacted by United Kingdom or Soviet organs and retained following independence. The 1860 Indian Penal Code, which included an anti-sodomy statute, was used as a basis of penal laws in other parts of the British empire. However, as Dynes and Donaldson point out, North African countries under French colonial tutelage lacked antihomosexual laws which were only born afterwards, with the full weight of Islamic opinion descending on those who, on the model of the gay liberationists of the West, would seek to make "homosexuality" (above all, adult men taking passive roles) publicly respectable. Among former British colonies, only Jordan, Bahrain, and (more recently) India abolished the criminal penalties for consensual homosexual acts introduced under colonial rule. Persecution of homosexuals has been exacerbated in recent decades by a rise in Islamic fundamentalism and the emergence of the gay-rights movement in the West, which allowed Islamists to paint homosexuality as a noxious Western import.
While friendship between men and boys is often described in sexual ways in classical Islamic literature, Khaled El-Rouayheb and Oliver Leaman have argued that it would be misleading to conclude from this that homosexuality was widespread in practice. Such literature tended to use transgressive motifs alluding to what is forbidden, in particular homosexuality and wine. Greek homoerotic motifs may have accurately described practices in ancient Greece, but in their Islamic adaptations they tended to play a satirical or metaphorical rather than descriptive role. At the same time, many miniatures, especially from Ottoman Turkey, contain explicit depictions of pederasty, suggesting that the practice enjoyed a certain degree of popularity. A number of pre-modern texts discuss the possibility of sexual exploitation faced by young boys in educational institutions and warn teachers to take precautions against it.
In modern times, despite the formal disapproval of religious authority, the segregation of women in Muslim societies and the strong emphasis on male virility leads adolescent males and unmarried young men to seek sexual outlets with boys younger than themselves—in one study in Morocco, with boys in the age-range 7 to 13. Men have sex with other males so long as they are the penetrators and their partners are boys, or in some cases effeminate men.
"Liwat" can therefore be regarded as "temptation", and anal intercourse is not seen as repulsively unnatural so much as dangerously attractive. They believe "one has to avoid getting buggered precisely in order not to acquire a taste for it and thus become addicted." Not all sodomy is homosexual: one Moroccan sociologist, in a study of sex education in his native country, notes that for many young men heterosexual sodomy is considered better than vaginal penetration, and female prostitutes likewise report the demand for anal penetration from their (male) clients.
In regards to homosexual intercourse, it is the enjoyment that is considered bad, rather than simply the penetration. Deep shame attaches to the passive partner. Similar sexual sociologies are reported for other Muslim societies from North Africa to Pakistan and the Far East. In Afghanistan in 2009, the British Army was forced to commission a report into the sexuality of the local men after British soldiers reported the discomfort at witnessing adult males involved in sexual relations with boys. The report stated that though illegal, there was a tradition of such relationships in the country, known as "bacha bazi" or "boy play", and that it was especially strong around North Afghanistan.
According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) seven countries still retain capital punishment for homosexual behavior: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Sudan, and northern Nigeria. In United Arab Emirates it is a capital offense. In Qatar, Algeria, Uzbekistan, and the Maldives, homosexuality is punished with time in prison or a fine. This has led to controversy regarding Qatar, which is due to stage the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Human rights groups have questioned the awarding in 2010 of the right to host the competition, due to the possibility that gay football fans may be jailed. In response, Sepp Blatter, head of FIFA, joked that they would have to "refrain from sexual activity" while in Qatar. He later withdrew the remarks after condemnation from rights groups.
Same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Chad since August 1, 2017 under a new penal code. Before that, homosexuality between consenting adults had not been criminalized ever prior to this law.
In Egypt, openly gay men have been prosecuted under general public morality laws. (See Cairo 52.) "Sexual relations between consenting adult persons of the same sex in private are not prohibited as such. However, the Law on the Combating of Prostitution, and the law against debauchery have been used to imprison gay men in recent years." An Egyptian TV host was recently sentenced to a year in prison for interviewing a gay man in January 2019.
Islamic state has decreed capital punishment for gay people. They have executed more than two dozen men and women for suspected homosexual activity, including several thrown off the top of buildings in highly publicized executions.
In India, which has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, and where Muslims form a large minority, the largest Islamic seminary (Darul Uloom Deoband) has vehemently opposed recent government moves to abrogate and liberalize laws from the British Raj era that banned homosexuality. As of September 2018, homosexuality is no longer a criminal act in India, and most of the religious groups withdrew their opposing claims against it in the Supreme Court.
In Iraq, homosexuality is allowed by the government, but terrorist groups often carry out illegal executions of gay people. Saddam Hussein was "unbothered by sexual mores." Ali Hili reports that "since the 2003 invasion more than 700 people have been killed because of their sexuality." He calls Iraq the "most dangerous place in the world for sexual minorities."
In Jordan, where homosexuality is legal, "gay hangouts have been raided or closed on bogus charges, such as serving alcohol illegally." Despite this legality, social attitudes towards homosexuality are still hostile and hateful.
In Pakistan, its law is a mixture of both Anglo-Saxon colonial law as well as Islamic law, both which proscribe criminal penalties for same-sex sexual acts. The Pakistan Penal Code of 1860, originally developed under colonialism, punishes sodomy with a possible prison sentence and has other provisions that impact the human rights of LGBT Pakistanis, under the guise of protecting public morality and order. Yet, the more likely situation for gay and bisexual men is sporadic police blackmail, harassment, fines, and jail sentences.
In Bangladesh, homosexual acts are illegal and punishable according to section 377. Due to the traditional mentality of the predominantly conservative Bangladeshi society, negative attitudes towards those in the LGBT community are high. In 2009 and 2013, the Bangladeshi Parliament refused to overturn Section 377.
In Saudi Arabia, the maximum punishment for homosexual acts is public execution by beheading or being thrown off of roofs.
In Malaysia, homosexual acts are illegal and punishable with jail, fine, deportation, whipping or castration. In October 2018, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad stated that Malaysia would not "copy" Western nations' approach towards LGBT rights, indicating that these countries were exhibiting a disregard for the institutions of the traditional family and marriage, as the value system in Malaysia is good. In May 2019, in response to the warning of George Clooney about intending to impose death penalty for homosexuals like Brunei, the Deputy Foreign Minister Marzuki Yahya pointed out that Malaysia does not kill gay people, and will not resort to killing sexual minorities. He also said, although such lifestyles deviate from Islam, the government would not impose such a punishment on the group.
In Indonesia, most parts of the country do not have a sodomy law and do not currently criminalize private, non-commercial homosexual acts among consenting adults, except in Aceh province and for Muslims in Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra province, where homosexuality is illegal for Muslims under Islamic Sharia law, and punishable by flogging. While not criminalising homosexuality, the country does not recognise same-sex marriage. In July 2015, the Minister of Religious Affairs stated that it is unacceptable in Indonesia, because strongly held religious norms speak strongly against it. According to some jurists, there should be death stoning penalty for homosexuals. While another group consider flogging with 100 lashes is the correct punishment.
In Turkey, homosexuality is legal, but "official censure can be fierce". A former interior minister, İdris Naim Şahin, called homosexuality an example of "dishonour, immorality and inhuman situations". Turkey held its 16th Gay Pride Parade in Istanbul on June 30, 2019.
As the latest addition in the list of criminalizing Muslim counties, Brunei's has implemented penalty for homosexuals within "Sharia Penal Code" in stages since 2014. It prescribes death by stoning as punishment for sex between men, and sex between women is punishable by caning or imprisonment. The sultanate currently has a moratorium in effect on death penalty.
In 2016, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) released its most recent "State Sponsored Homophobia Report". The report found that thirteen countries or regions impose the death penalty for "same-sex sexual acts" with reference to sharia-based laws. In Iran, according to article 129 and 131 there are up to 100 lashes of whip first three times and fourth time death penalty for lesbians. The death penalty is implemented nationwide in Brunei, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen; implemented locally in Nigeria (12 northern states), United Arab Emirates, and Somalia (southern parts); allowed by the law but not implemented in Afghanistan, Mauritania, and Pakistan; and was back then implemented through non-state courts by ISIS in parts of Iraq and Syria (now no longer existing).
Due to Brunei's law dictating that gay sex be punishable by stoning, many lesbian citizens fled to Canada in hopes of finding refuge. The law is also set to impose the same punishment for adultery among heterosexual couples. Despite pushback from citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, Brunei prime minister's office produced a statement explaining Brunei's intention for carrying through with the law. It has been suggested that this is part of a plan to separate Brunei from the western world and towards a Muslim one.
In Algeria, Bangladesh, Chad, Aceh province and Palembang city of South Sumatra province of Indonesia,
Malaysia, Maldives, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia and Syria, it is illegal, and penalties may be imposed. In Kuwait, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, homosexual acts between males are illegal, but homosexual relations between females are legal.
The Ottoman Empire (predecessor of Turkey) decriminalized homosexuality in 1858. In Turkey, where 99.8% of the population is officially registered as Muslim, homosexuality has never been criminalized since the day it was founded in 1923. And LGBT people also have the right to seek asylum in Turkey under the Geneva Convention since 1951.
Same-sex sexual intercourse is legal in Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Niger, Tajikistan, Turkey, West Bank (State of Palestine), most of Indonesia, and in Northern Cyprus. In Albania and Turkey, there have been discussions about legalizing same-sex marriage. Albania, Northern Cyprus and Kosovo also protect LGBT people with anti-discrimination laws.
Same-sex relations between females are legal in Kuwait, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, but homosexual acts between males are illegal.
In Lebanon, courts have ruled that the country's penal code must not be used to target homosexuals, but the law is yet to be changed by parliament.
In 2007 there was a gay party in the Moroccan town of al-Qasr al-Kabir. Rumours spread that this was a gay marriage and more than 600 people took to the streets, condemning the alleged event and protesting against leniency towards homosexuals. Several persons who attended the party were detained and eventually six Moroccan men were sentenced to between four and ten months in prison for "homosexuality".
In France there was an Islamic same-sex marriage on February 18, 2012. In Paris in November 2012 a room in a Buddhist prayer hall was used by gay Muslims and called a "gay-friendly mosque", and a French Islamic website is supporting religious same-sex marriage.
The first American Muslim in the United States Congress, Keith Ellison (D-MN) said in 2010 that all discrimination against LGBT people is wrong. He further expressed support for gay marriage stating:
I believe that the right to marry someone who you please is so fundamental it should not be subject to popular approval any more than we should vote on whether blacks should be allowed to sit in the front of the bus.
In 2014 eight men were jailed for three years by a Cairo court after the circulation of a video of them allegedly taking part in a private wedding ceremony between two men on a boat on the Nile.
While Iran has outlawed homosexuality, Iranian Shi'a thinkers such as Ayatollah Khomeini have allowed for transgender people to change their sex so that they can enter heterosexual relationships. This position has been confirmed by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and is also supported by many other Iranian clerics.
Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand. It is regarded as a cure for homosexuality, which is punishable by death under Iranian law. The government even provides up to half the cost for those needing financial assistance and a sex change is recognized on the birth certificate.
On 26 June 2016, clerics affiliated to the Pakistan-based organization Tanzeem Ittehad-i-Ummat issued a fatwa on transgender people where a trans woman (born male) with "visible signs of being a woman" is allowed to marry a man, and a trans man (born female) with "visible signs of being a man" is allowed to marry a woman. Pakistani transsexuals can also change their gender. Muslim ritual funerals also apply. Depriving transgender people of their inheritance, humiliating, insulting or teasing them were also declared haraam.
In Pakistan, transgender people make up 0.005 percent of the total population. Previously, transgender people were isolated from society and had no legal rights or protections. They also suffered discrimination in healthcare services. For example, in 2016 a transgender individual died in a hospital while doctors were trying to decide which ward the patient should be placed in. Transgender people also faced discrimination in finding employment resulting from incorrect Identification Cards and incongruous legal status. Many were forced into poverty, dancing, singing, and begging on the streets to scrape by. However, in May 2018, the Pakistani parliament passed a bill giving transgender individuals the right to choose their identity and correct their official documents, such as ID cards, driver license, and passports. Today, transgender people in Pakistan have the right to vote and to search for a job free from discrimination. As of 2018, one transgender woman became a news anchor, and two others were appointed to the Supreme Court.
In Lebanon, transgender women are not given any rights. Discrimination starts from their own family members when trans women are forced to leave their house. After that, trans women are not allowed to have any connections with their family members or with their neighbors. Trans women can't access educational institutions and medical services. Moreover, trans women face employment discrimination due to their wrong identification cards that are not being corrected by the government agencies. To support themselves financially, the only option often open to trans women is sex work, which is not safe for them either. Doing sex work, trans women are at higher risk of sexual abuse and violence. No laws are in existence to protect trans women. Instead, trans women are being arrested and put in jail for up to one year for having same sex intercourse.
Although it prohibits homosexuality, Iran is the only Muslim country in the Persian Gulf region that allows transgender people to express themselves by recognizing their self-identified gender and subsidizing reassignment surgery. Despite this, those who do not commit to reassignment surgery are often seen as freaks, and due to their refusal to conform they are treated as outcasts.
In 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed its first resolution recognizing LGBT rights, which was followed up with a report from the UN Human Rights Commission documenting violations of the rights of LGBT people. The two world maps of the percentage of Muslims per country and the countries that support LGBT rights at the UN give an impression of the attitude towards homosexuality on the part of many Muslim-majority governments.
The Muslim community as a whole, worldwide, has become polarized on the subject of homosexuality. Some Muslims say that "no good Muslim can be gay," and "traditional schools of Islamic law consider homosexuality a grave sin." At the opposite pole, "some Muslims . . . are welcoming what they see as an opening within their communities to address anti-gay attitudes." Especially, it is "young Muslims" who are "increasingly speaking out in support of gay rights".
According to the Albert Kennedy Trust, one in four young homeless people identify as LGBT due to their religious parents disowning them. The Trust suggests that the majority of individuals who are homeless due to religious out casting are either Christian or Muslim. Many young adults who come out to their parents are often forced out of the house to find refuge in a more accepting place. This leads many individual to be homeless – or worse – attempt suicide.
In 2013, the Pew Research Center conducted a study on the global acceptance of homosexuality and found a widespread rejection of homosexuality in many nations that are predominantly Muslim. In some countries, views were becoming more conservative among younger people.
There are a number of Islamic ex-gay organizations, that is, those composed of people claiming to have experienced a basic change in sexual orientation from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality. These groups, like those based in socially conservative Christianity, are aimed at attempting to guide homosexuals towards heterosexuality.
One of the leading LGBT reformatory Muslim organization is StraightWay Foundation, which was established in the United Kingdom in 2004 as an organization that provides information and advice for Muslims who struggle with homosexual attraction. They believe "that through following God's guidance", one may "cease to be" gay. They teach that the male-female pair is the "basis for humanity's growth" and that homosexual acts "are forbidden by God". NARTH has written favourably of the group. In 2004, Straightway entered into a controversy with the contemporary Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and the controversial Islamic cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It was suggested that Livingstone was giving a platform to Islamic fundamentalists, and not liberal and progressive Muslims. Straightway responded to this by compiling a document to clarify what they regarded as fundamental issues concerning Islam and homosexuality. They sent Livingstone a letter thanking him for his support of al-Qaradawi. Livingstone then ignited controversy when he thanked Straightway for the letter.
Since February 2017, over 100 male residents of the Chechen Republic (part of the Russian Federation) assumed to be gay or bisexual have been rounded up, detained and tortured by authorities on account of their sexual orientation. These crackdowns have been described as part of a systemic anti-LGBT "purge" in the region. The men are held and allegedly tortured in concentration camps.
Allegations were initially reported in "Novaya Gazeta" on April 1, 2017 a Russian-language opposition newspaper, which reported that over 100 men have allegedly been detained and tortured and at least three people have died in an extrajudicial killing. The paper, citing its sources in the Chechen special services, called the wave of detentions a "prophylactic sweep." The journalist who first reported on the subject has gone into hiding, There have been calls for reprisals for journalists reporting on the situation.
In response, the Russian LGBT Network is attempting to assist those who are threatened to evacuate from Chechnya. Human rights groups and foreign governments have called upon Russia and Chechnya to put an end to the internments.
On 11 January 2019, it was reported that another 'gay purge' had begun in the country in December 2018, with several gay men and women being detained. The Russian LGBT Network believes that around 40 persons were detained and two killed.
Several anti-LGBT incidents have occurred:
The coming together of "human rights discourses and sexual orientation struggles" has resulted in an abundance of "social movements and organizations concerned with gender and sexual minority oppression and discrimination."
The Al-Fatiha Foundation was an organization which tried to advance the cause of gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims. It was founded in 1998 by Faisal Alam, a Pakistani American, and was registered as a nonprofit organization in the United States. The organization was an offshoot of an internet listserve that brought together many gay, lesbian and questioning Muslims from various countries. The Foundation accepted and considered homosexuality as natural, either regarding Qur'anic verses as obsolete in the context of modern society, or stating that the Qu'ran speaks out against homosexual lust and is silent on homosexual love. After Alam stepped down, subsequent leaders failed to sustain the organization and it began a process of legal dissolution in 2011.
In 2001, Al-Muhajiroun, an international organization which sought the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate, but which is now a banned and defunct, issued a "fatwa" (ruling) declaring that all members of Al-Fatiha were "murtadd" (apostates), and condemning them to death. Because of this threat and their conservative familial backgrounds, many Al-Fatiha members chose anonymity to protect their identity. Al-Fatiha had fourteen chapters in the United States, as well as offices in England, Canada, Spain, Turkey, and South Africa.
The Al-Fitrah Foundation, previously known as The Inner Circle was one of the first queer Muslim organizations founded in 1996 when its founder Imam Muhsin Hendricks publicly revealed his sexual orientation. Imam Muhsin Hendricks is also considered as the world's first openly queer Imam. His activism grew since then and the organization became public in 1998. It soon grew into an international organization with annual international retreats of up to 120 international delegates meeting annually in Cape Town to discuss issues pertaining to LGBTIQ Muslims. In 2018 after having served the organization for 20 years her resigned after detecting corruption in the organization and being maliciously and wrongfully accused of mismanagement of funds. He, along with other queer Muslims who left the old Al-Fitrah Foundation founded a new organization in 2018 called Al-Ghurbaah Foundation. Imam Muhsin Hendricks also administers the Compassion-centred Islamic Network (CCI Network) which is a global network that seeks to connect and create a stronger voice for queer Muslims amongst activists, academics, Islamic scholars and religious leaders (Imams). Currently, the organization's main focus is working with religious leaders (Imams) while serving the needs of the queer Muslim community globally. Al-Ghurbaah Foundation also runs an inclusive mosque called Masjidul Ghurbaah which is open to anyone who wants to connect spiritually regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, religion or belief.
There are numbers of Muslim LGBT activists from different parts of the world. Some of them are listed below:
In 2010, an anthology "Islam and Homosexuality" was published. In the Forward, Parvez Sharma sounded a pessimistic note about the future: "In my lifetime I do not see Islam drafting a uniform edict that homosexuality is permissible." Following is material from two chapters dealing with the present:
Rusmir Musić in a chapter "Queer Visions of Islam" said that "Queer Muslims struggle daily to reconcile their sexuality and their faith." Musić began to study in college "whether or not my love for somebody of the same gender disgusts God and whether it will propel me to hell. The answer, for me, is an unequivocal "no". Furthermore, Musić wrote, "my research and reflection helped me to imagine my sexuality as a gift from a loving, not hateful, God."
Marhuq Fatima Khan in a chapter "Queer, American, and Muslim: Cultivating Identities and Communities of Affirmation," says that "Queer Muslims employ a few narratives to enable them to reconcile their religious and sexual identities." They "fall into three broad categories: (1) God Is Merciful; (2) That Is Just Who I Am; and (3) It's Not Just Islam."
In Chapter Eight of the 2003 book, "Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism", Professor Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle asserts "that Islam does not address homosexuality." In Kugle's reading, the Quran holds "a positive assessment of diversity." It "respects diversity in physical appearance, constitution, stature, and color of human beings as a natural consequence of Divine wisdom in creation." Therefore, Islam can be described as "a religion that positively assesses diversity in creation and in human societies." Furthermore, in Kugle's reading, the Quran "implies that some people are different in their sexual desires than others." Thus, homosexuality can be seen as part of the "natural diversity in sexuality in human societies." This is the way "gay and lesbian Muslims" view their homosexuality.
In addition to the Qur'an, Kugle refers to the benediction of Imam Al-Ghazali (the 11th-century Muslim theologian) which says. "praise be to God, the marvels of whose creation are not subject to the arrows of accident." For Kugle, this benediction implies that "if sexuality is inherent in a person's personality, then sexual diversity is a part of creation, which is never accidental but is always marvelous." Kugle also refers to "a rich archive of same-sex sexual desires and expressions, written by or reported about respected members of society: literati, educated elites, and religious scholars." Given these writings, Kugle concludes that "one might consider Islamic societies (like classical Greece) to provide a vivid illustration of a 'homosexual-friendly' environment." This evoked from "medieval and early modern Christian Europeans" accusations that Muslim were "engaging openly in same-sex practices."
Kugle goes a step further in his argument and asserts that "if some Muslims find it necessary to deny that sexual diversity is part of the natural created world, then the burden of proof rests on their shoulders to illustrate their denial from the Qur'anic discourse itself."
Kecia Ali in her 2016 book "Sexual Ethics and Islam" says that "there is no one Muslim perspective on anything." Regarding the Quran, Ali says that modern scholars disagree about what it says about "same-sex intimacy." Some scholars argue that "the Qur'an does not address homosexuality or homosexuals explicitly."
Regarding homosexuality, Ali, says that the belief that "exclusively homosexual desire is innate in some individuals" has been adopted "even among some relatively conservative Western Muslim thinkers."100 Homosexual Muslims believe their homosexuality to be innate and view "their sexual orientation as God-given and immutable." She observes that "queer and trans people are sometimes treated as defective or deviant," and she adds that it is "vital not to assume that variation implies imperfection or disability."
Regarding "medieval Muslim culture," Ali says that "male desire to penetrate desirable youth . . . was perfectly normal." Even if same-sex relations were not lawful, there was "an unwillingness to seek out and condemn instances of same-sex activity, but rather to let them pass by . . . unpunished." Ali states that some scholars claim that Islamic societies were 'homosexual-friendly' in history.
In an article "Same-sex Sexual Activity and Lesbian and Bisexual Women" Ali elaborates on homosexuality as an aspect of medieval Muslim culture. She says that "same-sex sexual expression has been a more or less recognized aspect of Muslim societies for many centuries." There are many explicit discussions of "same-sex sexual activity" in medieval Arabic literature. Ali states there is a lack of focus in medieval tradition on female same-sex sexual activity, where the Qur'an mainly focuses male/male sex. With female same-sex sexual activity there is more focus on the punishment for the acts and the complications with the dower, compare to men where there is a focus on punishment but also the needs to ablutions and the effect of the act on possible marriage decisions.
in conclusion lgbts is not an act that is acceptable for islam
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15471
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Infanticide
Infanticide (or infant homicide) is the intentional killing of infants. Now universally illegal, infanticide was a widespread practice throughout human history that was mainly used to dispose of unwanted children. Its main purposes were controlling population growth and saving resources from being spent on weak or disabled offspring. Unwanted infants were normally abandoned to die of exposure, but in some societies could be manually killed. In some societies infanticide was often done through child sacrifice, especially in New World societies such as the Maya, Aztecs, and Incans.
Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans. A few ancient societies did not practice infanticide, such as ancient Egypt and the ancient Jews.
Infanticide became forbidden in Europe and the Near East during the 1st millennium AD. Christianity forbade infanticide from its earliest times, which led Constantine the Great and Valentinian I to ban it across the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD. The practice ceased in Arabia in the 7th century after the founding of Islam, since the Quran prohibits infanticide. Infanticide of male babies had become uncommon in China by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), though female infanticide remained common until the 19th century. During British rule of India the British attempted to ban infanticide but were only partially successful, and female infanticide in some parts of India still continues. Infanticide is now very rare in Western and other developed countries, but may persist in some less developed countries.
Parental infanticide researchers have found that mothers are far more likely than fathers to be the perpetrators of neonaticide and slightly more likely to commit infanticide in general.
The practice of infanticide has taken many forms over time. Child sacrifice to supernatural figures or forces, such as that believed to have been practiced in ancient Carthage, may be only the most notorious example in the ancient world.
A frequent method of infanticide in ancient Europe and Asia was simply to abandon the infant, leaving it to die by exposure (i.e., hypothermia, hunger, thirst, or animal attack).
On at least one island in Oceania, infanticide was carried out until the 20th century by suffocating the infant, while in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and in the Inca Empire it was carried out by sacrifice (see below).
Many Neolithic groups routinely resorted to infanticide in order to control their numbers so that their lands could support them. Joseph Birdsell believed that infanticide rates in prehistoric times were between 15% and 50% of the total number of births, while Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15% to 20%. Both anthropologists believed that these high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. Comparative anthropologists have calculated that 50% of female newborn babies were killed by their parents during the Paleolithic era. From the infants hominid skulls (e.g. Taung child skull) that had been traumatized, has been proposed cannibalism by Raymond A. Dart. The children were not necessarily actively killed, but neglect and intentional malnourishment may also have occurred, as proposed by Vicente Lull as an explanation for an apparent surplus of men and the below average height of women in prehistoric Menorca.
Archaeologists have uncovered physical evidence of child sacrifice at several locations. Some of the best attested examples are the diverse rites which were part of the religious practices in Mesoamerica and the Inca Empire.
Three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found in Sardinia. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. Syrians sacrificed children to Jupiter and Juno. Many remains of children have been found in Gezer excavations with signs of sacrifice. Child skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found also in Egypt dating 950–720 BCE. In Carthage "[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith". Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.
In Egyptian households, at all social levels, children of both sexes were valued and there is no evidence of infanticide. The religion of the Ancient Egyptians forbade infanticide and during the Greco-Roman period they rescued abandoned babies from manure heaps, a common method of infanticide by Greeks or Romans, and were allowed to either adopt them as foundling or raise them as slaves, often giving them names such as "copro -" to memorialize their rescue. Strabo considered it a peculiarity of the Egyptians that every child must be reared. Diodorus indicates infanticide was a punishable offence. Egypt was heavily dependent on the annual flooding of the Nile to irrigate the land and in years of low inundation, severe famine could occur with breakdowns in social order resulting, notably between 930–1070 AD and 1180–1350 AD. Instances of cannibalism are recorded during these periods but it is unknown if this happened during the pharaonic era of Ancient Egypt. Beatrix Midant-Reynes describes human sacrifice as having occurred at Abydos in the early dynastic period (c. 3150–2850 BCE), while Jan Assmann asserts there is no clear evidence of human sacrifice ever happening in Ancient Egypt.
According to Shelby Brown, Carthaginians, descendants of the Phoenicians, sacrificed infants to their gods. Charred bones of hundreds of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. Skeptics suggest that the bodies of children found in Carthaginian and Phoenician cemeteries were merely the cremated remains of children that died naturally.
Plutarch (c. 46–120 AD) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo. The Hebrew Bible also mentions what appears to be child sacrifice practiced at a place called the Tophet (from the Hebrew "taph" or "toph", to burn) by the Canaanites. Writing in the 3rd century BCE, Kleitarchos, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, described that the infants rolled into the flaming pit. Diodorus Siculus wrote that babies were roasted to death inside the burning pit of the god Baal Hamon, a bronze statue.
The historical Greeks considered the practice of adult and child sacrifice barbarous, however, the exposure of newborns was widely practiced in ancient Greece, it was even advocated by Aristotle in the case of congenital deformity — "As to the exposure of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.” In Greece, the decision to expose a child was typically the father's, although in Sparta the decision was made by a group of elders. Exposure was the preferred method of disposal, as that act in itself was not considered to be murder; moreover, the exposed child technically had a chance of being rescued by the gods or any passersby. This very situation was a recurring motif in Greek mythology.
To notify the neighbors of a birth of a child, a woolen strip was hung over the front door to indicate a female baby and an olive branch to indicate a boy had been born. Families did not always keep their new child. After a woman had a baby, she would show it to her husband. If the husband accepted it, it would live, but if he refused it, it would die. Babies would often be rejected if they were illegitimate, unhealthy or deformed, the wrong sex, or too great a burden on the family. These babies would not be directly killed, but put in a clay pot or jar and deserted outside the front door or on the roadway. In ancient Greek religion, this practice took the responsibility away from the parents because the child would die of natural causes, for example, hunger, asphyxiation or exposure to the elements.
The practice was prevalent in ancient Rome, as well. Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against it. A letter from a Roman citizen to his sister, or a pregnant wife from her husband, dating from 1 BC, demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:
In some periods of Roman history it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the "pater familias", the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to die by exposure. The Twelve Tables of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. The concurrent practices of slavery and infanticide contributed to the "background noise" of the crises during the Republic.
Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374 AD, but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted.
According to mythology, Romulus and Remus, twin infant sons of the war god Mars, survived near-infanticide after being tossed into the Tiber River. According to the myth, they were raised by wolves, and later founded the city of Rome.
Whereas theologians and clerics preached sparing their lives, newborn abandonment continued as registered in both the literature record and in legal documents. According to William Lecky, exposure in the early Middle Ages, as distinct from other forms of infanticide, "was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference and, at least in the case of destitute parents, considered a very venial offence". The first foundling house in Europe was established in Milan in 787 on account of the high number of infanticides and out-of-wedlock births. The Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Rome was founded by Pope Innocent III because women were throwing their infants into the Tiber river.
Unlike other European regions, in the Middle Ages the German mother had the right to expose the newborn.
In the High Middle Ages, abandoning unwanted children finally eclipsed infanticide. Unwanted children were left at the door of church or abbey, and the clergy was assumed to take care of their upbringing. This practice also gave rise to the first orphanages.
However, very high sex ratios were common in even late medieval Europe, which may indicate sex-selective infanticide.
Judaism prohibits infanticide, and has for some time, dating back to at least early Common Era. Roman historians wrote about the ideas and customs of other peoples, which often diverged from their own. Tacitus recorded that the Jews "take thought to increase their numbers, for they regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children". Josephus, whose works give an important insight into 1st-century Judaism, wrote that God "forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward".
In his book "Germania", Tacitus wrote in 98 AD that the ancient Germanic tribes enforced a similar prohibition. He found such mores remarkable and commented: ""[The Germani] hold it shameful to kill any unwanted child."" It has become clear over the millennia, though, that Tacitus' description was inaccurate; the consensus of modern scholarship significantly differs. John Boswell believed that in ancient Germanic tribes unwanted children were exposed, usually in the forest. "It was the custom of the [Teutonic] pagans, that if they wanted to kill a son or daughter, they would be killed before they had been given any food." Usually children born out of wedlock were disposed of that way.
In his highly influential "Pre-historic Times", John Lubbock described burnt bones indicating the practice of child sacrifice in pagan Britain.
The last canto, "Marjatan poika" (Son of Marjatta), of Finnish national epic Kalevala describes assumed infanticide. Väinämöinen orders the infant bastard son of Marjatta to be drowned in a marsh.
The Íslendingabók, the main source for the early history of Iceland, recounts that on the Conversion of Iceland to Christianity in 1000 it was provided – in order to make the transition more palatable to Pagans – that "the old laws allowing exposure of newborn children will remain in force".
However, this provision – like other concessions made at the time to the Pagans – was abolished some years later.
Christians have explicitly rejected infanticide. The "Teachings of the Apostles" or "Didache" said "thou shalt not kill a child by abortion, neither shalt thou slay it when born". The "Epistle of Barnabas" stated an identical command, both thus conflating abortion and infanticide. Apologists Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr and Lactantius also maintained that exposing a baby to death was a wicked act. In 318 AD, Constantine I considered infanticide a crime, and in 374 AD, Valentinian I mandated the rearing of all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common). The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was homicide, and in 589 AD, the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the custom of killing their own children.
Some Muslim sources allege that pre-Islamic Arabian society practiced infanticide as a form of "post-partum birth control". The word "waʾd" was used to describe the practice. These sources state that infanticide was practiced either out of destitution (thus practiced on males and females alike), or as "disappointment and fear of social disgrace felt by a father upon the birth of a daughter".
Some authors believe that there is little evidence that infanticide was prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia or early Muslim history, except for the case of the Tamim tribe, who practiced it during severe famine according to Islamic sources. Others state that "female infanticide was common all over Arabia during this period of time" (pre-Islamic Arabia), especially by burying alive a female newborn. A tablet discovered in Yemen, forbidding the people of a certain town from engaging in the practice, is the only written reference to infanticide within the peninsula in pre-Islamic times.
Infanticide is explicitly prohibited by the Qur'an. ""And do not kill your children for fear of poverty; We give them sustenance and yourselves too; surely to kill them is a great wrong.""
Together with polytheism and homicide, infanticide is regarded as a grave sin (see and ). Infanticide is also implicitly denounced in the story of Pharaoh's slaughter of the male children of Israelites (see ; ; ; ; ; ).
Infanticide may have been practiced as human sacrifice, as part of the pagan cult of Perun. Ibn Fadlan describes sacrificial practices at the time of his trip to Kiev Rus (present-day Ukraine) in 921–922, and describes an incident of a woman voluntarily sacrificing her life as part of a funeral rite for a prominent leader, but makes no mention of infanticide. The Primary Chronicle, one of the most important literary sources before the 12th century, indicates that human sacrifice to idols may have been introduced by Vladimir the Great in 980. The same Vladimir the Great formally converted Kiev Rus into Christianity just 8 years later, but pagan cults continued to be practiced clandestinely in remote areas as late as the 13th century.
American explorer George Kennan noted that among the Koryaks, a Mongoloid people of north-eastern Siberia, infanticide was still common in the nineteenth century. One of a pair of twins was always sacrificed.
Infanticide (as a crime) gained both popular and bureaucratic significance in Victorian Britain. By the mid 19th century, in the context of criminal lunacy and the insanity defence, killing one's own child(ren) attracted ferocious debate, as the role of women in society was defined by motherhood, and it was thought that any woman who murdered her own child was by definition insane and could not be held responsible for her actions. Several cases were subsequently highlighted during the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1864-66), as a particular felony where an effective avoidance of the death penalty had informally begun.
The New Poor Law Act of 1834 ended parish relief for unmarried mothers and allowed fathers of illegitimate children to avoid paying for "child support". Unmarried mothers then received little assistance and the poor were left with the option either entering the workhouse, prostitution, infanticide or abortion. By the middle of the century infanticide was common for social reasons, such as illegitimacy, and the introduction of child life insurance additionally encouraged some women to kill their children for gain. Examples are Mary Ann Cotton, who murdered many of her 15 children as well as 3 husbands, Margaret Waters, the 'Brixton Baby Farmer', a professional baby-farmer who was found guilty of infanticide in 1870, Jessie King hanged in 1889, Amelia Dyer, the 'Angel Maker', who murdered over 400 babies in her care, and Ada Chard-Williams, a baby farmer who was later hanged at Newgate prison.
The Times reported that 67 infants were murdered in London in 1861 and 150 more recorded as "found dead", many of which were found on the streets. Another 250 were suffocated, half of them not recorded as accidental deaths. The report noted that "infancy in London has to creep into life in the midst of foes."
Recording a birth as a still-birth was also another way of concealing infanticide because still-births did not need to be registered until 1926 and they did not need to be buried in public cemeteries. In 1895 the Sun (London) published an article "Massacre of the Innocents" highlighting the dangers of baby-farming, in the recording of stillbirths and quoting Braxton-Hicks, the London Coroner, on lying-in houses: "I have not the slightest doubt that a large amount of crime is covered by the expression `still-birth’. There are a large number of cases of what are called newly-born children, which are found all over England, more especially in London and large towns, abandoned in streets, rivers, on commons, and so on." He continued "a great deal of that crime is due to what are called lying-in houses, which are not registered, or under the supervision of that sort, where the people who act as midwives constantly, as soon as the child is born, either drop it into a pail of water or smother it with a damp cloth. It is a very common thing, also, to find that they bash their heads on the floor and break their skulls."
The last British woman to be executed for infanticide of her own child was Rebecca Smith, who was hanged in Wiltshire in 1849.
The Infant Life Protection Act of 1897 required local authorities to be notified within 48 hours of changes in custody or the death of children under seven years. Under the Children’s Act of 1908 "no infant could be kept in a home that was so unfit and so overcrowded as to endanger its health, and no infant could be kept by an unfit nurse who threatened, by neglect or abuse, its proper care, and maintenance."
Short of execution, the harshest penalties were imposed on practitioners of infanticide by the legal codes of the Qin dynasty and Han dynasty of ancient China.
Marco Polo, the explorer, saw newborns exposed in Manzi. China's society practiced sex selective infanticide. Philosopher Han Fei Tzu, a member of the ruling aristocracy of the 3rd century BC, who developed a school of law, wrote: "As to children, a father and mother when they produce a boy congratulate one another, but when they produce a girl they put it to death." Among the Hakka people, and in Yunnan, Anhui, Sichuan, Jiangxi and Fujian a method of killing the baby was to put her into a bucket of cold water, which was called "baby water".
Infanticide was known in China as early as the 3rd century BC, and, by the time of the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD), it was widespread in some provinces. Belief in transmigration allowed poor residents of the country to kill their newborn children if they felt unable to care for them, hoping that they would be reborn in better circumstances. Furthermore, some Chinese did not consider newborn children fully "human" and saw "life" beginning at some point after the sixth month after birth.
Contemporary writers from the Song dynasty note that, in Hubei and Fujian provinces, residents would only keep three sons and two daughters (among poor farmers, two sons, and one daughter), and kill all babies beyond that number at birth. Initially the sex of the child was only one factor to consider. By the time of the Ming Dynasty, however (1368–1644), male infanticide was becoming increasingly uncommon. The prevalence of female infanticide remained high much longer. The magnitude of this practice is subject to some dispute; however, one commonly quoted estimate is that, by late Qing, between one fifth and one-quarter of all newborn girls, across the entire social spectrum, were victims of infanticide. If one includes excess mortality among female children under 10 (ascribed to gender-differential neglect), the share of victims rises to one third.
Scottish Physician John Dudgeon, who worked in Beijing, China, during the Qing Dynasty said that in China, "Infanticide does not prevail to the extent so generally believed among us, and in the north, it does not exist at all."
Gender-selected abortion or sex identification (without medical uses), abandonment, and infanticide are illegal in present-day Mainland China. Nevertheless, the US State Department, and the human rights organization Amnesty International have all declared that Mainland China's family planning programs, called the one child policy (has changed to two child policy nowaday), contribute to infanticide. The sex gap between males and females aged 0–19 years old was estimated to be 25 million in 2010 by the United Nations Population Fund. But in some cases, in order to avoid Mainland China's family planning programs, parents will not report to government when a child is born (in most cases a girl), so she or he will not have an identity in the government and they can keep on giving birth until they're satisfied, without fines or punishment. In 2017, the government announced that all children without an identity can now have an identity legally, known as family register.
Since feudal Edo era Japan the common slang for infanticide was ""mabiki"" (間引き) which means to pull plants from an overcrowded garden. A typical method in Japan was smothering through wet paper on the baby's mouth and nose. It became common as a method of population control. Farmers would often kill their second or third sons. Daughters were usually spared, as they could be married off, sold off as servants or prostitutes, or sent off to become geishas. Mabiki persisted in the 19th century and early 20th century. To bear twins was perceived as barbarous and unlucky and efforts were made to hide or kill one or both twins.
Female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in feudatory Rajputs in South Asia for illegitimate female children during the Middle Ages. According to Firishta, as soon as the illegitimate female child was born she was held "in one hand, and a knife in the other, that any person who wanted a wife might take her now, otherwise she was immediately put to death". The practice of female infanticide was also common among the Kutch, Kehtri, Nagar, Bengal, Miazed, Kalowries in India inhabitants, and also among the Sindh in British India.
It was not uncommon that parents threw a child to the sharks in the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. The British colonists were unable to outlaw the custom until the beginnings of the 19th century.
According to social activists, female infanticide has remained a problem in India into the 21st century, with both NGOs and the government conducting awareness campaigns to combat it.
In India female infanticide is more common than the killing of male offspring, due to sex-selective infanticide.
In some African societies some neonates were killed because of beliefs in evil omens or because they were considered unlucky. Twins were usually put to death in Arebo; as well as by the Nama people of South West Africa; in the Lake Victoria Nyanza region; by the Tswana in Portuguese East Africa; in some parts of Igboland, Nigeria twins were sometimes abandoned in a forest at birth (as depicted in "Things Fall Apart"), oftentimes one twin was killed or hidden by midwives of wealthier mothers; and by the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert. The Kikuyu, Kenya's most populous ethnic group, practiced ritual killing of twins.
Infanticide is rooted in the old traditions and beliefs prevailing all over the country. A survey conducted by Disability Rights International found that 45% of women interviewed by them in Kenya were pressured to kill their children born with disabilities. The pressure is much higher in the rural areas, with every second mother being forced out of three.
Literature suggests infanticide may have occurred reasonably commonly among Indigenous Australians, in all areas of Australia prior to European settlement. Infanticide may have continued to occur quite often up until the 1960s. An 1866 issue of "The Australian News for Home Readers" informed readers that "the crime of infanticide is so prevalent amongst the natives that it is rare to see an infant".
Author Susanna de Vries in 2007 told a newspaper that her accounts of Aboriginal violence, including infanticide, were censored by publishers in the 1980s and 1990s. She told reporters that the censorship "stemmed from guilt over the stolen children question". Keith Windschuttle weighed in on the conversation, saying this type of censorship started in the 1970s. In the same article Louis Nowra suggested that infanticide in customary Aboriginal law may have been because it was difficult to keep an abundant number of Aboriginal children alive; there were life-and-death decisions modern-day Australians no longer have to face.
According to William D. Rubinstein, "Nineteenth-century European observers of Aboriginal life in South Australia and Victoria reported that about 30% of Aboriginal infants were killed at birth."
James Dawson wrote a passage about infanticide among Indigenous people in the western district of Victoria, which stated that "Twins are as common among them as among Europeans; but as food is occasionally very scarce, and a large family troublesome to move about, it is lawful and customary to destroy the weakest twin child, irrespective of sex.
It is usual also to destroy those which are malformed."
He also wrote "When a woman has children too rapidly for the convenience and necessities of the parents, she makes up her mind to let one be killed, and consults with her husband which it is to be. As the strength of a tribe depends more on males than females, the girls are generally sacrificed.
The child is put to death and buried, or burned without ceremony; not, however, by its father or mother, but by relatives. No one wears mourning for it.
Sickly children are never killed on account of their bad health, and are allowed to die naturally."
In 1937, a reverend in the Kimberley offered a "baby bonus" to Aboriginal families as a deterrent against infanticide and to increase the birthrate of the local Indigenous population.
A Canberran journalist in 1927 wrote of the "cheapness of life" to the Aboriginal people local to the Canberra area 100 years before. "If drought or bush fires had devastated the country and curtailed food supplies, babies got a short shift. Ailing babies, too would not be kept" he wrote.
A bishop wrote in 1928 that it was common for Aboriginal Australians to restrict the size of their tribal groups, including by infanticide, so that the food resources of the tribal area may be sufficient for them.
Annette Hamilton, a professor of anthropology at Macquarie University who carried out research in the Aboriginal community of Maningrida in Arnhem Land during the 1960s wrote that prior to that time part-European babies born to Aboriginal mothers had not been allowed to live, and that 'mixed-unions are frowned on by men and women alike as a matter of principle'.
There is no agreement about the actual estimates of the frequency of newborn female infanticide in the Inuit population. Carmel Schrire mentions diverse studies ranging from 15–50% to 80%.
Polar Inuit (Inughuit) killed the child by throwing him or her into the sea. There is even a legend in Inuit mythology, "The Unwanted Child", where a mother throws her child into the fjord.
The Yukon and the Mahlemuit tribes of Alaska exposed the female newborns by first stuffing their mouths with grass before leaving them to die. In Arctic Canada the Inuit exposed their babies on the ice and left them to die.
Female Inuit infanticide disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s after contact with the Western cultures from the South.
The "Handbook of North American Indians" reports infanticide among the Dene Natives and those of the Mackenzie Mountains.
In the Eastern Shoshone there was a scarcity of Indian women as a result of female infanticide. For the Maidu Native Americans twins were so dangerous that they not only killed them, but the mother as well. In the region known today as southern Texas, the Mariame Indians practiced infanticide of females on a large scale. Wives had to be obtained from neighboring groups.
Bernal Díaz recounted that, after landing on the Veracruz coast, they came across a temple dedicated to Tezcatlipoca. "That day they had sacrificed two boys, cutting open their chests and offering their blood and hearts to that accursed idol". In "The Conquest of New Spain" Díaz describes more child sacrifices in the towns before the Spaniards reached the large Aztec city Tenochtitlan.
Although academic data of infanticides among the indigenous people in South America is not as abundant as that of North America, the estimates seem to be similar.
The Tapirapé indigenous people of Brazil allowed no more than three children per woman, and no more than two of the same sex. If the rule was broken infanticide was practiced. The Bororo killed all the newborns that did not appear healthy enough. Infanticide is also documented in the case of the Korubo people in the Amazon.
The Yanomami men killed children while raiding enemy villages. Helena Valero, a Brazilian woman kidnapped by Yanomami warriors in the 1930s, witnessed a Karawetari raid on her tribe:
While "qhapaq hucha" was practiced in the Peruvian large cities, child sacrifice in the pre-Columbian tribes of the region is less documented. However, even today studies on the Aymara Indians reveal high incidences of mortality among the newborn, especially female deaths, suggesting infanticide. The Abipones, a small tribe of Guaycuruan stock, of about 5,000 by the end of the 18th century in Paraguay, practiced systematic infanticide; with never more than two children being reared in one family. The Machigenga killed their disabled children. Infanticide among the Chaco in Paraguay was estimated as high as 50% of all newborns in that tribe, who were usually buried. The infanticidal custom had such roots among the Ayoreo in Bolivia and Paraguay that it persisted until the late 20th century.
Infanticide has become less common in the Western world. The frequency has been estimated to be 1 in approximately 3000 to 5000 children of all ages and 2.1 per 100,000 newborns per year. It is thought that infanticide today continues at a much higher rate in areas of extremely high poverty and overpopulation, such as parts of China and India. Female infants, then and even now, are particularly vulnerable, a factor in sex-selective infanticide. Recent estimates suggest that over 100 million girls and women are 'missing' in Asia.
In spite of the fact that it is illegal, in Benin, West Africa, parents secretly continue with infanticidal customs.
According to "The Hidden Gulag" published by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Mainland China returns all illegal immigrants from North Korea which usually imprisons them in a short term facility. Korean women who are suspected of being impregnated by Chinese fathers are subjected to forced abortions; babies born alive are killed, sometimes by exposure or being buried alive.
There have been some accusations that infanticide occurs in Mainland China due to the one-child policy. In the 1990s, a certain stretch of the Yangtze River was known to be a common site of infanticide by drowning, until government projects made access to it more difficult. Recent studies suggest that over 40 million girls and women are 'missing' in Mainland China (Klasen and Wink 2003).
The practice has continued in some rural areas of India. Infanticide is illegal in India but still has the highest infanticide rate in the world.
According to a recent report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) up to 50 million girls and women are missing in India's population as a result of systematic sex discrimination and sex selective abortions.
Killings of newborn babies have been on the rise in Pakistan, corresponding to an increase in poverty across the country. More than 1,000 infants, mostly girls, were killed or abandoned to die in Pakistan in 2009 according to a Pakistani charity organization.
The Edhi Foundation found 1,210 dead babies in 2010. Many more are abandoned and left at the doorsteps of mosques. As a result, Edhi centers feature signs "Do not murder, lay them here." Though female infanticide is punishable by life in prison, such crimes are rarely prosecuted.
In November 2008 it was reported that in Agibu and Amosa villages of Gimi region of Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea where tribal fighting in the region of Gimi has been going on since 1986 (many of the clashes arising over claims of sorcery) women had agreed that if they stopped producing males, allowing only female babies to survive, their tribe's stock of boys would go down and there would be no men in the future to fight. They agreed to have all newborn male babies killed. It is not known how many male babies were killed by being smothered, but it had reportedly happened to all males over a 10-year period and probably was still happening.
In England and Wales there were typically 30 to 50 homicides per million children less than 1 year old between 1982 and 1996. The younger the infant, the higher the risk. The rate for children 1 to 5 years was around 10 per million children. The homicide rate of infants less than 1 year is significantly higher than for the general population.
In English law infanticide is established as a distinct offence by the Infanticide Acts. Defined as the killing of a child under 12 months of age by their mother, the effect of the Acts are to establish a partial defence to charges of murder.
In the United States the infanticide rate during the first hour of life outside the womb dropped from 1.41 per 100,000 during 1963 to 1972 to 0.44 per 100,000 for 1974 to 1983; the rates during the first month after birth also declined, whereas those for older infants rose during this time. The legalization of abortion, which was completed in 1973, was the most important factor in the decline in neonatal mortality during the period from 1964 to 1977, according to a study by economists associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research.
While legislation regarding infanticide in the majority of Western countries focuses on rehabilitation, believing that treatment and education will prevent repetitive action, the United States remains focused on delivering punishment. One justification for punishment is the difficulty of implementing rehabilitation services. With an overcrowded prison system, the United States can not provide the necessary treatment and services.
In Canada 114 cases of infanticide by a parent were reported during 1964–1968. There is ongoing debate in the Canadian legal and political fields about whether section 237 of the Criminal Code, which creates the specific offence and partial defence of infanticide in Canadian law, should be amended or abolished altogether.
From 2013 to March 2018, 28 infanticides cases done by 22 mothers and three stepmothers were reported in Spain. The most famous case was the murder of Bernardo González Parra in 1910 perpetrated by Francisco Leona Romero, Julio Hernández Rodríguez, Francisco Ortega el Moruno and Agustina Rodríguez.
There are various reasons for infanticide. Neonaticide typically has different patterns and causes than for the killing of older infants. Traditional neonaticide is often related to economic necessity - the inability to provide for the infant.
In the United Kingdom and the United States, older infants are typically killed for reasons related to child abuse, domestic violence or mental illness. For infants older than one day, younger infants are more at risk, and boys are more at risk than girls. Risk factors for the parent include: Family history of violence, violence in a current relationship, history of abuse or neglect of children, and personality disorder and/or depression.
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, "loopholes" were invented by Protestants who wanted to avoid the damnation that was promised by most Christian doctrine as a penalty of suicide. One famous example of someone who wished to end their life but avoid the eternity in hell was Christina Johansdotter (died 1740). She was a Swedish murderer who killed a child in Stockholm with the sole purpose of being executed. She is an example of those who seek suicide through execution by committing a murder. It was a common act, frequently targeting young children or infants as they were believed to be free from sin, thus believing to go "straight to heaven".
On the contrary, most mainstream denominations view the murder of an innocent as being condemned in the Fifth Commandment. The Roman Catholic Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, in Donum Vitæ, is instructive. "Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being."
In 1888, Lieut. F. Elton reported that Ugi beach people in the Solomon Islands killed their infants at birth by burying them, and women were also said to practice abortion. They reported that it was too much trouble to raise a child, and instead preferred to buy one from the bush people.
Many historians believe the reason to be primarily economic, with more children born than the family is prepared to support. In societies that are patrilineal and patrilocal, the family may choose to allow more sons to live and kill some daughters, as the former will support their birth family until they die, whereas the latter will leave economically and geographically to join their husband's family, possibly only after the payment of a burdensome dowry price. Thus the decision to bring up a boy is more economically rewarding to the parents. However, this does not explain why infanticide would occur equally among rich and poor, nor why it would be as frequent during decadent periods of the Roman Empire as during earlier, less affluent, periods.
Before the appearance of effective contraception, infanticide was a common occurrence in ancient brothels. Unlike usual infanticide - where historically girls have been more likely to be killed - prostitutes in certain areas preferred to kill their male offspring.
Instances of infanticide in Britain in 18th and 19th centuries is often attributed to the economic position of the women, with juries committing “pious perjury” in many subsequent murder cases. The knowledge of the difficulties faced in the 18th century by those women who attempted to keep their children can be seen as a reason for juries to show compassion. If the woman chose to keep the child, society was not set up to ease the pressure placed upon the woman, legally, socially or economically.
In mid-18th century Britain there was assistance available for women who were not able to raise their children. The Foundling Hospital opened in 1756 and was able to take in some of the illegitimate children. However, the conditions within the hospital caused Parliament to withdraw funding and the governors to live off of their own incomes. This resulted in a stringent entrance policy, with the committee requiring that the hospital:
Once a mother had admitted her child to the hospital, the hospital did all it could to ensure that the parent and child were not re-united.
MacFarlane argues in "Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in Britain" (1980) that English society greatly concerned itself with the burden that a bastard child places upon its communities and had gone to some lengths to ensure that the father of the child is identified in order to maintain its well-being. Assistance could be gained through maintenance payments from the father, however, this was capped "at a miserable 2 s and 6 d a week". If the father fell behind with the payments he could only be asked "to pay a maximum of 13 weeks arrears".
Despite the accusations of some that women were getting a free hand-out, there is evidence that many women were far from receiving adequate assistance from their parish. "Within Leeds in 1822 ... relief was limited to 1 s per week". Sheffield required women to enter the workhouse, whereas Halifax gave no relief to the women who required it. The prospect of entering the workhouse was certainly something to be avoided. Lionel Rose quotes Dr Joseph Rogers in "Massacre of the Innocents ..." (1986). Rogers, who was employed by a London workhouse in 1856 stated that conditions in the nursery were ‘wretchedly damp and miserable ... [and] ... overcrowded with young mothers and their infants’.
The loss of social standing for a servant girl was a particular problem in respect of producing a bastard child as they relied upon a good character reference in order to maintain their job and more importantly, to get a new or better job. In a large number of trials for the crime of infanticide, it is the servant girl that stood accused. The disadvantage of being a servant girl is that they had to live to the social standards of their superiors or risk dismissal and no references. Whereas within other professions, such as in the factory, the relationship between employer and employee was much more anonymous and the mother would be better able to make other provisions, such as employing a minder. The result of the lack of basic social care in Britain in the 18th and 19th century is the numerous accounts in court records of women, particularly servant girls, standing trial for the murder of their child.
There may have been no specific offense of infanticide in England before about 1623 because infanticide was a matter for the by ecclesiastical courts, possibly because infant mortality from natural causes was high (about 15% or one in six).
Thereafter the accusation of the suppression of bastard children by lewd mothers was a crime incurring the presumption of guilt.
The Infanticide Acts are several laws. That of 1922 made the killing of an infant child by its mother during the early months of life as a lesser crime than murder. The acts of 1938 and 1939 abolished the earlier act, but introduced the idea that postpartum depression was legally to be regarded as a form of diminished responsibility.
Marvin Harris estimated that among Paleolithic hunters 23–50% of newborn children were killed. He argued that the goal was to preserve the 0.001% population growth of that time. He also wrote that female infanticide may be a form of population control. Population control is achieved not only by limiting the number of potential mothers; increased fighting among men for access to relatively scarce wives would also lead to a decline in population. For example, on the Melanesian island of Tikopia infanticide was used to keep a stable population in line with its resource base. Research by Marvin Harris and William Divale supports this argument, it has been cited as an example of environmental determinism.
Evolutionary psychology has proposed several theories for different forms of infanticide. Infanticide by stepfathers, as well as child abuse in general by stepfathers, has been explained by spending resources on not genetically related children reducing reproductive success (See the Cinderella effect and Infanticide (zoology)). Infanticide is one of the few forms of violence more often done by women than men. Cross-cultural research has found that this is more likely to occur when the child has deformities or illnesses as well as when there are lacking resources due to factors such as poverty, other children requiring resources, and no male support. Such a child may have a low chance of reproductive success in which case it would decrease the mother's inclusive fitness, in particular since women generally have a greater parental investment than men, to spend resources on the child.
A minority of academics subscribe to an alternate school of thought, considering the practice as "early infanticidal childrearing". They attribute parental infanticidal wishes to massive projection or displacement of the parents' unconscious onto the child, because of intergenerational, ancestral abuse by their own parents. Clearly, an infanticidal parent may have multiple motivations, conflicts, emotions, and thoughts about their baby and their relationship with their baby, which are often colored both by their individual psychology, current relational context and attachment history, and, perhaps most saliently, their psychopathology (See also Psychiatric section below) Almeida, Merminod, and Schechter suggest that parents with fantasies, projections, and delusions involving infanticide need to be taken seriously and assessed carefully, whenever possible, by an interdisciplinary team that includes infant mental health specialists or mental health practitioners who have experience in working with parents, children, and families.
In addition to debates over the morality of infanticide itself, there is some debate over the effects of infanticide on surviving children, and the effects of childrearing in societies that also sanction infanticide. Some argue that the practice of infanticide in any widespread form causes enormous psychological damage in children. Conversely, studying societies that practice infanticide Géza Róheim reported that even infanticidal mothers in New Guinea, who ate a child, did not affect the personality development of the surviving children; that "these are good mothers who eat their own children". Harris and Divale's work on the relationship between female infanticide and warfare suggests that there are, however, extensive negative effects.
Postpartum psychosis is also a causative factor of infanticide. Stuart S. Asch, MD, a Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University established the connections between some cases of infanticide and post-partum depression., The books, "From Cradle to Grave", and "The Death of Innocents", describe selected cases of maternal infanticide and the investigative research of Professor Asch working in concert with the New York City Medical Examiner's Office.
Stanley Hopwood wrote that childbirth and lactation entail severe stress on the female sex, and that under certain circumstances attempts at infanticide and suicide are common. A study published in the "American Journal of Psychiatry" revealed that 44% of filicidal fathers had a diagnosis of psychosis. In addition to postpartum psychosis, dissociative psychopathology and sociopathy have also been found to be associated with neonaticide in some cases
In addition, severe postpartum depression can lead to infanticide.
Sex selection may be one of the contributing factors of infanticide. In the absence of sex-selective abortion, sex-selective infanticide can be deduced from very skewed birth statistics. The biologically normal sex ratio for humans at birth is approximately 105 males per 100 females; normal ratios hardly ranging beyond 102–108. When a society has an infant male to female ratio which is significantly higher or lower than the biological norm, and biased data can be ruled out, sex selection can usually be inferred.
In New South Wales, infanticide is defined in Section 22A(1) of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) as follows:
Because Infanticide is punishable as manslaughter, as per s24, the maximum penalty for this offence is therefore 25 years imprisonment.
In Victoria, infanticide is defined by Section 6 of the Crimes Act of 1958 with a maximum penalty of five years .
In Canada, a mother commits infanticide, a lesser offense than homicide, if she killed her child while "not fully recovered from the effects of giving birth to the child and by reason thereof or of the effect of lactation consequent on the birth of the child her mind is then disturbed".
In England and Wales, the Infanticide Act 1938 describes the offense of infanticide as one which would otherwise amount to murder (by his/her mother) if the victim was older than 12 months and the mother was not suffering from an imbalance of mind due to the effects of childbirth or lactation. Where a mother who has killed such an infant has been charged with murder rather than infanticide s.1(3) of the Act confirms that a jury has the power to find alternative verdicts of Manslaughter in English law or guilty but insane.
Infanticide is illegal in the Netherlands, although the maximum sentence is lower than for homicide. The Groningen Protocol regulates euthanasia for infants who are believed to "suffer hopelessly and unbearably" under strict conditions.
Article 200 of the Penal Code of Romania stipulates that the killing of a newborn during the first 24 hours, by the mother who is in a state of mental distress, shall be punished with imprisonment of one to five years. The previous Romanian Penal Code also defined infanticide ("pruncucidere") as a distinct criminal offense, providing for punishment of two to seven years imprisonment, recognizing the fact that a mother's judgment may be impaired immediately after birth but did not define the term "infant", and this had led to debates regarding the precise moment when infanticide becomes homicide. This issue was resolved by the new Penal Code, which came into force in 2014.
In 2009, Texas state representative Jessica Farrar proposed legislation that would define infanticide as a distinct and lesser crime than homicide. Under the terms of the proposed legislation, if jurors concluded that a mother's "judgment was impaired as a result of the effects of giving birth or the effects of lactation following the birth", they would be allowed to convict her of the crime of infanticide, rather than murder. The maximum penalty for infanticide would be two years in prison. Farrar's introduction of this bill prompted liberal bioethics scholar Jacob M. Appel to call her "the bravest politician in America".
The "MOTHERS Act" (Moms Opportunity To access Health, Education, Research and Support), precipitated by the death of a Chicago woman with postpartum psychosis was introduced in 2009. The act was ultimately incorporated into the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" which passed in 2010. The act requires screening for postpartum mood disorders at any time of the adult lifespan as well as expands research on postpartum depression. Provisions of the act also authorize grants to support clinical services for women who have, or are at risk for, postpartum psychosis.
Since infanticide, especially neonaticide, is often a response to an unwanted birth, preventing unwanted pregnancies through improved sex education and increased contraceptive access are advocated as ways of preventing infanticide. Increased use of contraceptives and access to safe legal abortions have greatly reduced neonaticide in many developed nations. Some say that where abortion is illegal, as in Pakistan, infanticide would decline if safer legal abortions were available.
Cases of infanticide have also garnered increasing attention and interest from advocates for the mentally ill as well as organizations dedicated to postpartum disorders. Following the trial of Andrea Yates, a mother from the United States who garnered national attention for drowning her 5 children, representatives from organizations such as the Postpartum Support International and the Marcé Society for Treatment and Prevention of Postpartum Disorders began requesting clarification of diagnostic criteria for postpartum disorders and improved guidelines for treatments. While accounts of postpartum psychosis have dated back over 2,000 years ago, perinatal mental illness is still largely under-diagnosed despite postpartum psychosis affecting 1 to 2 per 1000 women. However, with clinical research continuing to demonstrate the large role of rapid neurochemical fluctuation in postpartum psychosis, prevention of infanticide points ever strongly towards psychiatric intervention.
Screening for psychiatric disorders or risk factors, and providing treatment or assistance to those at risk may help prevent infanticide. Current diagnostic considerations include symptoms, psychological history, thoughts of self-harm or harming one's children, physical and neurological examination, laboratory testing, substance abuse, and brain imaging. As psychotic symptoms may fluctuate, it is important that diagnostic assessments cover a wide range of factors.
While studies on the treatment of postpartum psychosis are scarce, a number of case and cohort studies have found evidence describing the effectiveness of lithium monotherapy for both acute and maintenance treatment of postpartum psychosis, with the majority of patients achieving complete remission. Adjunctive treatments include electroconvulsive therapy, antipsychotic medication, or benzodiazepines. Electroconvulsive therapy, in particular, is the primary treatment for patients with catatonia, severe agitation, and difficulties eating or drinking. Antidepressants should be avoided throughout the acute treatment of postpartum psychosis due to risk of worsening mood instability.
Though screening and treatment may help prevent infanticide, in the developed world, significant proportions of neonaticides that are detected occur in young women who deny their pregnancy and avoid outside contacts, many of who may have limited contact with these health care services.
In some areas baby hatches or "safe surrender sites", safe places for a mother to anonymously leave an infant, are offered, in part to reduce the rate of infanticide. In other places, like the United States, safe-haven laws allow mothers to anonymously give infants to designated officials; they are frequently located at hospitals and police and fire stations. Additionally, some countries in Europe have the laws of anonymous birth and confidential birth that allow mothers to give up an infant after birth. In anonymous birth, the mother does not attach her name to the birth certificate. In confidential birth, the mother registers her name and information, but the document containing her name is sealed until the child comes to age. Typically such babies are put up for adoption, or cared for in orphanages.
Granting women employment raises their status and autonomy. Having a gainful employment can raise the perceived worth of females. This can lead to an increase in the number of women getting an education and a decrease in the number of female infanticide. As a result, the infant mortality rate will decrease and economic development will increase.
The practice has been observed in many other species of the animal kingdom since it was first seriously studied by . These include from microscopic rotifers and insects, to fish, amphibians, birds and mammals, including primates such as chacma baboons.
According to studies carried out by Kyoto University in primates, including certain types of gorillas and chimpanzees, several conditions favor the tendency to kill their offspring in some species (to be performed only by males), among them are: Nocturnal live, the absence of nest construction, the marked sexual dimorphism in which the male is much larger than the female, the mating in a specific season and the high period of lactation without resumption of the estrus state in the female.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15474
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Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite is the conceptual model and set of communications protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP because the foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). During its development, versions of it were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the development of the networking method was funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA. Its implementation is a protocol stack.
The Internet protocol suite provides end-to-end data communication specifying how data should be packetized, addressed, transmitted, routed, and received. This functionality is organized into four abstraction layers, which classify all related protocols according to the scope of networking involved. From lowest to highest, the layers are the link layer, containing communication methods for data that remains within a single network segment (link); the internet layer, providing internetworking between independent networks; the transport layer, handling host-to-host communication; and the application layer, providing process-to-process data exchange for applications.
The technical standards underlying the Internet protocol suite and its constituent protocols are maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The Internet protocol suite predates the OSI model, a more comprehensive reference framework for general networking systems.
The Internet protocol suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the late 1960s. After initiating the pioneering ARPANET in 1969, DARPA started work on a number of other data transmission technologies. In 1972, Robert E. Kahn joined the DARPA Information Processing Technology Office, where he worked on both satellite packet networks and ground-based radio packet networks, and recognized the value of being able to communicate across both. In the spring of 1973, Vinton Cerf, who helped develop the existing ARPANET Network Control Program (NCP) protocol, joined Kahn to work on open-architecture interconnection models with the goal of designing the next protocol generation for the ARPANET. They drew on the experience from the ARPANET research community and the International Networking Working Group, which Cerf chaired.
By the summer of 1973, Kahn and Cerf had worked out a fundamental reformulation, in which the differences between local network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and, instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the existing ARPANET protocols, this function was delegated to the hosts. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmermann and Louis Pouzin, designer of the CYCLADES network, with important influences on this design. The new protocol was implemented as the Transmission Control Program in 1974.
Initially, the Transmission Control Program managed both datagram transmissions and routing, but as experience with the protocol grew, collaborators recommended division of functionality into layers of distinct protocols. Advocates included Jonathan Postel of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, who edited the Request for Comments (RFCs), the technical and strategic document series that has both documented and catalyzed Internet development, and the research group of Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC. Postel stated, "We are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering." Encapsulation of different mechanisms was intended to create an environment where the upper layers could access only what was needed from the lower layers. A monolithic design would be inflexible and lead to scalability issues. In version 3 of TCP, written in 1978, the Transmission Control Program was split into two distinct protocols, the Internet Protocol as connectionless layer and the Transmission Control Protocol as a reliable connection-oriented service.
The design of the network included the recognition that it should provide only the functions of efficiently transmitting and routing traffic between end nodes and that all other intelligence should be located at the edge of the network, in the end nodes. This design is known as the end-to-end principle. Using this design, it became possible to connect other networks to the ARPANET that used the same principle, irrespective of other local characteristics, thereby solving Kahn's initial internetworking problem. A popular expression is that TCP/IP, the eventual product of Cerf and Kahn's work, can run over "two tin cans and a string." Years later, as a joke, the IP over Avian Carriers formal protocol specification was created and successfully tested.
DARPA contracted with BBN Technologies, Stanford University, and the University College London to develop operational versions of the protocol on several hardware platforms. During development of the protocol the version number of the packet routing layer progressed from version 1 to version 4, the latter of which was installed in the ARPANET in 1983. It became known as "Internet Protocol version 4" (IPv4) as the protocol that is still in use in the Internet, alongside its current successor, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
In 1975, a two-network TCP/IP communications test was performed between Stanford and University College London. In November 1977, a three-network TCP/IP test was conducted between sites in the US, the UK, and Norway. Several other TCP/IP prototypes were developed at multiple research centers between 1978 and 1983.
A computer called a router is provided with an interface to each network. It forwards network packets back and forth between them. Originally a router was called "gateway", but the term was changed to avoid confusion with other types of gateways.
In March 1982, the US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking. In the same year, NORSAR and Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London adopted the protocol. The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP was officially completed on flag day January 1, 1983, when the new protocols were permanently activated.
In 1985, the Internet Advisory Board (later Internet Architecture Board) held a three-day TCP/IP workshop for the computer industry, attended by 250 vendor representatives, promoting the protocol and leading to its increasing commercial use. In 1985, the first Interop conference focused on network interoperability by broader adoption of TCP/IP. The conference was founded by Dan Lynch, an early Internet activist. From the beginning, large corporations, such as IBM and DEC, attended the meeting.
IBM, AT&T and DEC were the first major corporations to adopt TCP/IP, this despite having competing proprietary protocols. In IBM, from 1984, Barry Appelman's group did TCP/IP development. They navigated the corporate politics to get a stream of TCP/IP products for various IBM systems, including MVS, VM, and OS/2. At the same time, several smaller companies, such as FTP Software and the Wollongong Group, began offering TCP/IP stacks for DOS and Microsoft Windows. The first VM/CMS TCP/IP stack came from the University of Wisconsin.
Some of the early TCP/IP stacks were written single-handedly by a few programmers. Jay Elinsky and of IBM Research wrote TCP/IP stacks for VM/CMS and OS/2, respectively. In 1984 Donald Gillies at MIT wrote a "ntcp" multi-connection TCP which ran atop the IP/PacketDriver layer maintained by John Romkey at MIT in 1983–4. Romkey leveraged this TCP in 1986 when FTP Software was founded. Starting in 1985, Phil Karn created a multi-connection TCP application for ham radio systems (KA9Q TCP).
The spread of TCP/IP was fueled further in June 1989, when the University of California, Berkeley agreed to place the TCP/IP code developed for BSD UNIX into the public domain. Various corporate vendors, including IBM, included this code in commercial TCP/IP software releases. Microsoft released a native TCP/IP stack in Windows 95. This event helped cement TCP/IP's dominance over other protocols on Microsoft-based networks, which included IBM Systems Network Architecture (SNA), and on other platforms such as Digital Equipment Corporation's DECnet, Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), and Xerox Network Systems (XNS).
Nonetheless, for a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, engineers, organizations and nations were polarized over the issue of which standard, the OSI model or the Internet protocol suite would result in the best and most robust computer networks.
The technical standards underlying the Internet protocol suite and its constituent protocols have been delegated to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The characteristic architecture of the Internet Protocol Suite is its broad division into operating scopes for the protocols that constitute its core functionality. The defining specification of the suite is RFC 1122, which broadly outlines four abstraction layers. These have stood the test of time, as the IETF has never modified this structure. As such a model of networking, the Internet Protocol Suite predates the OSI model, a more comprehensive reference framework for general networking systems.
The end-to-end principle has evolved over time. Its original expression put the maintenance of state and overall intelligence at the edges, and assumed the Internet that connected the edges retained no state and concentrated on speed and simplicity. Real-world needs for firewalls, network address translators, web content caches and the like have forced changes in this principle.
The robustness principle states: "In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior. That is, it must be careful to send well-formed datagrams, but must accept any datagram that it can interpret (e.g., not object to technical errors where the meaning is still clear)." "The second part of the principle is almost as important: software on other hosts may contain deficiencies that make it unwise to exploit legal but obscure protocol features."
Encapsulation is used to provide abstraction of protocols and services. Encapsulation is usually aligned with the division of the protocol suite into layers of general functionality. In general, an application (the highest level of the model) uses a set of protocols to send its data down the layers. The data is further encapsulated at each level.
An early architectural document, , emphasizes architectural principles over layering. RFC 1122, titled "Host Requirements", is structured in paragraphs referring to layers, but the document refers to many other architectural principles and does not emphasize layering. It loosely defines a four-layer model, with the layers having names, not numbers, as follows:
The protocols of the link layer operate within the scope of the local network connection to which a host is attached. This regime is called the "link" in TCP/IP parlance and is the lowest component layer of the suite. The link includes all hosts accessible without traversing a router. The size of the link is therefore determined by the networking hardware design. In principle, TCP/IP is designed to be hardware independent and may be implemented on top of virtually any link-layer technology. This includes not only hardware implementations, but also virtual link layers such as virtual private networks and networking tunnels.
The link layer is used to move packets between the Internet layer interfaces of two different hosts on the same link. The processes of transmitting and receiving packets on the link can be controlled both in the device driver for the network card, as well as in firmware or by specialized chipsets. These perform functions, such as framing, to prepare the Internet layer packets for transmission, and finally transmit the frames to the physical layer and over a transmission medium. The TCP/IP model includes specifications for translating the network addressing methods used in the Internet Protocol to link-layer addresses, such as media access control (MAC) addresses. All other aspects below that level, however, are implicitly assumed to exist, and are not explicitly defined in the TCP/IP model.
The link layer in the TCP/IP model has corresponding functions in Layer 2 of the OSI model.
Internetworking requires sending data from the source network to the destination network. This process is called routing and is supported by host addressing and identification using the hierarchical IP addressing system. The internet layer provides an unreliable datagram transmission facility between hosts located on potentially different IP networks by forwarding datagrams to an appropriate next-hop router for further relaying to its destination. The internet layer has the responsibility of sending packets across potentially multiple networks. With this functionality, the internet layer makes possible internetworking, the interworking of different IP networks, and it essentially establishes the Internet.
The internet layer does not distinguish between the various transport layer protocols. IP carries data for a variety of different upper layer protocols. These protocols are each identified by a unique protocol number: for example, Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) are protocols 1 and 2, respectively.
The Internet Protocol is the principal component of the internet layer, and it defines two addressing systems to identify network hosts and to locate them on the network. The original address system of the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet, is Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). It uses a 32-bit IP address and is therefore capable of identifying approximately four billion hosts. This limitation was eliminated in 1998 by the standardization of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) which uses 128-bit addresses. IPv6 production implementations emerged in approximately 2006.
The transport layer establishes basic data channels that applications use for task-specific data exchange. The layer establishes host-to-host connectivity, meaning it provides end-to-end message transfer services that are independent of the structure of user data and the logistics of exchanging information for any particular specific purpose and independent of the underlying network. The protocols in this layer may provide error control, segmentation, flow control, congestion control, and application addressing (port numbers). End-to-end message transmission or connecting applications at the transport layer can be categorized as either connection-oriented, implemented in TCP, or connectionless, implemented in UDP.
For the purpose of providing process-specific transmission channels for applications, the layer establishes the concept of the network port. This is a numbered logical construct allocated specifically for each of the communication channels an application needs. For many types of services, these port numbers have been standardized so that client computers may address specific services of a server computer without the involvement of service announcements or directory services.
Because IP provides only a best effort delivery, some transport layer protocols offer reliability. However, IP can run over a reliable data link protocol such as the High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC).
For example, the TCP is a connection-oriented protocol that addresses numerous reliability issues in providing a reliable byte stream:
The newer Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is also a reliable, connection-oriented transport mechanism. It is message-stream-oriented—not byte-stream-oriented like TCP—and provides multiple streams multiplexed over a single connection. It also provides multi-homing support, in which a connection end can be represented by multiple IP addresses (representing multiple physical interfaces), such that if one fails, the connection is not interrupted. It was developed initially for telephony applications (to transport SS7 over IP), but can also be used for other applications.
The User Datagram Protocol is a connectionless datagram protocol. Like IP, it is a best effort, "unreliable" protocol. Reliability is addressed through error detection using a weak checksum algorithm. UDP is typically used for applications such as streaming media (audio, video, Voice over IP etc.) where on-time arrival is more important than reliability, or for simple query/response applications like DNS lookups, where the overhead of setting up a reliable connection is disproportionately large. Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is a datagram protocol that is designed for real-time data such as streaming audio and video.
The applications at any given network address are distinguished by their TCP or UDP port. By convention certain "well known ports" are associated with specific applications.
The TCP/IP model's transport or host-to-host layer corresponds roughly to the fourth layer in the OSI model, also called the transport layer.
The application layer includes the protocols used by most applications for providing user services or exchanging application data over the network connections established by the lower level protocols. This may include some basic network support services such as protocols for routing and host configuration. Examples of application layer protocols include the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Data coded according to application layer protocols are encapsulated into transport layer protocol units (such as TCP or UDP messages), which in turn use lower layer protocols to effect actual data transfer.
The TCP/IP model does not consider the specifics of formatting and presenting data, and does not define additional layers between the application and transport layers as in the OSI model (presentation and session layers). Such functions are the realm of libraries and application programming interfaces.
Application layer protocols generally treat the transport layer (and lower) protocols as black boxes which provide a stable network connection across which to communicate, although the applications are usually aware of key qualities of the transport layer connection such as the end point IP addresses and port numbers. Application layer protocols are often associated with particular client-server applications, and common services have "well-known" port numbers reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). For example, the HyperText Transfer Protocol uses server port 80 and Telnet uses server port 23. Clients connecting to a service usually use ephemeral ports, i.e., port numbers assigned only for the duration of the transaction at random or from a specific range configured in the application.
The transport layer and lower-level layers are unconcerned with the specifics of application layer protocols. Routers and switches do not typically examine the encapsulated traffic, rather they just provide a conduit for it. However, some firewall and bandwidth throttling applications must interpret application data. An example is the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP). It is also sometimes necessary for network address translator (NAT) traversal to consider the application payload.
The application layer in the TCP/IP model is often compared as equivalent to a combination of the fifth (Session), sixth (Presentation), and the seventh (Application) layers of the OSI model.
Furthermore, the TCP/IP model distinguishes between "user protocols" and "support protocols". Support protocols provide services to a system of network infrastructure. User protocols are used for actual user applications. For example, FTP is a user protocol and DNS is a support protocol.
The following table shows various networking models. The number of layers varies between three and seven.
Some of the networking models are from textbooks, which are secondary sources that may conflict with the intent of RFC 1122 and other IETF primary sources.
The three top layers in the OSI model, i.e. the application layer, the presentation layer and the session layer, are not distinguished separately in the TCP/IP model which only has an application layer above the transport layer. While some pure OSI protocol applications, such as X.400, also combined them, there is no requirement that a TCP/IP protocol stack must impose monolithic architecture above the transport layer. For example, the NFS application protocol runs over the eXternal Data Representation (XDR) presentation protocol, which, in turn, runs over a protocol called Remote Procedure Call (RPC). RPC provides reliable record transmission, so it can safely use the best-effort UDP transport.
Different authors have interpreted the TCP/IP model differently, and disagree whether the link layer, or the entire TCP/IP model, covers OSI layer 1 (physical layer) issues, or whether a hardware layer is assumed below the link layer.
Several authors have attempted to incorporate the OSI model's layers 1 and 2 into the TCP/IP model, since these are commonly referred to in modern standards (for example, by IEEE and ITU). This often results in a model with five layers, where the link layer or network access layer is split into the OSI model's layers 1 and 2.
The IETF protocol development effort is not concerned with strict layering. Some of its protocols may not fit cleanly into the OSI model, although RFCs sometimes refer to it and often use the old OSI layer numbers. The IETF has repeatedly stated that Internet protocol and architecture development is not intended to be OSI-compliant. RFC 3439, referring to the Internet architecture, contains a section entitled: "Layering Considered Harmful".
For example, the session and presentation layers of the OSI suite are considered to be included to the application layer of the TCP/IP suite. The functionality of the session layer can be found in protocols like HTTP and SMTP and is more evident in protocols like Telnet and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Session layer functionality is also realized with the port numbering of the TCP and UDP protocols, which cover the transport layer in the TCP/IP suite. Functions of the presentation layer are realized in the TCP/IP applications with the MIME standard in data exchange.
Conflicts are apparent also in the original OSI model, ISO 7498, when not considering the annexes to this model, e.g., the ISO 7498/4 Management Framework, or the ISO 8648 Internal Organization of the Network layer (IONL). When the IONL and Management Framework documents are considered, the ICMP and IGMP are defined as layer management protocols for the network layer. In like manner, the IONL provides a structure for "subnetwork dependent convergence facilities" such as ARP and RARP.
IETF protocols can be encapsulated recursively, as demonstrated by tunneling protocols such as Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE). GRE uses the same mechanism that OSI uses for tunneling at the network layer.
The Internet protocol suite does not presume any specific hardware or software environment. It only requires that hardware and a software layer exists that is capable of sending and receiving packets on a computer network. As a result, the suite has been implemented on essentially every computing platform. A minimal implementation of TCP/IP includes the following: Internet Protocol (IP), Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP). In addition to IP, ICMP, TCP, UDP, Internet Protocol version 6 requires Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP), ICMPv6, and IGMPv6 and is often accompanied by an integrated IPSec security layer.
Application programmers are typically concerned only with interfaces in the application layer and often also in the transport layer, while the layers below are services provided by the TCP/IP stack in the operating system. Most IP implementations are accessible to programmers through sockets and APIs.
Unique implementations include Lightweight TCP/IP, an open source stack designed for embedded systems, and KA9Q NOS, a stack and associated protocols for amateur packet radio systems and personal computers connected via serial lines.
Microcontroller firmware in the network adapter typically handles link issues, supported by driver software in the operating system. Non-programmable analog and digital electronics are normally in charge of the physical components below the link layer, typically using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chipset for each network interface or other physical standard. High-performance routers are to a large extent based on fast non-programmable digital electronics, carrying out link level switching.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15476
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Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (; ALFB transliteration: "Ḁbnʋ ălŞɑỉƈ alLibi"; born Ali Mohamed Abdul Aziz al-Fakheri, 1963 – May 10, 2009) was a Libyan national captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 after the fall of the Taliban; he was interrogated by the American and Egyptian forces. The information he gave under torture to Egyptian authorities was cited by the George W. Bush Administration in the months preceding its 2003 invasion of Iraq as evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. That information was frequently repeated by members of the Bush Administration, although reports from both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) strongly questioned its credibility, suggesting that al-Libi was "intentionally misleading" interrogators.
In 2006, the United States transferred al-Libi to Libya, where he was imprisoned by the government. He was reported to have tuberculosis. On May 19, 2009, the government reported that he had recently committed suicide in prison. Human Rights Watch, whose representatives had recently visited him, called for an investigation into the circumstances of his death; "The New York Times" reported that Ayman al-Zawahiri had asserted that Libya had tortured al-Libi to death.
In Afghanistan, al-Libi led the Al Khaldan training camp, where Zacarias Moussaoui and Ahmed Ressam trained for attacks in the United States. An associate of Abu Zubaydah, al-Libi had his assets frozen by the U.S. government following the September 11 attacks; on September 26, 2002, the U.S. government published a list of terrorists who were covered by this restriction.
The Uyghur Turkistan Islamic Party's "Islamic Turkistan" magazine in its 5th edition published an obituary of its member Turghun (Ibn Umar al Turkistani) speaking of his time training at the Al Khaldan training camp and his meeting with Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The Uyghurs in Afghanistan fought against the American bombing and the Northern Alliance after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Ibn Umar died fighting against Americans at the Qalai Jangi prison riot.
Al-Libi was captured by Pakistani officials in November 2001, as he attempted to flee Afghanistan following the collapse of the Taliban after the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and was transferred to the US military in January 2002.
Department of Defense spokesmen used to routinely describe the Khaldan training camp as an al-Qaeda training camp, and Al-Libi and Abu Zubaydah as senior members of al-Qaeda. But, during testimony at their Combatant Status Review Tribunals, several Guantanamo captives, including Zubaydah, described the Khaldan camp as having been run by a rival jihadist organizationone that did not support attacking civilians.
Al-Libi was turned over to the FBI and held at Bagram Air Base. When talking to the FBI interrogators Russell Fincher and Marty Mahon, he seemed "genuinely friendly" and spoke chiefly in English, calling for a translator only when necessary. He seemed to bond with Fincher, a devout Christian, and the two prayed together and discussed religion at length.
Al-Libi told the interrogators details about Richard Reid, a British citizen who had joined al-Qaeda and trained to carry out a suicide bombing of an airliner, which he unsuccessfully attempted on December 22, 2001. Al-Libi agreed to continue cooperating if the United States would allow his wife and her family to emigrate, while he was prosecuted within the American legal system.
The CIA asked President Bush for permission to take al-Libi into their own custody and rendition him to a foreign country for more "tough guy" questioning, and were granted permission. They "simply came and took al-Libi away from the FBI." One CIA officer was heard telling their new prisoner that "You know where you are going. Before you get there, I am going to find your mother and fuck her".
In the second week of January 2002, al-Libi was flown to the USS "Bataan" in the northern Arabian Sea, a ship being used to hold eight other notable prisoners, including John Walker Lindh. He was subsequently transferred to Egyptian interrogators.
According to "The Washington Post",
On September 15, 2002, "Time" published an article that detailed the CIA interrogations of Omar al-Faruq. It said,
On Sept. 9, according to a secret CIA summary of the interview, al-Faruq confessed that he was, in fact, al-Qaeda's senior representative in Southeast Asia. Then came an even more shocking confession: according to the CIA document, al-Faruq said two senior al-Qaeda officials, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had ordered him to 'plan large-scale attacks against U.S. interests in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia.'
Al-Libi has been identified as a principal source of faulty prewar intelligence regarding chemical weapons training between Iraq and al-Qaeda that was used by the Bush Administration to justify the invasion of Iraq. Specifically, he told interrogators that Iraq provided training to al-Qaeda in the area of "chemical and biological weapons". In Cincinnati in October 2002, Bush informed the public: "Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases."
This claim was repeated several times in the run-up to the war, including in then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the U.N Security Council on February 5, 2003, which concluded with a long recitation of the information provided by al-Libi. Powell's speech was made less than a month after a then-classified CIA report concluded that the information provided by al-Libi was unreliable, and about a year after a DIA report concluded the same thing.
Al-Libi recanted these claims in January 2004 after U.S. interrogators presented "new evidence from other detainees that cast doubt on his claims", according to "Newsweek". The DIA concluded in February 2002 that al-Libi deliberately misled interrogators, in what the CIA called an "attempt to exaggerate his importance". Some speculate that his reason for giving disinformation was in order to draw the U.S. into an attack on Iraq—Islam's "weakest" state; a remark attributed to al-Libi—which al-Qaeda believes will lead to a global jihad. Others, including al-Libi himself, have insisted that he gave false information due to the use of torture (so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques").
An article published in the November 5, 2005, "The New York Times" quoted two paragraphs of a Defense Intelligence Agency report, declassified upon request by Senator Carl Levin, that expressed doubts about the results of al-Libi's interrogation in February 2002.
Al-Libi told a foreign intelligence service that:
Iraq — acting on the request of al-Qa'ida militant Abu Abdullah, who was Muhammad Atif's emissary — agreed to provide unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qa'ida associates beginning in December 2000. The two individuals departed for Iraq but did not return, so al-Libi was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.
The September 2002 version of "Iraqi Support for Terrorism" stated that al-Libi said Iraq had "provided" chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda associates in 2000, but also stated that al-Libi "did not know the results of the training."
The 2006 Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq stated that "Although DIA coordinated on CIA's "Iraqi Support for Terrorism" paper, DIA analysis preceding that assessment was more skeptical of the al-Libi reporting." In July 2002, DIA assessed
It is plausible al-Qa'ida attempted to obtain CB assistance from Iraq and Ibn al-Shaykh is sufficiently senior to have access to such sensitive information. However, Ibn al-Shaykh's information lacks details concerning the individual Iraqis involved, the specific CB materials associated with the assistance and the location where the alleged training occurred. The information is also second hand, and not derived from Ibn al-Shaykh's personal experience.
The Senate report also states "According to al-Libi, after his decision to fabricate information for debriefers, he 'lied about being a member of al-Qa'ida. Although he considered himself close to, but not a member of, al-Qa'ida, he knew enough about the senior members, organization and operations to claim to be a member.'"
On September 8, 2006, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released "Phase II" of its report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. Conclusion 3 of the report states the following:
On June 11, 2008, "Newsweek" published an account of material from a "previously undisclosed CIA report written in the summer of 2002". The article reported that on August 7, 2002, CIA analysts had drafted a high-level report that expressed serious doubts about the information flowing from al-Libi's interrogation. The information that al-Libi acknowledged being a member of al-Qaeda's executive council was not supported by other sources. According to al-Libi, in Egypt he was locked in a tiny box less than 20 inches high and held for 17 hours and after being let out he was thrown to the floor and punched for 15 minutes. According to CIA operational cables, only then did he tell his "fabricated" story about al-Qaeda members being dispatched to Iraq.
In November 2006, a Moroccan using the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, having infiltrated al-Qaeda in the 1990s, wrote the book, "". In the book, Nasiri claims that al-Libi deliberately planted information to encourage the U.S. to invade Iraq. In an interview with BBC2's "Newsnight", Nasiri said Libi "needed the conflict in Iraq because months before I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?" Nasiri said that Libi had identified Iraq as the "weakest" Muslim country. He suggested to "Newsnight" that al-Libi wanted to overthrow Saddam and use Iraq as a jihadist base. Nasiri describes al-Libi as one of the leaders at the Afghan camp, and characterizes him as "brilliant in every way." He said that learning how to withstand interrogations and supply false information was a key part of the training in the camps. Al-Libi "knew what his interrogators wanted, and he was happy to give it to them. He wanted to see Saddam toppled even more than the Americans did."
In April 2007, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet released his memoir titled "". With regard to al-Libi, Tenet writes the following:
In 2006, the Bush Administration announced that it was transferring high-value al-Qaeda detainees from CIA secret prisons so they could be put on trial by military commissions. However, the Administration was conspicuously silent about al-Libi. In December 2014, it was revealed that he had been transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2003 and transferred to Morocco on March 27, 2004.
Noman Benotman, a former Mujahideen who knew Libi, told "Newsweek" that during a recent trip to Tripoli, he met with a senior Libyan government official who confirmed to him that Libi had been transferred to Libya and was being held in prison there. He was suffering from tuberculosis.
On May 10, 2009, the English language edition of the Libyan newspaper "Ennahar" reported that the government said that Al-Libi had been repatriated to Libyan custody in 2006, and had recently committed suicide by hanging. It attributed the information to another newspaper, "Oea". "Ennahar" reported Al-Libi's real name was Ali Mohamed Abdul Aziz Al-Fakheri. It stated he was 46 years old, and had been allowed visits with international human rights workers from Human Rights Watch. The story was widely reported by other media outlets.
Al-Libi had been visited in April 2009 by a team from Human Rights Watch. His sudden death so soon after this visit has led human rights organisations and Islamic groups to question whether it was truly a suicide. Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of the UK branch of the human rights group Reprieve, said, "We are told that al-Libi committed suicide in his Libyan prison. If this is true it would be because of his torture and abuse. If false, it may reflect a desire to silence one of the greatest embarrassments to the Bush administration." Hafed Al-Ghwell, a Libya expert and director of communications at the Dubai campus of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, commented,
This is a regime with a long history of killing people in jail and then claiming it was suicide. My guess is Libya has seen the winds of change in America and wanted to bury this man before international organisations start demanding access to him.
On June 19, 2009, Andy Worthington published new information on al-Libi's death. Worthington gave a detailed timeline of Al Libi's last years.
The head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch said al-Libi was "Exhibit A" in hearings on the relationship between pre-Iraq War false intelligence and torture. Confirmation of al-Libi's location came two weeks prior to his death. An independent investigation of his death has been requested by Human Rights Watch.
On October 4, 2009, the "Reuters" reported that Ayman Al Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda, had asserted that Libya had caused al-Libi's death through torture.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15477
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International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is an international humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million volunteers, members and staff worldwide which was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for all human beings, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering.
The movement consists of several distinct organizations that are legally independent from each other, but are united within the movement through common basic principles, objectives, symbols, statutes and governing organisations. The movement's parts are:
Until the middle of the 19th century, there were no organized and/or well-established army nursing systems for casualties and no safe and protected institutions to accommodate and treat those who were wounded on the battlefield. A devout Reformed Christian, the Swiss businessman Jean-Henri Dunant, in June 1859, traveled to Italy to meet French emperor Napoléon III with the intention of discussing difficulties in conducting business in Algeria, at that time occupied by France. He arrived in the small town of Solferino on the evening of 24 June after the Battle of Solferino, an engagement in the Austro-Sardinian War. In a single day, about 40,000 soldiers on both sides died or were left wounded on the field. Jean-Henri Dunant was shocked by the terrible aftermath of the battle, the suffering of the wounded soldiers, and the near-total lack of medical attendance and basic care. He completely abandoned the original intent of his trip and for several days he devoted himself to helping with the treatment and care for the wounded. He took point in organizing an overwhelming level of relief assistance with the local villagers to aid without discrimination.
Back in his home in Geneva, he decided to write a book entitled "A Memory of Solferino" which he published using his own money in 1862. He sent copies of the book to leading political and military figures throughout Europe, and people he thought could help him make a change. In addition to penning a vivid description of his experiences in Solferino in 1859, he explicitly advocated the formation of national voluntary relief organizations to help nurse wounded soldiers in the case of war, an idea that was inspired by Christian teaching regarding social responsibility, as well as his experience after the battlefield of Solferino. In addition, he called for the development of an international treaty to guarantee the protection of medics and field hospitals for soldiers wounded on the battlefield.
In 1863, Gustave Moynier, a Geneva lawyer and president of the Geneva Society for Public Welfare, received a copy of Dunant's book and introduced it for discussion at a meeting of that society. As a result of this initial discussion the society established an investigatory commission to examine the feasibility of Dunant's suggestions and eventually to organize an international conference about their possible implementation. The members of this committee, which has subsequently been referred to as the "Committee of the Five," aside from Dunant and Moynier were physician Louis Appia, who had significant experience working as a field surgeon; Appia's friend and colleague Théodore Maunoir, from the Geneva Hygiene and Health Commission; and Guillaume-Henri Dufour, a Swiss Army general of great renown. Eight days later, the five men decided to rename the committee to the "International Committee for Relief to the Wounded". In October (26–29) 1863, the international conference organized by the committee was held in Geneva to develop possible measures to improve medical services on the battlefield. The conference was attended by 36 individuals: eighteen official delegates from national governments, six delegates from other non-governmental organizations, seven non-official foreign delegates, and the five members of the International Committee. The states and kingdoms represented by official delegates were: Austrian Empire, Grand Duchy of Baden, Kingdom of Bavaria, French Empire, Kingdom of Hanover, Grand Duchy of Hesse, Kingdom of Italy, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Kingdom of Prussia, Russian Empire, Kingdom of Saxony, Kingdom of Spain, United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Among the proposals written in the final resolutions of the conference, adopted on 29 October 1863, were:
Only one year later, the Swiss government invited the governments of all European countries, as well as the United States of America, the Empire of Brazil, and the Mexican Empire, to attend an official diplomatic conference. Sixteen countries sent a total of twenty-six delegates to Geneva. On 22 August 1864, the conference adopted the first Geneva Convention "for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field". Representatives of 12 states and kingdoms signed the convention:
The convention contained ten articles, establishing for the first time legally binding rules guaranteeing neutrality and protection for wounded soldiers, field medical personnel, and specific humanitarian institutions in an armed conflict.
Directly following the establishment of the Geneva Convention, the first national societies were founded in Belgium, Denmark, France, Oldenburg, Prussia, Spain, and Württemberg. Also in 1864, Louis Appia and Charles van de Velde, a captain of the Dutch Army, became the first independent and neutral delegates to work under the symbol of the Red Cross in an armed conflict. Three years later in 1867, the first International Conference of National Aid Societies for the Nursing of the War Wounded was convened.
Also in 1867, Jean-Henri Dunant was forced to declare bankruptcy due to business failures in Algeria, partly because he had neglected his business interests during his tireless activities for the International Committee. The controversy surrounding Dunant's business dealings and the resulting negative public opinion, combined with an ongoing conflict with Gustave Moynier, led to Dunant's expulsion from his position as a member and secretary. He was charged with fraudulent bankruptcy and a warrant for his arrest was issued. Thus, he was forced to leave Geneva and never returned to his home city.
In the following years, national societies were founded in nearly every country in Europe. The project resonated well with patriotic sentiments that were on the rise in the late-nineteenth-century, and national societies were often encouraged as signifiers of national moral superiority. In 1876, the committee adopted the name "International Committee of the Red Cross" (ICRC), which is still its official designation today. Five years later, the American Red Cross was founded through the efforts of Clara Barton. More and more countries signed the Geneva Convention and began to respect it in practice during armed conflicts. In a rather short period of time, the Red Cross gained huge momentum as an internationally respected movement, and the national societies became increasingly popular as a venue for volunteer work.
When the first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901, the Norwegian Nobel Committee opted to give it jointly to Jean-Henri Dunant and Frédéric Passy, a leading international pacifist. More significant than the honor of the prize itself, this prize marked the overdue rehabilitation of Jean-Henri Dunant and represented a tribute to his key role in the formation of the Red Cross. Dunant died nine years later in the small Swiss health resort of Heiden. Only two months earlier his long-standing adversary Gustave Moynier had also died, leaving a mark in the history of the Committee as its longest-serving president ever.
In 1906, the 1864 Geneva Convention was revised for the first time. One year later, the Hague Convention X, adopted at the Second International Peace Conference in The Hague, extended the scope of the Geneva Convention to naval warfare. Shortly before the beginning of the First World War in 1914, 50 years after the foundation of the ICRC and the adoption of the first Geneva Convention, there were already 45 national relief societies throughout the world. The movement had extended itself beyond Europe and North America to Central and South America (Argentine Republic, the United States of Brazil, the Republic of Chile, the Republic of Cuba, the United Mexican States, the Republic of Peru, the Republic of El Salvador, the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, the United States of Venezuela), Asia (the Republic of China, the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Siam), and Africa (Union of South Africa).
With the outbreak of World War I, the ICRC found itself confronted with enormous challenges that it could handle only by working closely with the national Red Cross societies. Red Cross nurses from around the world, including the United States and Japan, came to support the medical services of the armed forces of the European countries involved in the war. On 15 August 1914, immediately after the start of the war, the ICRC set up its International Prisoners-of-War (POW) Agency, which had about 1,200 mostly volunteer staff members by the end of 1914. By the end of the war, the Agency had transferred about 20 million letters and messages, 1.9 million parcels, and about 18 million Swiss francs in monetary donations to POWs of all affected countries. Furthermore, due to the intervention of the Agency, about 200,000 prisoners were exchanged between the warring parties, released from captivity and returned to their home country. The organizational card index of the Agency accumulated about 7 million records from 1914 to 1923. The card index led to the identification of about 2 million POWs and the ability to contact their families. The complete index is on loan today from the ICRC to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva. The right to access the index is still strictly restricted to the ICRC.
During the entire war, the ICRC monitored warring parties' compliance with the Geneva Conventions of the 1907 revision and forwarded complaints about violations to the respective country. When chemical weapons were used in this war for the first time in history, the ICRC vigorously protested against this new type of warfare. Even without having a mandate from the Geneva Conventions, the ICRC tried to ameliorate the suffering of civil populations. In territories that were officially designated as "occupied territories", the ICRC could assist the civilian population on the basis of the Hague Convention's "Laws and Customs of War on Land" of 1907. This convention was also the legal basis for the ICRC's work for prisoners of war. In addition to the work of the International Prisoner-of-War Agency as described above this included inspection visits to POW camps. A total of 524 camps throughout Europe were visited by 41 delegates from the ICRC until the end of the war.
Between 1916 and 1918, the ICRC published a number of postcards with scenes from the POW camps. The pictures showed the prisoners in day-to-day activities such as the distribution of letters from home. The intention of the ICRC was to provide the families of the prisoners with some hope and solace and to alleviate their uncertainties about the fate of their loved ones. After the end of the war, between 1920 and 1922, the ICRC organized the return of about 500,000 prisoners to their home countries. In 1920, the task of repatriation was handed over to the newly founded League of Nations, which appointed the Norwegian diplomat and scientist Fridtjof Nansen as its "High Commissioner for Repatriation of the War Prisoners". His legal mandate was later extended to support and care for war refugees and displaced persons when his office became that of the League of Nations "High Commissioner for Refugees". Nansen, who invented the Nansen passport for stateless refugees and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922, appointed two delegates from the ICRC as his deputies.
A year before the end of the war, the ICRC received the 1917 Nobel Peace Prize for its outstanding wartime work. It was the only Nobel Peace Prize awarded in the period from 1914 to 1918. In 1923, the International Committee of the Red Cross adopted a change in its policy regarding the selection of new members. Until then, only citizens from the city of Geneva could serve in the Committee. This limitation was expanded to include Swiss citizens. As a direct consequence of World War I, a treaty was adopted in 1925 which outlawed the use of suffocating or poisonous gases and biological agents as weapons. Four years later, the original Convention was revised and the second Geneva Convention "relative to the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea" was established. The events of World War I and the respective activities of the ICRC significantly increased the reputation and authority of the Committee among the international community and led to an extension of its competencies.
As early as in 1934, a draft proposal for an additional convention for the protection of the civil population in occupied territories during an armed conflict was adopted by the International Red Cross Conference. Unfortunately, most governments had little interest in implementing this convention, and it was thus prevented from entering into force before the beginning of World War II.
The Red Cross' response to the Holocaust has been the subject of significant controversy and criticism. As early as May 1944, the ICRC was criticized for its indifference to Jewish suffering and death—criticism that intensified after the end of the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust became undeniable. One defense to these allegations is that the Red Cross was trying to preserve its reputation as a neutral and impartial organization by not interfering with what was viewed as a German internal matter. The Red Cross also considered its primary focus to be prisoners of war whose countries had signed the Geneva Convention.
The legal basis of the work of the ICRC during World War II were the Geneva Conventions in their 1929 revision. The activities of the Committee were similar to those during World War I: visiting and monitoring POW camps, organizing relief assistance for civilian populations, and administering the exchange of messages regarding prisoners and missing persons. By the end of the war, 179 delegates had conducted 12,750 visits to POW camps in 41 countries. The Central Information Agency on Prisoners-of-War ("Agence centrale des prisonniers de guerre") had a staff of 3,000, the card index tracking prisoners contained 45 million cards, and 120 million messages were exchanged by the Agency. One major obstacle was that the Nazi-controlled German Red Cross refused to cooperate with the Geneva statutes including blatant violations such as the deportation of Jews from Germany and the mass murders conducted in the Nazi concentration camps. Moreover, two other main parties to the conflict, the Soviet Union and Japan, were not party to the 1929 Geneva Conventions and were not legally required to follow the rules of the conventions.
During the war, the ICRC was unable to obtain an agreement with Nazi Germany about the treatment of detainees in concentration camps, and it eventually abandoned applying pressure in order to avoid disrupting its work with POWs. The ICRC was also unable to obtain a response to reliable information about the extermination camps and the mass killing of European Jews, Roma, et al. After November 1943, the ICRC achieved permission to send parcels to concentration camp detainees with known names and locations. Because the notices of receipt for these parcels were often signed by other inmates, the ICRC managed to register the identities of about 105,000 detainees in the concentration camps and delivered about 1.1 million parcels, primarily to the camps Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen.
Maurice Rossel was sent to Berlin as a delegate of the International Red Cross; he visited Theresienstadt in 1944. The choice of the inexperienced Rossel for this mission has been interpreted as indicative of his organization's indifference to the "Jewish problem", while his report has been described as "emblematic of the failure of the ICRC" to advocate for Jews during the Holocaust. Rossel's report was noted for its uncritical acceptance of Nazi propaganda. He erroneously stated that Jews were not deported from Theresienstadt. Claude Lanzmann recorded his experiences in 1979, producing a documentary entitled "A Visitor from the Living".
On 12 March 1945, ICRC president Jacob Burckhardt received a message from SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner allowing ICRC delegates to visit the concentration camps. This agreement was bound by the condition that these delegates would have to stay in the camps until the end of the war. Ten delegates, among them Louis Haefliger (Mauthausen-Gusen), Paul Dunant (Theresienstadt) and Victor Maurer (Dachau), accepted the assignment and visited the camps. Louis Haefliger prevented the forceful eviction or blasting of Mauthausen-Gusen by alerting American troops.
Friedrich Born (1903–1963), an ICRC delegate in Budapest who saved the lives of about 11,000 to 15,000 Jewish people in Hungary. Marcel Junod (1904–1961), a physician from Geneva was one of the first foreigners to visit Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped.
In 1944, the ICRC received its second Nobel Peace Prize. As in World War I, it received the only Peace Prize awarded during the main period of war, 1939 to 1945. At the end of the war, the ICRC worked with national Red Cross societies to organize relief assistance to those countries most severely affected. In 1948, the Committee published a report reviewing its war-era activities from 1 September 1939 to 30 June 1947. The ICRC opened its archives from World War II in 1996.
On 12 August 1949, further revisions to the existing two Geneva Conventions were adopted. An additional convention "for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea", now called the second Geneva Convention, was brought under the Geneva Convention umbrella as a successor to the 1907 Hague Convention X. The 1929 Geneva convention "relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War" may have been the second Geneva Convention from a historical point of view (because it was actually formulated in Geneva), but after 1949 it came to be called the third Convention because it came later chronologically than the Hague Convention. Reacting to the experience of World War II, the Fourth Geneva Convention, a new Convention "relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War", was established. Also, the additional protocols of 8 June 1977 were intended to make the conventions apply to internal conflicts such as civil wars. Today, the four conventions and their added protocols contain more than 600 articles, a remarkable expansion when compared to the mere 10 articles in the first 1864 convention.
In celebration of its centennial in 1963, the ICRC, together with the League of Red Cross Societies, received its third Nobel Peace Prize. Since 1993, non-Swiss individuals have been allowed to serve as Committee delegates abroad, a task which was previously restricted to Swiss citizens. Indeed, since then, the share of staff without Swiss citizenship has increased to about 35%.
On 16 October 1990, the UN General Assembly decided to grant the ICRC observer status for its assembly sessions and sub-committee meetings, the first observer status given to a private organization. The resolution was jointly proposed by 138 member states and introduced by the Italian ambassador, Vieri Traxler, in memory of the organization's origins in the Battle of Solferino. An agreement with the Swiss government signed on 19 March 1993, affirmed the already long-standing policy of full independence of the Committee from any possible interference by Switzerland. The agreement protects the full sanctity of all ICRC property in Switzerland including its headquarters and archive, grants members and staff legal immunity, exempts the ICRC from all taxes and fees, guarantees the protected and duty-free transfer of goods, services, and money, provides the ICRC with secure communication privileges at the same level as foreign embassies, and simplifies Committee travel in and out of Switzerland.
At the end of the Cold War, the ICRC's work actually became more dangerous. In the 1990s, more delegates lost their lives than at any point in its history, especially when working in local and internal armed conflicts. These incidents often demonstrated a lack of respect for the rules of the Geneva Conventions and their protection symbols. Among the slain delegates were:
ICRC is active in the Afghanistan conflict areas and has set up six physical rehabilitation centers to help land mine victims. Their support extends to the national and international armed forces, civilians and the armed opposition. They regularly visit detainees under the custody of the Afghan government and the international armed forces, but have also occasionally had access since 2009 to people detained by the Taliban. They have provided basic first aid training and aid kits to both the Afghan security forces and Taliban members because, according to an ICRC spokesperson, "ICRC's constitution stipulates that all parties harmed by warfare will be treated as fairly as possible".
In 1919, representatives from the national Red Cross societies of Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the US came together in Paris to found the "League of Red Cross Societies". The original idea was Henry Davison's, then president of the American Red Cross. This move, led by the American Red Cross, expanded the international activities of the Red Cross movement beyond the strict mission of the ICRC to include relief assistance in response to emergency situations which were not caused by war (such as man-made or natural disasters). The ARC already had great disaster relief mission experience extending back to its foundation.
The formation of the League, as an additional international Red Cross organization alongside the ICRC, was not without controversy for a number of reasons. The ICRC had, to some extent, valid concerns about a possible rivalry between both organizations. The foundation of the League was seen as an attempt to undermine the leadership position of the ICRC within the movement and to gradually transfer most of its tasks and competencies to a multilateral institution. In addition to that, all founding members of the League were national societies from countries of the Entente or from associated partners of the Entente. The original statutes of the League from May 1919 contained further regulations which gave the five founding societies a privileged status and, due to the efforts of Henry P. Davison, the right to permanently exclude the national Red Cross societies from the countries of the Central Powers, namely Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, and in addition to that the national Red Cross society of Russia. These rules were contrary to the Red Cross principles of universality and equality among all national societies, a situation which furthered the concerns of the ICRC.
The first relief assistance mission organized by the League was an aid mission for the victims of a famine and subsequent typhus epidemic in Poland. Only five years after its foundation, the League had already issued 47 donation appeals for missions in 34 countries, an impressive indication of the need for this type of Red Cross work. The total sum raised by these appeals reached 685 million Swiss francs, which were used to bring emergency supplies to the victims of famines in Russia, Germany, and Albania; earthquakes in Chile, Persia, Japan, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Turkey; and refugee flows in Greece and Turkey. The first large-scale disaster mission of the League came after the 1923 earthquake in Japan which killed about 200,000 people and left countless more wounded and without shelter. Due to the League's coordination, the Red Cross society of Japan received goods from its sister societies reaching a total worth of about $100 million. Another important new field initiated by the League was the creation of youth Red Cross organizations within the national societies.
A joint mission of the ICRC and the League in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 marked the first time the movement was involved in an internal conflict, although still without an explicit mandate from the Geneva Conventions. The League, with support from more than 25 national societies, organized assistance missions and the distribution of food and other aid goods for civil populations affected by hunger and disease. The ICRC worked with the Russian Red Cross society and later the society of the Soviet Union, constantly emphasizing the ICRC's neutrality. In 1928, the "International Council" was founded to coordinate cooperation between the ICRC and the League, a task which was later taken over by the "Standing Commission". In the same year, a common statute for the movement was adopted for the first time, defining the respective roles of the ICRC and the League within the movement.
During the Abyssinian war between Ethiopia and Italy from 1935 to 1936, the League contributed aid supplies worth about 1.7 million Swiss francs. Because the Italian fascist regime under Benito Mussolini refused any cooperation with the Red Cross, these goods were delivered solely to Ethiopia. During the war, an estimated 29 people lost their lives while being under explicit protection of the Red Cross symbol, most of them due to attacks by the Italian Army. During the civil war in Spain from 1936 to 1939 the League once again joined forces with the ICRC with the support of 41 national societies. In 1939 on the brink of the Second World War, the League relocated its headquarters from Paris to Geneva to take advantage of Swiss neutrality.
In 1952, the 1928 common statute of the movement was revised for the first time. Also, the period of decolonization from 1960 to 1970 was marked by a huge jump in the number of recognized national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. By the end of the 1960s, there were more than 100 societies around the world. On December 10, 1963, the Federation and the ICRC received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1983, the League was renamed to the "League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies" to reflect the growing number of national societies operating under the Red Crescent symbol. Three years later, the seven basic principles of the movement as adopted in 1965 were incorporated into its statutes. The name of the League was changed again in 1991 to its current official designation the "International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies". In 1997, the ICRC and the IFRC signed the Seville Agreement which further defined the responsibilities of both organizations within the movement. In 2004, the IFRC began its largest mission to date after the tsunami disaster in South Asia. More than 40 national societies have worked with more than 22,000 volunteers to bring relief to the countless victims left without food and shelter and endangered by the risk of epidemics.
Altogether, there are about 97 million people worldwide who serve with the ICRC, the International Federation, and the National Societies, the majority with the latter.
The 1965 International Conference in Vienna adopted seven basic principles which should be shared by all parts of the Movement, and they were added to the official statutes of the Movement in 1986.
At the 20th International Conference in Neue Hofburg, Vienna, from 2–9 October 1965, delegates "proclaimed" seven fundamental principles which are shared by all components of the Movement, and they were added to the official statutes of the Movement in 1986. The durability and universal acceptance is a result of the process through which they came into being in the form they have. Rather than an effort to arrive at agreement, it was an attempt to discover what successful operations and organisational units, over the past 100 years, had in common. As a result, the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross and Red Crescent were not revealed, but "found" – through a deliberate and participative process of discovery.
That makes it even more important to note that the text that appears under each "heading" is an integral part of the Principle in question and not an interpretation that can vary with time and place.
Humanity
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, born of a desire to bring assistance without discrimination to the wounded on the battlefield, endeavours, in its international and national capacity, to prevent and alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found. Its purpose is to protect life and health and to ensure respect for the human being. It promotes mutual understanding, friendship, cooperation and lasting peace amongst all peoples.
Impartiality
It makes no discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions. It endeavours to relieve the suffering of individuals, being guided solely by their needs, and to give priority to the most urgent cases of distress.
Neutrality
In order to continue to enjoy the confidence of all, the Movement may not take sides in hostilities or engage at any time in controversies of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature.
Independence
The Movement is independent. The National Societies, while auxiliaries in the humanitarian services of their governments and subject to the laws of their respective countries, must always maintain their autonomy so that they may be able at all times to act in accordance with the principles of the Movement.
Voluntary Service
It is a voluntary relief movement not prompted in any manner by desire for gain.
Unity
There can be only one Red Cross or one Red Crescent Society in any one country. It must be open to all. It must carry on its humanitarian work throughout its territory.
Universality
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, in which all Societies have equal status and share equal responsibilities and duties in helping each other, is worldwide.
The International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which occurs once every four years, is the highest institutional body of the Movement. It gathers delegations from all of the national societies as well as from the ICRC, the IFRC and the signatory states to the Geneva Conventions. In between the conferences, the Standing Commission of the Red Cross and Red Crescent acts as the supreme body and supervises implementation of and compliance with the resolutions of the conference. In addition, the Standing Commission coordinates the cooperation between the ICRC and the IFRC. It consists of two representatives from the ICRC (including its president), two from the IFRC (including its president), and five individuals who are elected by the International Conference. The Standing Commission convenes every six months on average. Moreover, a convention of the Council of Delegates of the Movement takes place every two years in the course of the conferences of the General Assembly of the International Federation. The Council of Delegates plans and coordinates joint activities for the Movement.
The official mission of the ICRC as an impartial, neutral, and independent organization is to stand for the protection of the life and dignity of victims of international and internal armed conflicts. According to the 1997 Seville Agreement, it is the "Lead Agency" of the Movement in conflicts. The core tasks of the Committee, which are derived from the Geneva Conventions and its own statutes, are the following:
The ICRC is headquartered in the Swiss city of Geneva and has external offices in about 80 countries. It has about 12,000 staff members worldwide, about 800 of them working in its Geneva headquarters, 1,200 expatriates with about half of them serving as delegates managing its international missions and the other half being specialists like doctors, agronomists, engineers or interpreters, and about 10,000 members of individual national societies working on site.
According to Swiss law, the ICRC is defined as a private association. Contrary to popular belief, the ICRC is not a non-governmental organization in the most common sense of the term, nor is it an international organization. As it limits its members (a process called cooptation) to Swiss nationals only, it does not have a policy of open and unrestricted membership for individuals like other legally defined NGOs. The word "international" in its name does not refer to its membership but to the worldwide scope of its activities as defined by the Geneva Conventions. The ICRC has special privileges and legal immunities in many countries, based on national law in these countries or through agreements between the Committee and respective national governments.
According to its statutes it consists of 15 to 25 Swiss-citizen members, which it coopts for a period of four years. There is no limit to the number of terms an individual member can have although a three-quarters majority of all members is required for re-election after the third term.
The leading organs of the ICRC are the Directorate and the Assembly. The Directorate is the executive body of the Committee. It consists of a general director and five directors in the areas of "Operations", "Human Resources", "Resources and Operational Support", "Communication", and "International Law and Cooperation within the Movement". The members of the Directorate are appointed by the Assembly to serve for four years. The Assembly, consisting of all of the members of the Committee, convenes on a regular basis and is responsible for defining aims, guidelines, and strategies and for supervising the financial matters of the Committee. The president of the Assembly is also the president of the Committee as a whole. Furthermore, the Assembly elects a five-member Assembly Council which has the authority to decide on behalf of the full Assembly in some matters. The Council is also responsible for organizing the Assembly meetings and for facilitating communication between the Assembly and the Directorate.
Due to Geneva's location in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, the ICRC usually acts under its French name "Comité international de la Croix-Rouge" (CICR). The official symbol of the ICRC is the Red Cross on white background with the words "COMITE INTERNATIONAL GENEVE" circling the cross.
The 2009 budget of the ICRC amounts to more than 1 billion Swiss francs. Most of that money comes from the States, including Switzerland in its capacity as the depositary state of the Geneva Conventions, from national Red Cross societies, the signatory states of the Geneva Conventions, and from international organizations like the European Union. All payments to the ICRC are voluntary and are received as donations based on two types of appeals issued by the Committee: an annual "Headquarters Appeal" to cover its internal costs and "Emergency Appeals" for its individual missions.
The ICRC is asking donors for more than 1.1 billion Swiss francs to fund its work in 2010. Afghanistan is projected to become the ICRC's biggest humanitarian operation (at 86 million Swiss francs, an 18% increase over the initial 2009 budget), followed by Iraq (85 million francs) and Sudan (76 million francs). The initial 2010 field budget for medical activities of 132 million francs represents an increase of 12 million francs over 2009.
The IFRC coordinates cooperation between national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies throughout the world and supports the foundation of new national societies in countries where no official society exists. On the international stage, the IFRC organizes and leads relief assistance missions after emergencies such as natural disasters, manmade disasters, epidemics, mass refugee flights, and other emergencies. As per the 1997 Seville Agreement, the IFRC is the Lead Agency of the Movement in any emergency situation which does not take place as part of an armed conflict. The IFRC cooperates with the national societies of those countries affected – each called the "Operating National Society" (ONS) – as well as the national societies of other countries willing to offer assistance – called "Participating National Societies" (PNS). Among the 187 national societies admitted to the General Assembly of the International Federation as full members or observers, about 25–30 regularly work as PNS in other countries. The most active of those are the American Red Cross, the British Red Cross, the German Red Cross, and the Red Cross societies of Sweden and Norway. Another major mission of the IFRC which has gained attention in recent years is its commitment to work towards a codified, worldwide ban on the use of land mines and to bring medical, psychological, and social support for people injured by land mines.
The tasks of the IFRC can therefore be summarized as follows:
The IFRC has its headquarters in Geneva. It also runs five zone offices (Africa, Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East-North Africa), 14 permanent regional offices and has about 350 delegates in more than 60 delegations around the world. The legal basis for the work of the IFRC is its constitution. The executive body of the IFRC is a secretariat, led by a secretary general. The secretariat is supported by five divisions including "Programme Services", "Humanitarian values and humanitarian diplomacy", "National Society and Knowledge Development" and "Governance and Management Services".
The highest decision making body of the IFRC is its General Assembly, which convenes every two years with delegates from all of the national societies. Among other tasks, the General Assembly elects the secretary general. Between the convening of General Assemblies, the Governing Board is the leading body of the IFRC. It has the authority to make decisions for the IFRC in a number of areas. The Governing Board consists of the president and the vice presidents of the IFRC, the chairpersons of the Finance and Youth Commissions, and twenty elected representatives from national societies.
The symbol of the IFRC is the combination of the Red Cross (left) and Red Crescent (right) on a white background surrounded by a red rectangular frame.
The main parts of the budget of the IFRC are funded by contributions from the national societies which are members of the IFRC and through revenues from its investments. The exact amount of contributions from each member society is established by the Finance Commission and approved by the General Assembly. Any additional funding, especially for unforeseen expenses for relief assistance missions, is raised by ""appeals"" published by the IFRC and comes for voluntary donations by national societies, governments, other organizations, corporations, and individuals.
National Red Cross and Red Crescent societies exist in nearly every country in the world. Within their home country, they take on the duties and responsibilities of a national relief society as defined by International Humanitarian Law. Within the Movement, the ICRC is responsible for legally recognizing a relief society as an official national Red Cross or Red Crescent society. The exact rules for recognition are defined in the statutes of the Movement. Article 4 of these statutes contains the ""Conditions for recognition of National Societies.""
Once a National Society has been recognized by the ICRC as a component of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (the Movement), it is in principle admitted to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in accordance with the terms defined in the Constitution and Rules of Procedure of the International Federation.
There are today 190 National Societies recognized within the Movement and which are members of the International Federation.
The most recent National Societies to have been recognized within the Movement are the Maldives Red Crescent Society (9 November 2011), the Cyprus Red Cross Society, the South Sudan Red Cross Society (12 November 2013) and, the last, the Tuvalu Red Cross Society (on 1 March 2016).
Despite formal independence regarding its organizational structure and work, each national society is still bound by the laws of its home country. In many countries, national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies enjoy exceptional privileges due to agreements with their governments or specific "Red Cross Laws" granting full independence as required by the International Movement. The duties and responsibilities of a national society as defined by International Humanitarian Law and the statutes of the Movement include humanitarian aid in armed conflicts and emergency crises such as natural disasters through activities such as Restoring Family Links.
Depending on their respective human, technical, financial, and organizational resources, many national societies take on additional humanitarian tasks within their home countries such as blood donation services or acting as civilian Emergency Medical Service (EMS) providers. The ICRC and the International Federation cooperate with the national societies in their international missions, especially with human, material, and financial resources and organizing on-site logistics.
The Red Cross emblem was officially approved in Geneva in 1863.
The Red Cross flag is not to be confused with the Saint George's Cross depicted on the flag of England, Barcelona, Georgia, Freiburg im Breisgau, and several other places. In order to avoid this confusion the protected symbol is sometimes referred to as the "Greek Red Cross" (now Hellenic Red Cross); that term is also used in United States law to describe the Red Cross. The red cross of the Saint George cross extends to the edge of the flag, whereas the red cross on the Red Cross flag does not.
The Red Cross flag is the colour-switched version of the Flag of Switzerland. In 1906, to put an end to the argument of the Ottoman Empire that the flag took its roots from Christianity, it was decided to promote officially the idea that the Red Cross flag had been formed by reversing the federal colours of Switzerland, although no clear evidence of this origin had ever been found.
The Red Crescent emblem was first used by ICRC volunteers during the armed conflict of 1876–8 between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire. The symbol was officially adopted in 1929, and so far 33 states in the Muslim world have recognized it. In common with the official promotion of the red cross symbol as a colour-reversal of the Swiss flag (rather than a religious symbol), the red crescent is similarly presented as being derived from a colour-reversal of the flag of the Ottoman Empire.
On 8 December 2005, in response to growing pressure to accommodate Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel's national emergency medical, disaster, ambulance and blood bank service, as a full member of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, a new emblem (officially the Third Protocol Emblem, but more commonly known as the Red Crystal) was adopted by an amendment of the Geneva Conventions known as Protocol III.
The Red Lion and Sun Society of Iran was established in 1922 and admitted to the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement in 1923. However, some report the symbol was introduced at Geneva in 1864 as a counter example to the crescent and cross used by two of Iran's rivals, the Ottoman and the Russian empires. Although that claim is inconsistent with the Red Crescent's history, that history also suggests that the Red Lion and Sun, like the Red Crescent, may have been conceived during the 1877–1878 war between Russia and Turkey.
Due to the emblem's association with the Iranian monarchy, the Islamic Republic of Iran replaced the Red Lion and Sun with the Red Crescent in 1980, consistent with two existing Red Cross and Red Crescent symbols. Although the Red Lion and Sun has now fallen into disuse, Iran has in the past reserved the right to take it up again at any time; the Geneva Conventions continue to recognize it as an official emblem, and that status was confirmed by Protocol III in 2005 even as it added the Red Crystal.
For over 50 years, Israel requested the addition of a red Star of David, arguing that since Christian and Muslim emblems were recognized, the corresponding Jewish emblem should be as well. This emblem has been used by Magen David Adom (MDA), or Red Star of David, the national first-aid society of Israel of 1930, but it is not recognized by the Geneva Conventions as a protected symbol. The first use of the ″Magen David Adom″ was during the Anglo Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902) when it was used by the Ambulance Corps founded by Ben Zion Aaron in Johannesburg as a first aid corps to assist the Boer forces. Permission was given by President Paul Kruger of the South African Republic for the Star of David to be used as its insignia, rather than the conventional red cross.
The Red Cross and Red Crescent movement repeatedly rejected Israel's request over the years, stating that the Red Cross and Red Crescent emblems were not meant to represent Christianity and Islam but were colour reversals of the Swiss and the Ottoman flags, and also that if Jews (or another group) were to be given another emblem, there would be no end to the number of religious or other groups claiming an emblem for themselves. They reasoned that a proliferation of red symbols would detract from the original intention of the Red Cross emblem, which was to be a single emblem to mark vehicles and buildings protected on humanitarian grounds.
Certain Arab nations, such as Syria, also protested against the entry of MDA into the Red Cross movement, making consensus impossible for a time.
However, from 2000 to 2006 the American Red Cross withheld its dues (a total of $42 million) to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) because of IFRC's refusal to admit MDA; this ultimately led to the creation of the Red Crystal emblem and the admission of MDA on June 22, 2006.
The Red Star of David is not recognized as a protected symbol outside Israel; instead the MDA uses the Red Crystal emblem during international operations in order to ensure protection. Depending on the circumstances, it may place the Red Star of David inside the Red Crystal, or use the Red Crystal alone.
The Australian TV network ABC and the indigenous rights group Rettet die Naturvölker released a documentary called "Blood on the Cross" in 1999. It alleged the involvement of the Red Cross with the British and Indonesian military in a massacre in the Southern Highlands of Western New Guinea during the World Wildlife Fund's Mapenduma hostage crisis of May 1996, when Western and Indonesian activists were held hostage by separatists.
Following the broadcast of the documentary, the Red Cross announced publicly that it would appoint an individual outside the organization to investigate the allegations made in the film and any responsibility on its part. Piotr Obuchowicz was appointed to investigate the matter. The report categorically states that the Red Cross personnel accused of involvement were proven not to have been present; that a white helicopter was probably used in a military operation, but the helicopter was not a Red Cross helicopter, and must have been painted by one of several military organizations operating in the region at the time. Perhaps the Red Cross logo itself was also used, although no hard evidence was found for this; that this was part of the military operation to free the hostages, but was clearly intended to achieve surprise by deceiving the local people into thinking that a Red Cross helicopter was landing; and that the Red Cross should have responded more quickly and thoroughly to investigate the allegations than it did.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15487
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Ira Gershwin
Ira Gershwin (born Israel Gershowitz, December 6, 1896 – August 17, 1983) was an American lyricist who collaborated with his younger brother, composer George Gershwin, to create some of the most memorable songs in the English language of the 20th century.
With George he wrote more than a dozen Broadway shows, featuring songs such as "I Got Rhythm", "Embraceable You", "The Man I Love" and "Someone to Watch Over Me". He was also responsible, along with DuBose Heyward, for the libretto to George's opera "Porgy and Bess".
The success the Gershwin brothers had with their collaborative works has often overshadowed the creative role that Ira played. His mastery of songwriting continued, however, after the early death of George. He wrote additional hit songs with composers Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill, Harry Warren and Harold Arlen.
His critically acclaimed 1959 book "Lyrics on Several Occasions", an amalgam of autobiography and annotated anthology, is an important source for studying the art of the lyricist in the golden age of American popular song.
Gershwin was born at 242 Snediker Avenue in Brooklyn, the oldest of four children of Morris (Moishe) and Rose Gershovitz (née Rosa Bruskin), who were Russian Jews, born in St Petersburg, who had emigrated to the US in 1891. Ira's siblings were George (Jacob, b. 1898), Arthur (b. 1900) and Frances (b. 1906). Morris changed the family name to "Gershwine" (or alternatively "Gershvin") well before their children rose to fame; it was not spelled "Gershwin" until later. Shy in his youth, Ira spent much of his time at home reading, but from grammar school through college he played a prominent part in several school newspapers and magazines.
He graduated in 1914 from Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students, where he met Yip Harburg, with whom he enjoyed a lifelong friendship and a love of Gilbert and Sullivan. He attended the City College of New York but dropped out.
The childhood home of Ira and George Gershwin was in the center of the Yiddish Theater District, on the second floor at 91 Second Avenue, between East 5th Street and East 6th Street. They frequented the local Yiddish theaters.
While George began composing and "plugging" in Tin Pan Alley from the age of 18, Ira worked as a cashier in his father's Turkish baths. It was not until 1921 that Ira became involved in the music business. Alex Aarons signed Ira to write the songs for his next show, "Two Little Girls in Blue", ultimately produced by Abraham Erlanger, along with co-composers Vincent Youmans and Paul Lannin. So as not to appear to trade off George's growing reputation, Ira wrote under the pseudonym "Arthur Francis", after his youngest two siblings. His lyrics were well received, allowing him successfully to enter the show-business world with just one show. Later the same year, the Gershwins collaborated for the first time on a score; this was for "A Dangerous Maid", which played in Atlantic City and on tour.
It was not until 1924 that Ira and George teamed up to write the music for what became their first Broadway hit "Lady, Be Good". Once the brothers joined forces, their combined talents became one of the most influential forces in the history of American Musical Theatre. "When the Gershwins teamed up to write songs for "Lady, Be Good", the American musical found its native idiom." Together, they wrote the music for more than 12 shows and four films. Some of their more famous works include "The Man I Love", "Fascinating Rhythm", "Someone to Watch Over Me", "I Got Rhythm" and "They Can't Take That Away from Me". Their partnership continued until George's sudden death from a brain tumor in 1937. Following his brother's death, Ira waited nearly three years before writing again.
After this temporary retirement, Ira teamed up with accomplished composers such as Jerome Kern ("Cover Girl"); Kurt Weill ("Where Do We Go from Here?"; "Lady in the Dark"); and Harold Arlen (""; "A Star Is Born"). Over the next 14 years, Gershwin continued to write the lyrics for many film scores and a few Broadway shows. But the failure of "Park Avenue" in 1946 (a "smart" show about divorce, co-written with composer Arthur Schwartz) was his farewell to Broadway. As he wrote at the time, "Am reading a couple of stories for possible musicalization (if there is such a word) but I hope I don't like them as I think I deserve a long rest."
In 1947, he took 11 songs George had written but never used, provided them with new lyrics, and incorporated them into the Betty Grable film "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim". He later wrote comic lyrics for Billy Wilder's 1964 movie "Kiss Me, Stupid", although most critics believe his final major work was for the 1954 Judy Garland film "A Star Is Born".
American singer, pianist and musical historian Michael Feinstein worked for Gershwin in the lyricist's latter years, helping him with his archive. Several lost musical treasures were unearthed during this period, and Feinstein performed some of the material. Feinstein's book "The Gershwins and Me: A Personal History in Twelve Songs" about working for Ira, and George and Ira's music was published in 2012.
According to a 1999 story in Vanity Fair, Ira Gershwin's love for loud music was as great as his wife's loathing of it. When Debby Boone—daughter-in-law of his neighbor Rosemary Clooney—returned from Japan with one of the first Sony Walkmans (utilizing cassette tape), Clooney gave it to Michael Feinstein to give to Ira, "so he could crank it in his ears, you know. And he said, 'This is absolutely wonderful!' And he called his broker and bought Sony stock!"
Three of Ira Gershwin's songs ("They Can't Take That Away From Me" (1937), "Long Ago (And Far Away)" (1944) and "The Man That Got Away" (1954)) were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, though none won.
Along with George S Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, he was a recipient of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for "Of Thee I Sing".
In 1988 UCLA established The George and Ira Gershwin Lifetime Musical Achievement Award in recognition of the brothers' contribution to music, and for their gift to UCLA of the fight song "Strike Up the Band for UCLA". Recipients include Angela Lansbury (1988), Ray Charles (1991), Mel Tormé (1994), Bernadette Peters (1995), Frank Sinatra (2000), Stevie Wonder (2002), k.d. lang (2003), James Taylor (2004), Babyface (2005), Burt Bacharach (2006), Quincy Jones (2007), Lionel Richie (2008) and Julie Andrews (2009).
Ira Gershwin was a joyous listener to the sounds of the modern world. "He had a sharp eye and ear for the minutiae of living." He noted in a diary: "Heard in a day: An elevator's purr, telephone's ring, telephone's buzz, a baby's moans, a shout of delight, a screech from a 'flat wheel', hoarse honks, a hoarse voice, a tinkle, a match scratch on sandpaper, a deep resounding boom of dynamiting in the impending subway, iron hooks on the gutter."
In 1987, Ira's widow, Leonore, established the Ira Gershwin Literacy Center at University Settlement, a century-old institution at 185 Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, New York City. The Center is designed to give English-language programs to primarily Hispanic and Chinese Americans. Ira and his younger brother George spent many after-school hours at the Settlement.
The George and Ira Gershwin Collection and the Ira Gershwin Files from the Law Office of Leonard Saxe are both at the Library of Congress Music Division. The Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart Gershwin Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds a number of Ira's manuscripts and other material.
In 2007, the United States Library of Congress named its Prize for Popular Song after him and his brother George. Recognizing the profound and positive effect of American popular music on the world's culture, the prize will be given annually to a composer or performer whose lifetime contributions exemplify the standard of excellence associated with the Gershwins.
He married Leonore (née Strunsky) in 1926. He died in Beverly Hills, California, on 17 August 1983 at the age of 86. He is interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Leonore died in 1991.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15489
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Indus River
The Indus River (also called the Sindhū) is one of the longest rivers in Asia. It flows through China (western Tibet), India (Ladakh) and Pakistan. Originating in the Tibetan Plateau in the vicinity of Lake Manasarovar, the river runs a course through the Ladakh region of India, towards Gilgit-Baltistan and then flows in a southerly direction along the entire length of Pakistan to merge into the Arabian Sea near the port city of Karachi in Sindh. It is the longest river of Pakistan.
The river has a total drainage area exceeding . Its estimated annual flow stands at around , twice that of the Nile River and three times that of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers combined, making it one of the largest rivers in the world in terms of annual flow. The Zanskar is its left bank tributary in Ladakh. In the plains, its left bank tributary is the Panjnad which itself has five major tributaries, namely, the Chenab, Jhelum, the Ravi, the Beas, and the Sutlej. Its principal right bank tributaries are the Shyok, the Gilgit, the Kabul, the Gomal, and the Kurram. Beginning in a mountain spring and fed with glaciers and rivers in the Himalayan, Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, the river supports ecosystems of temperate forests, plains and arid countryside.
The northern part of the Indus Valley, with its tributaries, forms the Punjab region, while the lower course of the river is known as Sindh and ends in a large delta. The river has historically been important to many cultures of the region. The 3rd millennium BC saw the rise of a major urban civilization of the Bronze Age. During the 2nd millennium BC, the Punjab region was mentioned in the hymns of the Hindu Rigveda as "Sapta Sindhu" and the Zoroastrian Avesta as "Hapta Hindu" (both terms meaning "seven rivers"). Early historical kingdoms that arose in the Indus Valley include Gandhāra, and the Ror dynasty of Sauvīra. The Indus River came into the knowledge of the West early in the Classical Period, when King Darius of Persia sent his Greek subject Scylax of Caryanda to explore the river, c. 515 BC.
This river was known to the ancient Indians in Sanskrit as "Sindhu" and the Persians as "Hindu" which was regarded by both of them as "the border river". The variation between the two names is explained by the Old Iranian sound change "*s" > "h", which occurred between 850–600 BCE according to Asko Parpola. From the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the name passed to the Greeks as "Indós" (Ἰνδός). It was adopted by the Romans as "Indus".
Southworth suggests that the name "Sindhu" is derived from "Cintu", the Proto-Dravidian word for date palm, a tree commonly found in Sindh.
The meaning of "Sindhu" as a "large body of water, sea, or ocean" is a later meaning in Classical Sanskrit. A later Persian name for the river was "Darya", which similarly has the connotations of large body of water and sea. Other variants of the name "Sindhu" include Assyrian "Sinda" (as early as the 7th century BC), Persian "Ab-e-sind", Pashto "Abasind", Arab "Al-Sind", Chinese "Sintow", and Javanese "Santri".
In other languages of the region, the river is known as (Darya-ī Sindh) in Urdu सिन्धु ("Sindhu") in Hindi, سنڌو ("Sindhu") in Sindhi, ("Sindh") in Shahmukhi Punjabi, ਸਿੰਧ ਨਦੀ ("Sindh Nadī") in Gurmukhī Punjabi, اباسين ("Abāsin" lit. "Father of Rivers") in Pashto, نهر السند ("Nahar al-Sind") in Arabic, སེང་གེ་གཙང་པོ། ("singi khamban" lit. "Lion River" or "Lion Spring") in Tibetan, ("Yìndù") in Chinese, "Nilab" in Turki and සින්දු නදී ("Sindhu Nadi") in Sinhalese.
The Indus River provides key water resources for Pakistan's economy – especially the "breadbasket" of Punjab province, which accounts for most of the nation's agricultural production, and Sindh. The word Punjab means "land of five rivers" and the five rivers are Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, all of which finally flow into the Indus. The Indus also supports many heavy industries and provides the main supply of potable water in Pakistan.
The ultimate source of the Indus is in Tibet; the river begins at the confluence of the Sengge Zangbo and Gar Tsangpo rivers that drain the Nganglong Kangri and Gangdise Shan (Gang Rinpoche, Mt. Kailash) mountain ranges. The Indus then flows northwest through Ladakh, India, and Baltistan into Gilgit, just south of the Karakoram range. The Shyok, Shigar and Gilgit rivers carry glacial waters into the main river. It gradually bends to the south and descends into the Punjab plains at Kalabagh, Pakistan. The Indus passes gigantic gorges deep near the Nanga Parbat massif. It flows swiftly across Hazara and is dammed at the Tarbela Reservoir. The Kabul River joins it near Attock. The remainder of its route to the sea is in the plains of the Punjab and Sindh, where the flow of the river becomes slow and highly braided. It is joined by the Panjnad at Mithankot. Beyond this confluence, the river, at one time, was named the "Satnad River" ("sat" = "seven", "nadī" = "river"), as the river now carried the waters of the Kabul River, the Indus River and the five Punjab rivers. Passing by Jamshoro, it ends in a large delta to the South of Thatta in the Sindh province of Pakistan
The Indus is one of the few rivers in the world to exhibit a tidal bore. The Indus system is largely fed by the snows and glaciers of the Himalayas, Karakoram and the Hindu Kush ranges of Tibet, the Indian states and union territories of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh and the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan. The flow of the river is also determined by the seasons – it diminishes greatly in the winter, while flooding its banks in the monsoon months from July to September. There is also evidence of a steady shift in the course of the river since prehistoric times – it deviated westwards from flowing into the Rann of Kutch and adjoining Banni grasslands after the 1816 earthquake. Presently, Indus water flows in to the Rann of Kutch during its floods breaching flood banks.
The traditional source of the river is the "Sênggê Kanbab" (a.k.a. Sênggê Zangbo, Senge Khabab) or "Lion's Mouth", a perennial spring, not far from the sacred Mount Kailash marked by a long low line of Tibetan chortens. There are several other tributaries nearby, which may possibly form a longer stream than Sênggê Kanbab, but unlike the Sênggê Kanbab, are all dependent on snowmelt. The Zanskar River, which flows into the Indus in Ladakh, has a greater volume of water than the Indus itself before that point.
The major cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, date back to around 3300 BC, and represent some of the largest human habitations of the ancient world. The Indus Valley Civilisation extended from across northeast Afghanistan to Pakistan and northwest India, with an upward reach from east of Jhelum River to Ropar on the upper Sutlej. The coastal settlements extended from Sutkagan Dor at the Pakistan, Iran border to Kutch in modern Gujarat, India. There is an Indus site on the Amu Darya at Shortughai in northern Afghanistan, and the Indus site Alamgirpur at the Hindon River is located only from Delhi. To date, over 1,052 cities and settlements have been found, mainly in the general region of the Ghaggar-Hakra River and its tributaries. Among the settlements were the major urban centres of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, as well as Lothal, Dholavira, Ganeriwala, and Rakhigarhi. Only 90–96 of more than 800 known Indus Valley sites have been discovered on the Indus and its tributaries. The Sutlej, now a tributary of the Indus, in Harappan times flowed into the Ghaggar-Hakra River, in the watershed of which were more Harappan sites than along the Indus.
Most scholars believe that settlements of Gandhara grave culture of the early Indo-Aryans flourished in Gandhara from 1700 BC to 600 BC, when Mohenjo-daro and Harappa had already been abandoned.
The Rigveda describes several rivers, including one named "Sindhu". The Rigvedic "Sindhu" is thought to be the present-day Indus river. It is attested 176 times in its text, 94 times in the plural, and most often used in the generic sense of "river". In the Rigveda, notably in the later hymns, the meaning of the word is narrowed to refer to the Indus river in particular, e.g. in the list of rivers mentioned in the hymn of "Nadistuti sukta". The Rigvedic hymns apply a feminine gender to all the rivers mentioned therein, except for the Brahmaputra.
The word "India" is derived from the Indus River. In ancient times, "India" initially referred to those regions immediately along the east bank of the Indus, but by 300 BC, Greek writers including Herodotus and Megasthenes were applying the term to the entire subcontinent that extends much farther eastward.
The lower basin of the Indus forms a natural boundary between the Iranian Plateau and the Indian subcontinent; this region embraces all or parts of the Pakistani provinces Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh and the countries Afghanistan and India. The first West Eurasian empire to annex the Indus Valley was the Persian Empire, during the reign of Darius the Great. During his reign, the Greek explorer Scylax of Caryanda was commissioned to explore the course of the Indus. It was crossed by the invading armies of Alexander, but after his Macedonians conquered the west bank—joining it to the Hellenic world, they elected to retreat along the southern course of the river, ending Alexander's Asian campaign. Alexander's admiral Nearchus set out from the Indus Delta to explore the Persian Gulf, until reaching the Tigris River. The Indus Valley were later dominated by the Mauryan and Kushan Empires, Indo-Greek Kingdoms, Indo-Scythians and Hepthalites. Over several centuries Muslim armies of Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni, Mohammed Ghori, Tamerlane and Babur crossed the river to invade Sindh and Punjab, providing a gateway to the Indian subcontinent.
The Indus river feeds the Indus submarine fan, which is the second largest sediment body on the Earth. It consists of around 5 million cubic kilometres of material eroded from the mountains. Studies of the sediment in the modern river indicate that the Karakoram Mountains in northern Pakistan and India are the single most important source of material, with the Himalayas providing the next largest contribution, mostly via the large rivers of the Punjab (Jhelum, Ravi, Chenab, Beas and Sutlej). Analysis of sediments from the Arabian Sea has demonstrated that prior to five million years ago the Indus was not connected to these Punjab rivers which instead flowed east into the Ganga and were captured after that time. Earlier work showed that sand and silt from western Tibet was reaching the Arabian Sea by 45 million years ago, implying the existence of an ancient Indus River by that time. The delta of this proto-Indus river has subsequently been found in the Katawaz Basin, on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
In the Nanga Parbat region, the massive amounts of erosion due to the Indus river following the capture and rerouting through that area is thought to bring middle and lower crustal rocks to the surface.
In November 2011, satellite images showed that the Indus river had re-entered India, feeding Great Rann of Kutch, Little Rann of Kutch and a lake near Ahmedabad known as Nal Sarovar. Heavy rains had left the river basin along with the Lake Manchar, Lake Hemal and Kalri Lake (all in modern-day Pakistan) inundated. This happened two centuries after the Indus river shifted its course westwards following the 1819 Rann of Kutch earthquake.
The Induan Age at start of the Triassic Period of geological time is named for the Indus region.
Accounts of the Indus valley from the times of Alexander's campaign indicate a healthy forest cover in the region, which has now considerably receded. The Mughal Emperor Babur writes of encountering rhinoceroses along its bank in his memoirs (the Baburnama). Extensive deforestation and human interference in the ecology of the Shivalik Hills has led to a marked deterioration in vegetation and growing conditions. The Indus valley regions are arid with poor vegetation. Agriculture is sustained largely due to irrigation works.
The Indus river and its watershed has a rich biodiversity. It is home to around 25 amphibian species.
The Indus river dolphin ("Platanista indicus minor") is found only in the Indus River. It is subspecies of the South Asian river dolphin. The Indus river dolphin formerly also occurred in the tributaries of the Indus river. According to the World Wildlife Fund it is one of the most threatened cetaceans with only about 1,000 still existing.
There are two otter species in the Indus River basin: the Eurasian otter in the northeastern highland sections and the smooth-coated otter elsewhere in the river basin. The smooth-coated otters in the Indus River represent a subspecies found nowhere else, the Sindh otter ("Lutrogale perspicillata sindica").
The Indus River basin has a high diversity, being the home of more than 180 freshwater fish species, including 22 which are found nowhere else. Fish also played a major role in earlier cultures of the region, including the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation where depictions of fish were frequent. The Indus script has a commonly used fish sign, which in its various forms may simply have meant "fish", or referred to stars or gods.
In the uppermost, highest part of the Indus River basin there are relatively few genera and species: "Diptychus", "Ptychobarbus", "Schizopyge", "Schizopygopsis" and "Schizothorax" snowtrout, "Triplophysa" loaches, and the catfish "Glyptosternon reticulatum". Going downstream these are soon joined by the golden mahseer "Tor putitora" (alternatively "T. macrolepis", although it often is regarded as a synonym of "T. putitora") and "Schistura" loaches. Downriver from around Thakot, Tarbela, the Kabul–Indus river confluence, Attock Khurd and Peshawar the diversity rises strongly, including many cyprinids ("Amblypharyngodon", "Aspidoparia", "Barilius", "Chela", "Cirrhinus", "Crossocheilus", "Cyprinion", "Danio", "Devario", "Esomus", "Garra", "Labeo", "Naziritor", "Osteobrama", "Pethia", "Puntius", "Rasbora", "Salmophasia", "Securicula" and "Systomus"), true loaches ("Botia" and "Lepidocephalus"), stone loaches ("Acanthocobitis" and "Nemacheilus"), ailiid catfish ("Clupisoma"), bagridae catfish ("Batasio", "Mystus", "Rita" and "Sperata"), airsac catfish ("Heteropneustes"), schilbid catfish ("Eutropiichthys"), silurid catfish ("Ompok" and "Wallago"), sisorid catfish ("Bagarius", "Gagata", "Glyptothorax" and "Sisor"), gouramis ("Trichogaster"), nandid leaffish ("Nandus"), snakeheads ("Channa"), spiny eel ("Macrognathus" and "Mastacembelus"), knifefish ("Notopterus"), glassfish ("Chanda" and "Parambassis"), clupeids ("Gudusia"), needlefish ("Xenentodon") and gobies ("Glossogobius"), as well as a few introduced species. As the altitude further declines the Indus basin becomes overall quite slow-flowing as it passes through the Punjab Plain. Major carp become common, and chameleonfish ("Badis"), mullet ("Sicamugil") and swamp eel ("Monopterus") appear. In some upland lakes and tributaries of the Punjab region snowtrout and mahseer are still common, but once the Indus basin reaches its lower plain the former group is entirely absent and the latter are rare. Many of the species of the middle sections of the Indus basin are also present in the lower. Notable examples of genera that are present in the lower plain but generally not elsewhere in the Indus River basin are the "Aphanius" pupfish, "Aplocheilus" killifish, palla fish ("Tenualosa ilisha"), catla ("Labeo catla"), rohu ("Labeo rohita") and "Cirrhinus mrigala". The lowermost part of the river and its delta are home to freshwater fish, but also a number of brackish and marine species. This includes including pomfret and prawns. The large delta has been recognized by conservationists as an important ecological region. Here, the river turns into many marshes, streams and creeks and meets the sea at shallow levels.
Palla fish ("Tenualosa ilisha") of the river is a delicacy for people living along the river. The population of fish in the river is moderately high, with Sukkur, Thatta, and Kotri being the major fishing centres – all in the lower Sindh course. As a result, damming and irrigation has made fish farming an important economic activity.
The Indus is the most important supplier of water resources to the Punjab and Sindh plains – it forms the backbone of agriculture and food production in Pakistan. The river is especially critical since rainfall is meagre in the lower Indus valley. Irrigation canals were first built by the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation, and later by the engineers of the Kushan Empire and the Mughal Empire. Modern irrigation was introduced by the British East India Company in 1850 – the construction of modern canals accompanied with the restoration of old canals. The British supervised the construction of one of the most complex irrigation networks in the world. The Guddu Barrage is long – irrigating Sukkur, Jacobabad, Larkana and Kalat. The Sukkur Barrage serves over .
After Pakistan came into existence, a water control treaty signed between India and Pakistan in 1960 guaranteed that Pakistan would receive water from the Indus River and its two tributaries the Jhelum River & the Chenab River independently of upstream control by India.
The Indus Basin Project consisted primarily of the construction of two main dams, the Mangla Dam built on the Jhelum River and the Tarbela Dam constructed on the Indus River, together with their subsidiary dams. The Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority undertook the construction of the Chashma-Jhelum link canal – linking the waters of the Indus and Jhelum rivers – extending water supplies to the regions of Bahawalpur and Multan. Pakistan constructed the Tarbela Dam near Rawalpindi – standing long and high, with an long reservoir. It supports the Chashma Barrage near Dera Ismail Khan for irrigation use and flood control and the Taunsa Barrage near Dera Ghazi Khan which also produces 100,000 kilowatts of electricity. The Kotri Barrage near Hyderabad is long and provides additional water supplies for Karachi. The extensive linking of tributaries with the Indus has helped spread water resources to the valley of Peshawar, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The extensive irrigation and dam projects provide the basis for Pakistan's large production of crops such as cotton, sugarcane and wheat. The dams also generate electricity for heavy industries and urban centers.
The inhabitants of the regions are mainly Muslim as Pakistan is an Islamic country through which the Indus river passes and forms a major natural feature and resource are diverse in ethnicity, religion, national and linguistic backgrounds. On the northern course of the river in the union territory of Ladakh in India, live the Buddhist people of Ladakh, of Tibetan stock, and the Dards of Indo-Aryan or Dardic stock and practising Islam. Then it descends into Baltistan, northern Pakistan passing the main Balti city of Skardu. A river from Dubair Bala also drains into it at Dubair Bazar. People living in this area are mainly Kohistani and speak the Kohistani language. Major areas through which the Indus river passes in Kohistan are Dasu, Pattan and Dubair. As it continues through Pakistan, the Indus river forms a distinctive boundary of ethnicity and cultures – upon the western banks the population is largely Pashtun, Baloch, and of other Iranian stock. The eastern banks are largely populated by people of Indo-Aryan stock, such as the Punjabis and the Sindhis. In northern Punjab and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, ethnic Pashtun tribes live alongside Dardic people in the hills (Khowar, Kalash, Shina, etc.), Burushos (in Hunza), and Punjabi people.
The people living along the Indus river speak Punjabi and Sindhi on the eastern side (in Punjab and Sindh provinces respectively), Pushto plus Balochi as well as Barohi (in Khyber Pakhtoonkha and Baluchistan provinces). In the province of Sindh, the upper third of the river is inhabited by people speaking Saraiki; which is a somewhat transitional dialect of the Punjabi and Sindhi languages.
The ethnicities of the Indus Valley (Pakistan and Northwest India) have a greater amount of ANI (or West Eurasian) admixture than other South Asians, including inputs from Western Steppe Herders, with evidence of more sustained and multi-layered migrations from the west.
The Indus is a strategically vital resource for Pakistan's economy and society. After Pakistan and India declared Independence from the British Raj, the use of the waters of the Indus and its five eastern tributaries became a major dispute between India and Pakistan. The irrigation canals of the Sutlej valley and the Bari Doab were split – with the canals lying primarily in Pakistan and the headwork dams in India disrupting supply in some parts of Pakistan. The concern over India building large dams over various Punjab rivers that could undercut the supply flowing to Pakistan, as well as the possibility that India could divert rivers in the time of war, caused political consternation in Pakistan. Holding diplomatic talks brokered by the World Bank, India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960. The treaty gave India control of the three easternmost rivers of the Punjab, the Sutlej, the Beas and the Ravi, while Pakistan gained control of the three western rivers, the Jhelum, the Chenab and the Indus. India retained the right to use of the western rivers for non-irrigation projects.
Large-scale diversion of the river's water for irrigation has raised far-reaching issues. Sediment clogging from poor maintenance of canals has affected agricultural production and vegetation on numerous occasions. Irrigation itself is increasing soil salinization, reducing crop yields and in some cases rendering farmland useless for cultivation. And ecologically, the reduced flow of fresh water and silt into the Indus delta is threatening the area's mangrove forests.
There are also concerns that the Indus River may be shifting its course westwards, although the progression spans centuries.
Originally, the delta used to receive almost all of the water from the Indus river, which has an annual flow of approximately , and is accompanied by of silt. Since the 1940s, dams, barrages and irrigation works have been constructed on the river Indus. The Indus Basin Irrigation System is the "largest contiguous irrigation system developed over the past 140 years" anywhere in the world. This has reduced the flow of water and by 2018, the average annual flow of water below the Kotri barrage was , and annual amount of silt discharged was estimated at . As a result, the 2010 Pakistan floods were considered "good news" for the ecosystem and population of the river delta as they brought much needed fresh water. Any further utilization of the river basin water is not economically feasible.
Vegetation and wildlife of the Indus delta are threatened by the reduced inflow of fresh water, along with extensive deforestation, industrial pollution and global warming. Damming has also isolated the delta population of Indus river dolphins from those further upstream.
The Tibetan Plateau contains the world's third-largest store of ice. Qin Dahe, the former head of the China Meteorological Administration, said the recent fast pace of melting and warmer temperatures will be good for agriculture and tourism in the short term, but issued a strong warning:
"There is insufficient data to say what will happen to the Indus," says David Grey, the World Bank's senior water advisor in South Asia. "But we all have very nasty fears that the flows of the Indus could be severely, severely affected by glacier melt as a consequence of climate change," and reduced by perhaps as much as 50 percent. "Now what does that mean to a population that lives in a desert [where], without the river, there would be no life? I don't know the answer to that question," he says. "But we need to be concerned about that. Deeply, deeply concerned."
U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke said, shortly before his death in 2010, that he believed that falling water levels in the Indus River "could very well precipitate World War III."
Over the years factories on the banks of the Indus River have increased levels of water pollution in the river and the atmosphere around it. High levels of pollutants in the river have led to the deaths of endangered Indus river dolphin. The Sindh Environmental Protection Agency has ordered polluting factories around the river to shut down under the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act, 1997. Death of the Indus river dolphin has also been attributed to fishermen using poison to kill fish and scooping them up. As a result, the government banned fishing from Guddu Barrage to Sukkur.
The Indus is second among a group of ten rivers responsible for about 90% of all the plastic that reaches the oceans. The Yangtze is the only river contributing more plastic.
Frequently, Indus river is prone to moderate to severe flooding. In July 2010, following abnormally heavy monsoon rains, the Indus River rose above its banks and started flooding. The rain continued for the next two months, devastating large areas of Pakistan. In Sindh, the Indus burst its banks near Sukkur on 8 August, submerging the village of Mor Khan Jatoi. In early August, the heaviest flooding moved southward along the Indus River from severely affected northern regions toward western Punjab, where at least of cropland was destroyed, and the southern province of Sindh. , over two thousand people had died and over a million homes had been destroyed since the flooding began.
The 2011 Sindh floods began during the Pakistani monsoon season in mid-August 2011, resulting from heavy monsoon rains in Sindh, eastern Balochistan, and southern Punjab. The floods caused considerable damage; an estimated 434 civilians were killed, with 5.3 million people and 1,524,773 homes affected. Sindh is a fertile region and often called the "breadbasket" of the country; the damage and toll of the floods on the local agrarian economy was said to be extensive. At least of arable land were inundated. The flooding followed the previous year's floods, which devastated a large part of the country. Unprecedented torrential monsoon rains caused severe flooding in 16 districts of Sindh.
In Pakistan currently there are six barrages on the Indus: Guddu barrage, Sukkur Barrage, Kotri barrage (also called Ghulam Muhammad barrage), Taunsa Barrage, Chashma Barrage and Jinnah Barrage. Another new barrage called "Sindh barrage" is planned as terminal barrage on Indus River. There are some bridges on river Indus, such as, Dadu Moro Bridge, Larkana Khairpur Indus River Bridge, Thatta-Sujawal bridge, Jhirk-Mula Katiar bridge and recently planned Kandhkot-Ghotki bridge.
The entire left bank of Indus river in Sind province is protected from river flooding by constructing around 600 km long levees. The right bank side is also leveed from Guddu barrage to Lake Manchar. In response to the levees construction, the river has been aggrading rapidly over the last 20 years leading to breaches upstream of barrages and inundation of large areas.
Tarbela Dam in Pakistan is constructed on the Indus River, while the controversial Kalabagh dam is also being constructed on Indus river. Pakistan is also building Munda Dam.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15490
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Integer factorization
In number theory, integer factorization is the decomposition of a composite number into a product of smaller integers. If these factors are further restricted to prime numbers, the process is called prime factorization.
When the numbers are sufficiently large, no efficient, non-quantum integer factorization algorithm is known. In 2019, Fabrice Boudot, Pierrick Gaudry, Aurore Guillevic, Nadia Heninger, Emmanuel Thomé and Paul Zimmermann factored a 240-digit number (RSA-240) utilizing approximately 900 core-years of computing power. The researchers estimated that a 1024-bit RSA modulus would take about 500 times as long. However, it has not been proven that no efficient algorithm exists. The presumed difficulty of this problem is at the heart of widely used algorithms in cryptography such as RSA. Many areas of mathematics and computer science have been brought to bear on the problem, including elliptic curves, algebraic number theory, and quantum computing.
Not all numbers of a given length are equally hard to factor. The hardest instances of these problems (for currently known techniques) are semiprimes, the product of two prime numbers. When they are both large, for instance more than two thousand bits long, randomly chosen, and about the same size (but not too close, for example, to avoid efficient factorization by Fermat's factorization method), even the fastest prime factorization algorithms on the fastest computers can take enough time to make the search impractical; that is, as the number of digits of the primes being factored increases, the number of operations required to perform the factorization on any computer increases drastically.
Many cryptographic protocols are based on the difficulty of factoring large composite integers or a related problem—for example, the RSA problem. An algorithm that efficiently factors an arbitrary integer would render RSA-based public-key cryptography insecure.
By the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, every positive integer has a unique prime factorization. (By convention, 1 is the empty product.) Testing whether the integer is prime can be done in polynomial time, for example, by the AKS primality test. If composite, however, the polynomial time tests give no insight into how to obtain the factors.
Given a general algorithm for integer factorization, any integer can be factored into its constituent prime factors by repeated application of this algorithm. The situation is more complicated with special-purpose factorization algorithms, whose benefits may not be realized as well or even at all with the factors produced during decomposition. For example, if where are very large primes, trial division will quickly produce the factors 3 and 19 but will take "p" divisions to find the next factor. As a contrasting example, if "N" is the product of the primes 13729, 1372933, and 18848997161, where , Fermat's factorization method will begin with which immediately yields and hence the factors and . While these are easily recognized as composite and prime respectively, Fermat's method will take much longer to factor the composite number because the starting value of for "a" is nowhere near 1372933.
Among the "b"-bit numbers, the most difficult to factor in practice using existing algorithms are those that are products of two primes of similar size. For this reason, these are the integers used in cryptographic applications. The largest such semiprime yet factored was RSA-250, a 829-bit number with 250 decimal digits, in February 2020. The total computation time was roughly 2700 core-years of computing using Intel Xeon Gold 6130 at 2.1 GHz. Like all recent factorization records, this factorization was completed with a highly optimized implementation of the general number field sieve run on hundreds of machines.
No algorithm has been published that can factor all integers in polynomial time, that is, that can factor "b"-bit numbers in time O("b""k") for some constant "k". Neither the existence nor non-existence of such algorithms has been proved, but it is generally suspected that they do not exist and hence that the problem is not in class P. The problem is clearly in class NP but has not been proved to be or not be NP-complete. It is generally suspected not to be NP-complete.
There are published algorithms that are faster than O((1 + "ε")"b") for all positive "ε", that is, sub-exponential. The best published asymptotic running time is for the general number field sieve (GNFS) algorithm, which, for a "b"-bit number "n", is
For current computers, GNFS is the best published algorithm for large "n" (more than about 400 bits). For a quantum computer, however, Peter Shor discovered an algorithm in 1994 that solves it in polynomial time. This will have significant implications for cryptography if quantum computation becomes scalable. Shor's algorithm takes only time and O("b") space on "b"-bit number inputs. In 2001, Shor's algorithm was implemented for the first time, by using NMR techniques on molecules that provide 7 qubits.
When discussing what complexity classes the integer factorization problem falls into, it is necessary to distinguish two slightly different versions of the problem:
For , the decision problem is equivalent to asking whether "N" is not prime.
An algorithm for either version provides one for the other. Repeated application of the function problem (applied to "d" and "N"/"d", and their factors, if needed) will eventually provide either a factor of "N" no larger than "M" or a factorization into primes all greater than "M". All known algorithms for the decision problem work in this way. Hence it is only of theoretical interest that, with at most log "N" queries using an algorithm for the decision problem, one would isolate a factor of "N" (or prove it prime) by binary search.
It is not known exactly which complexity classes contain the decision version of the integer factorization problem. It is known to be in both NP and co-NP. This is because both "yes" and "no" answers can be verified in polynomial time. An answer of "yes" can be certified by exhibiting a factorization with . An answer of "no" can be certified by exhibiting the factorization of "N" into distinct primes, all larger than "M". We can verify their primality using the AKS primality test and that their product is "N" by multiplication. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic guarantees that there is only one possible string that will be accepted (providing the factors are required to be listed in order), which shows that the problem is in both UP and co-UP. It is known to be in BQP because of Shor's algorithm. It is suspected to be outside of all three of the complexity classes P, NP-complete, and co-NP-complete. It is therefore a candidate for the NP-intermediate complexity class. If it could be proved that it is in either NP-complete or co-NP-complete, that would imply NP = co-NP. That would be a very surprising result, and therefore integer factorization is widely suspected to be outside both of those classes. Many people have tried to find classical polynomial-time algorithms for it and failed, and therefore it is widely suspected to be outside P.
In contrast, the decision problem "is "N" a composite number?" (or equivalently: "is "N" a prime number?") appears to be much easier than the problem of actually finding the factors of "N". Specifically, the former can be solved in polynomial time (in the number "n" of digits of "N") with the AKS primality test. In addition, there are a number of probabilistic algorithms that can test primality very quickly in practice if one is willing to accept the vanishingly small possibility of error. The ease of primality testing is a crucial part of the RSA algorithm, as it is necessary to find large prime numbers to start with.
A special-purpose factoring algorithm's running time depends on the properties of the number to be factored or on one of its unknown factors: size, special form, etc. Exactly what the running time depends on varies between algorithms.
An important subclass of special-purpose factoring algorithms is the "Category 1" or "First Category" algorithms, whose running time depends on the size of smallest prime factor. Given an integer of unknown form, these methods are usually applied before general-purpose methods to remove small factors. For example, trial division is a Category 1 algorithm.
A general-purpose factoring algorithm, also known as a "Category 2", "Second Category", or "Kraitchik family" algorithm (after Maurice Kraitchik), has a running time which depends solely on the size of the integer to be factored. This is the type of algorithm used to factor RSA numbers. Most general-purpose factoring algorithms are based on the congruence of squares method.
In number theory, there are many integer factoring algorithms that heuristically have expected running time
in big O and L-notation.
Some examples of those algorithms are the elliptic curve method and the quadratic sieve.
Another such algorithm is the class group relations method proposed by Schnorr, Seysen, and Lenstra, that is proved under the assumption of the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis (GRH).
The Schnorr–Seysen–Lenstra probabilistic algorithm has been rigorously proven by Lenstra and Pomerance to have expected running time formula_3 by replacing the GRH assumption with the use of multipliers.
The algorithm uses the class group of positive binary quadratic forms of discriminant Δ denoted by "G"Δ.
"G"Δ is the set of triples of integers ("a", "b", "c") in which those integers are relative prime.
Given an integer "n" that will be factored, where "n" is an odd positive integer greater than a certain constant. In this factoring algorithm the discriminant Δ is chosen as a multiple of "n", , where "d" is some positive multiplier. The algorithm expects that for one "d" there exist enough smooth forms in "G"Δ. Lenstra and Pomerance show that the choice of "d" can be restricted to a small set to guarantee the smoothness result.
Denote by "P"Δ the set of all primes "q" with Kronecker symbol formula_4. By constructing a set of generators of "G"Δ and prime forms "f"q of "G"Δ with "q" in "P"Δ a sequence of relations between the set of generators and "f"q are produced.
The size of "q" can be bounded by formula_5 for some constant formula_6.
The relation that will be used is a relation between the product of powers that is equal to the neutral element of "G"Δ. These relations will be used to construct a so-called ambiguous form of "G"Δ, which is an element of "G"Δ of order dividing 2. By calculating the corresponding factorization of Δ and by taking a gcd, this ambiguous form provides the complete prime factorization of "n". This algorithm has these main steps:
Let "n" be the number to be factored.
To obtain an algorithm for factoring any positive integer, it is necessary to add a few steps to this algorithm such as trial division, and the Jacobi sum test.
The algorithm as stated is a probabilistic algorithm as it makes random choices. Its expected running time is at most formula_3.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15491
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Imperial units
The imperial system of units, imperial system or imperial units (also known as British Imperial or Exchequer Standards of 1825) is the system of units first defined in the British Weights and Measures Act 1824 and continued to be developed through a series of Weights and Measures Acts and amendments. The imperial units replaced the Winchester Standards, which were in effect from 1588 to 1825. The system came into official use across the British Empire. By the late 20th century, most nations of the former empire had officially adopted the metric system as their main system of measurement but imperial units are still used in the United Kingdom, Canada and other countries formerly part of the British Empire. The imperial system developed from what were first known as English units, as did the related system of United States customary units.
The modern legislation defining the imperial system of units is given in the Weights and Measures Act 1985 (as amended).
The Weights and Measures Act of 1824 was initially scheduled to go into effect on 1 May 1825. The Weights and Measures Act of 1825 pushed back the date to 1 January 1826. The 1824 Act allowed the continued use of pre-imperial units provided that they were customary, widely known, and clearly marked with imperial equivalents.
Apothecaries' units are mentioned neither in the act of 1824 nor 1825. At the time, apothecaries' weights and measures were regulated "in England, Wales, and Berwick-upon-Tweed" by the London College of Physicians, and in Ireland by the Dublin College of Physicians. In Scotland, apothecaries' units were unofficially regulated by the Edinburgh College of Physicians. The three colleges published, at infrequent intervals, pharmacopoeiae, the London and Dublin editions having the force of law.
Imperial apothecaries' measures, based on the imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces, were introduced by the publication of the London Pharmacopoeia of 1836, the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia of 1839, and the Dublin Pharmacopoeia of 1850. The Medical Act of 1858 transferred to The Crown the right to publish the official pharmacopoeia and to regulate apothecaries' weights and measures.
Metric equivalents in this article usually assume the latest official definition. Before this date, the most precise measurement of the imperial Standard Yard was metres.
The Weights and Measures Act 1824 invalidated the various different gallons in use in the British Empire, declaring them to be replaced by the statute gallon (which became known as the Imperial Gallon), a unit close in volume to the ale gallon. The 1824 Act defined as the volume of a gallon to be that of of distilled water weighed in air with brass weights with the barometer standing at at a temperature of . The 1824 Act went on to give this volume as . The Weights and Measures Act 1963 refined this definition to be the volume of 10 pounds of distilled water of density weighed in air of density against weights of density , which works out to . The Weights and Measures Act 1985 defined a gallon to be exactly (approximately ).
These measurements were in use from 1826, when the new imperial gallon was defined, but were officially abolished in the United Kingdom on 1 January 1971. In the US, though no longer recommended, the apothecaries' system is still used occasionally in medicine, especially in prescriptions for older medications.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the UK used three different systems for mass and weight.
The distinction between mass and weight is not always clearly drawn. Strictly a pound is a unit of mass, but it is commonly referred to as a weight. When a distinction is necessary, the term "pound-force" may refer to a unit of force rather than mass. The troy pound () was made the primary unit of mass by the 1824 Act and its use was abolished in the UK on 1 January 1879, with only the troy ounce () and its decimal subdivisions retained. The "Weights and Measures Act 1855" (18 & 19 Victoria C72) made the avoirdupois pound the primary unit of mass. In all the systems, the fundamental unit is the pound, and all other units are defined as fractions or multiples of it.
The 1824 Act of Parliament defined the yard and pound by reference to the prototype standards, and it also defined the values of certain physical constants, to make provision for re-creation of the standards if they were to be damaged. For the yard, the length of a pendulum beating seconds at the latitude of Greenwich at Mean Sea Level "in vacuo" was defined as inches. For the pound, the mass of a cubic inch of distilled water at an atmospheric pressure of 30 inches of mercury and a temperature of 62° Fahrenheit was defined as 252.458 grains, with there being 7,000 grains per pound.
Following the destruction of the original prototypes in the 1834 Houses of Parliament fire, it proved impossible to recreate the standards from these definitions, and a new Weights and Measures Act (18 & 19 Victoria. Cap. 72) was passed in 1855 which permitted the recreation of the prototypes from recognized secondary standards.
The imperial system is one of many systems of English units. Most of the units are defined in more than one system, and some subsidiary units were used to a much greater extent, or for different purposes, in one area rather than another. The distinctions between the systems are often not drawn precisely.
One such distinction is that between the Imperial system and older British/English units/systems or newer additions. The term "imperial" should not be applied to English units that were outlawed by the Weights and Measures Act 1824 or earlier, or which had fallen out of use by that time, nor to post-imperial inventions, such as the slug or poundal.
The US customary system is derived from those English units which were in use at the time of the original settlement of North America from England in the 17th century. And because the United States had achieved independence from Britain prior to the 19th Century, US customary units were unaffected by Britain's introduction of the Imperial system in 1834.
Since the Weights and Measures Act 1985, British law defines base imperial units in terms of their metric equivalent and declares that none may be used "for trade" (except that milk, beer and cider may also be sold by the pint). The metric system is routinely used in business and technology within the United Kingdom, with Imperial units remaining in widespread use amongst the public. All UK roads use the imperial system except for weight limits, and newer height or width restriction signs give metric alongside imperial.
Units of measurement regulations require all measuring devices used in trade or retail to display measurements in metric quantities. Almost all traders in the UK will accept requests from customers specified in imperial units, and scales which display in both unit systems are commonplace in the retail trade. Metric price signs may be accompanied by imperial price signs provided that the imperial signs are no larger and no more prominent than the metric ones.
The United Kingdom completed its official partial transition to the metric system in 1995, with imperial units still legally mandated for certain applications such as draught beer and cider, and road-signs. Therefore, the speedometers on vehicles sold in the UK must be capable of displaying miles per hour. Even though the troy pound was outlawed in the UK in the Weights and Measures Act of 1878, the "troy ounce" "may" still be used for the weights of precious stones and metals. The original railways (many built in the Victorian era) are a big user of imperial units, with distances officially measured in miles and yards or miles and chains, and also feet and inches, and speeds are in miles per hour. More recent systems like tram networks and the London Underground use metric.
Most British people still use imperial units in everyday life for distance (miles, yards, feet and inches) and volume in some cases (especially milk and beer in pints) but rarely for canned or bottled soft drinks or petrol. Though use of kilograms is increasing, many British people also still use imperial units in everyday life for body weight (stones and pounds for adults, pounds and ounces for babies). Government documents aimed at the public may give body weight and height in imperial units as well as in metric. A survey in 2015 found that many people did not know their body weight or height in one system or the other. People under the age of 40 preferred the metric system but people aged 40 and over preferred the imperial system. The height of horses in English-speaking countries, including Australia,[1] Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States is usually measured in hands, standardized to 4 inches (101.6 mm). Fuel consumption for vehicles is commonly stated in miles per gallon (mpg), though official figures always include litres per 100 km equivalents and fuel is sold in litres. When sold draught in licensed premises, beer and cider must be sold in pints, half-pints and third-pints. Cow's milk is available in both litre- and pint-based containers in supermarkets and shops. Areas of land associated with farming, forestry and real estate are commonly advertised in acres and square feet but, for contracts and land registration purposes, the units are always hectares and square metres.
Office space and industrial units are usually advertised in square feet. Steel pipe sizes are sold in increments of inches, while copper pipe is sold in increments of millimetres. Road bicycles have their frames measured in centimetres, while off-road bicycles have their frames measured in inches. The size (diagonal) of television and computer monitor screens is always denominated in inches. Food sold by length or width, e.g. pizzas or sandwiches, is generally sold in inches. Clothing is always sized in inches, with the metric equivalent often shown as a small supplementary indicator. Gas is usually measured by the cubic foot or cubic metre, but is billed like electricity by the kilowatt hour.
Pre-packaged products can show both metric and imperial measures, and it is also common to see imperial pack sizes with metric only labels, e.g. a tin of Lyle's Golden Syrup is always labelled 454 g with no imperial indicator. Similarly most jars of jam and packs of sausages are labelled 454 g with no imperial indicator. But, whatever the label says, the tins or packets are invariably still packaged in Imperial quantities (typically 8 or 16 ounces).
India's conversion to the metric system from the imperial system occurred in stages between 1955 and 1962. The metric system in weights and measures was adopted by the Indian Parliament in December 1956 with the "Standards of Weights and Measures Act", which took effect beginning 1 October 1958. For the next five years, both the previous and new system were legal. In April 1962, all other systems were banned.
Today all official measurements are made in the metric system. In common usage some older Indians may still refer to imperial units. Some measurements, such as the heights of mountains, are still recorded in feet. Tyre rim diameters are still measured in inches, as used worldwide. Industries like the construction and the real estate industry still use both the metric and the imperial system though it is more common for sizes of homes to be given in square feet and land in acres.
In Standard Indian English, as in Australian, Singaporean, and British English, metric units such as the litre, metre, and metric tonne utilise the traditional spellings brought over from French, which differ from those used in the United States and the Philippines. The imperial long ton is invariably spelt with one 'n'.
Hong Kong has three main systems of units of measurement in current use:
In 1976 the Hong Kong Government started the conversion to the metric system, and as of 2012 measurements for government purposes, such as road signs, are almost always in metric units. All three systems are officially permitted for trade, and in the wider society a mixture of all three systems prevails.
The Chinese system's most commonly used units for length are ("lei5"), ("zoeng6"), ("cek3"), ("cyun3"), ("fan1") in descending scale order. These units are now rarely used in daily life, the imperial and metric systems being preferred. The imperial equivalents are written with the same basic Chinese characters as the Chinese system. In order to distinguish between the units of the two systems, the units can be prefixed with "Ying" (, "jing1") for the Imperial system and "Wa" (, "waa4") for the Chinese system. In writing, derived characters are often used, with an additional (mouth) radical to the left of the original Chinese character, for writing imperial units. The most commonly used units are the mile or "li" (, "li1"), the yard or "ma" (, "maa5"), the foot or "chek" (, "cek3"), and the inch or "tsun" (, "cyun3").
The traditional measure of flat area is the square foot (, "fong1 cek3, ping4 fong1 cek3") of the imperial system, which is still in common use for real estate purposes. The measurement of agricultural plots and fields is traditionally conducted in ("mau5") of the Chinese system.
For the measurement of volume, Hong Kong officially uses the metric system, though the gallon (, "gaa1 leon4-2") is also occasionally used.
During the 1970s, the metric system and SI units were introduced in Canada to replace the imperial system. Within the government, efforts to implement the metric system were extensive; almost any agency, institution, or function provided by the government uses SI units exclusively. Imperial units were eliminated from all public road signs and both systems of measurement will still be found on privately owned signs, such as the height warnings at the entrance of a parkade. In the 1980s, momentum to fully convert to the metric system stalled when the government of Brian Mulroney was elected. There was heavy opposition to metrication and as a compromise the government maintains legal definitions for and allows use of imperial units as long as metric units are shown as well.
The law requires that measured products (such as fuel and meat) be priced in metric units and an imperial price can be shown if a metric price is present. There tends to be leniency in regards to fruits and vegetables being priced in imperial units only.
Environment Canada still offers an imperial unit option beside metric units, even though weather is typically measured and reported in metric units in the Canadian media. Some radio stations near the United States border (such as CIMX and CIDR) primarily use imperial units to report the weather. Railways in Canada also continue to use Imperial units.
Imperial units are still used in ordinary conversation. Today, Canadians typically use a mix of metric and imperial measurements in their daily lives. The use of the metric and imperial systems varies by age. The older generation mostly uses the imperial system, while the younger generation more often uses the metric system. Quebec has implemented metrication more fully. Newborns are measured in SI at hospitals, but the birth weight and length is also announced to family and friends in imperial units. Drivers' licences use SI units, though many English-speaking Canadians give their height and weight in imperial. In livestock auction markets, cattle are sold in dollars per hundredweight (short), whereas hogs are sold in dollars per hundred kilograms. Imperial units still dominate in recipes, construction, house renovation and gardening. Land is now surveyed and registered in metric units whist initial surveys used imperial units. For example, partitioning of farm land on the prairies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was done in imperial units; this accounts for imperial units of distance and area retaining wide use in the Prairie Provinces. In English-speaking Canada commercial and residential spaces are mostly (but not exclusively) constructed using square feet, while in French-speaking Quebec commercial and residential spaces are constructed in metres and advertised using both square metres and square feet as equivalents. Carpet or flooring tile is purchased by the square foot, but less frequently also in square metres. Motor-vehicle fuel consumption is reported in both litres per 100 km and statute miles per imperial gallon, leading to the erroneous impression that Canadian vehicles are 20% more fuel-efficient than their apparently identical American counterparts for which fuel economy is reported in statute miles per US gallon (neither country specifies which gallon is used). Canadian railways maintain exclusive use of imperial measurements to describe train length (feet), train height (feet), capacity (tons), speed (mph), and trackage (miles).
Imperial units also retain common use in firearms and ammunition. Imperial measures are still used in the description of cartridge types, even when the cartridge is of relatively recent invention (e.g., .204 Ruger, .17 HMR, where the calibre is expressed in decimal fractions of an inch). Ammunition that is already classified in metric is still kept metric (e.g., 9×19mm). In the manufacture of ammunition, bullet and powder weights are expressed in terms of grains for both metric and imperial cartridges.
As in most of the western world, air navigation is based on "nautical" units, e.g., the nautical mile, which is neither imperial nor metric, though altitude is still measured in imperial feet in keeping with the international standard.
Metrication in Australia has largely ended the official use of imperial units, though for particular measurements, international use of imperial units is still followed. In licensed venues, draught beer and cider is sold in glasses and jugs with sizes based on the imperial fluid ounce, though rounded to the nearest 5 mL.
Newborns are measured in metric at hospitals, but the birth weight and length is also announced to family and friends in imperial units.
Screen sizes, are frequently advertised in inches as well as centimetres.
Property size is frequently advertised in acres, but is mostly as square metres.
Navigation is done in nautical miles, and water-based speed limits are in nautical miles per hour.
In New Zealand, which completed metrication in the 1970s, a study of university students undertaken in 1992 found a continued use of imperial units for birth weight and human height alongside metric units.
In aviation, altitude and airport elevation are measured in feet whilst navigation is done in nautical miles; all other aspects (fuel quantity, aircraft weight, runway length, etc.) use metric units.
Screen sizes for devices such as televisions, monitors and phones, and wheel rim sizes for vehicles, are stated in inches, as is the convention in the rest of the world.
Ireland has officially changed over to the metric system since entering the European Union, with distances on new road signs being metric since 1997 and speed limits being metric since 2005. The imperial system remains in limited use – for sales of beer in pubs (traditionally sold by the pint). All other goods are required by law to be sold in metric units with traditional quantities being retained for goods like butter and sausages, which are sold in 454-gram (1 lb) packaging. The majority of cars sold pre-2005 feature speedometers with miles per hour as the primary unit, but with a kilometres per hour display as well. Often signs such as those for bridge height can display both metric and imperial units. Imperial measurements continue to be used colloquially by the general population especially with height and distance measurements such as feet, inches, and acres as well as for weight with pounds and stones still in common use among people of all ages. Measurements such as yards have fallen out of favour with younger generations. All of Ireland's railways still operate on imperial measurements and property is usually listed in square feet as well as metres also.
Some imperial measurements remain in limited use in Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Measurements in feet and inches, especially for a person's height, are frequently encountered in conversation and non-governmental publications.
Prior to metrication, it was a common practice in Malaysia for people to refer to unnamed locations and small settlements along major roads by referring to how many miles the said locations were from the nearest major town. In some cases, these eventually became the official names of the locations; in other cases, such names have been largely or completely superseded by new names. An example of the former is Batu 32 (literally "Mile 32" in Malay), which refers to the area surrounding the intersection between Federal Route 22 (the Tamparuli-Sandakan highway) and Federal Route 13 (the Sandakan-Tawau highway). The area is so named because it is 32 miles west of Sandakan, the nearest major town.
Petrol is still sold by the imperial gallon in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Myanmar, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The United Arab Emirates Cabinet in 2009 issued the Decree No. (270 / 3) specifying that, from 1 January 2010, the new unit sale price for petrol will be the litre and not the gallon. This in line with the UAE Cabinet Decision No. 31 of 2006 on the national system of measurement, which mandates the use of International System of units as a basis for the legal units of measurement in the country. Sierra Leone switched to selling fuel by the litre in May 2011.
In October 2011, the Antigua and Barbuda government announced the re-launch of the Metrication Programme in accordance with the Metrology Act 2007, which established the International System of Units as the legal system of units. The Antigua and Barbuda government has committed to a full conversion from the imperial system by the first quarter of 2015.
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International Society of Olympic Historians
The International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH) is a non-profit organization founded in 1991 with the purpose of promoting and studying the Olympic Movement and the Olympic Games. The majority of recent books on the Olympic Games have been written by ISOH members. The ISOH publishes the Journal of Olympic History (JOH, formerly "Citius, Altius, Fortius") three times a year.
The International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH) was formed as the result of a meeting in London, England in December 1991. The idea of forming an Olympic historical society had been the subject of correspondence – mainly between Bill Mallon (United States) and Ture Widlund (Sweden) – for many years. On Thursday, 5 December 1991, a group of potential members met at the Duke of Clarence, a small pub in the Kensington section of London. Those present were Ian Buchanan (Great Britain), Stan Greenberg (Great Britain), Ove Karlsson (Sweden), Bill Mallon (United States), Peter Matthews (Great Britain), David Wallechinsky (United States), and Ture Widlund (Sweden). The invited guests who sent regrets were: Anthony Bijkerk (Netherlands), Peter Diamond (United States), Pim Huurman (Netherlands), Erich Kamper (Austria), Volker Kluge (Germany), John Lucas (United States), and Wolf Lyberg (Sweden).
ISOH was formed with the purpose of promoting and studying the Olympic Movement and the Olympic Games. This purpose is achieved primarily through research into their history, through the gathering of historical and statistical data concerning the Olympic Movement and Olympic Games, through the publication of the research via journals and other publications, and through the cooperation of the membership.
From its inception to 2000, Ian Buchanan has been the president of the ISOH. In 2000, this function was taken over by Bill Mallon. From 2004 to 2012 Dr. Karl Lennartz (Germany) served as president and since 2012 David Wallechinsky (United States) has been president.
The ISOH publishes the "Journal of Olympic History" (formerly "Citius, Altius, Fortius").
, the ISOH has about 340 members from 48 nations. The membership includes well-known Olympic historians and researchers on Olympic topics. The majority of recent books on the Olympic Games have been written by ISOH members. Over 20 ISOH members have received the Olympic Order for their contributions to the Olympic Movement, and several members of the IOC and several Olympians are members. Other members are collectors of Olympic memorabilia, such as Raleigh DeGeer Amyx.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15495
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Serie A
Serie A (), also called Serie A TIM due to sponsorship by TIM, is a professional league competition for football clubs located at the top of the Italian football league system and the winner is awarded the Scudetto and the Coppa Campioni d'Italia. It has been operating as a round-robin tournament for over ninety years since the 1929–30 season. It had been organized by the Direttorio Divisioni Superiori until 1943 and the Lega Calcio until 2010, when the Lega Serie A was created for the 2010–11 season. Serie A is regarded as one of the best football leagues in the world and it is often depicted as the most tactical national league. Serie A was the world's second-strongest national league in 2014 according to IFFHS. Serie A is ranked fourth among European leagues according to UEFA's league coefficient, behind La Liga, the Premier League and the Bundesliga, and ahead of Ligue 1, which is based on the performance of Italian clubs in the Champions League and the Europa League during the last five years. Serie A led the UEFA ranking from 1986 to 1988 and from 1990 to 1999.
In its current format, the Italian Football Championship was revised from having regional and interregional rounds, to a single-tier league from the 1929–30 season onwards. The championship titles won prior to 1929 are officially recognised by FIGC with the same weighting as titles that were subsequently awarded. Similarly, the 1945–46 season, when the round-robin was suspended and the league was played over two geographical groups due to the ravages of WWII, is not statistically considered, even if its title is fully official. All the winning teams are recognised with the title of "Campione d'Italia" ("Champion of Italy"), which is ratified by the Lega Serie A before the start of the next edition of the championship.
The league hosts three of the world's most famous clubs as Juventus, Milan and Internazionale, all founding members of the G-14, a group which represented the largest and most prestigious European football clubs from 2000 to 2008, with the first two also being founding members of its successive organisation, European Club Association (ECA). More players have won the coveted Ballon d'Or award while playing at a Serie A club than any league in the world other than Spain's La Liga, although Spain's La Liga has the highest total number of Ballon d'Or winners. Juventus, Italy's most successful club of the 20th century and the most successful Italian team, is tied for fifth in Europe and eleventh in the world with the most official international titles. The club is also the only one in the world to have won all possible official confederation competitions. Milan is joint third club for official international titles won in the world, with 18. Internazionale, following their achievements in the 2009–10 season, became the first Italian team to have achieved a treble. Inter are also the only team in Italian football history to have never been relegated. Juventus, Milan and Inter, along with Lazio, Fiorentina, Roma and Napoli, are known as the Seven Sisters of Italian football.
Serie A is one of the most storied football leagues in the world. Of the 100 greatest footballers in history chosen by "FourFourTwo" magazine in 2017, 42 players have played in Serie A, more than any other league in the world. Juventus is the team that has produced the most World Cup champions (25), with Inter (19), Roma (15) and Milan (10), being respectively third, fourth and ninth in that ranking.
Serie A, as it is structured today, began during the 1929–30 season. From 1898 to 1922, the competition was organised into regional groups. Because of ever growing teams attending regional championships, the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) split the CCI (Italian Football Confederation) in 1921. When CCI teams rejoined the FIGC created two interregional divisions renaming Categories into Divisions and splitting FIGC sections into two north–south leagues. In 1926, due to internal crises and fascist pressures, the FIGC changed internal settings, adding southern teams to the national division, ultimately leading to the 1929–30 final settlement. Torino were declared champions in the 1948–49 season following a plane crash near the end of the season in which the entire team was killed.
The Serie A Championship title is often referred to as the "scudetto" ("small shield") because since the 1923–24 season, the winning team will bear a small coat of arms with the Italian tricolour on their strip in the following season. The most successful club is Juventus with 35 championships, followed by both Milan and Internazionale, with 18 championships apiece. From the 2004–05 season onwards, an actual trophy was awarded to club on the pitch after the last turn of the championship. The trophy, called the Coppa Campioni d'Italia, has officially been used since the 1960–61 season, but between 1961 and 2004 was consigned to the winning clubs at the head office of the Lega Nazionale Professionisti.
In April 2009, Serie A announced a split from Serie B. Nineteen of the twenty clubs voted in favour of the move in an argument over television rights; the relegation-threatened Lecce had voted against the decision. Maurizio Beretta, the former head of Italy's employers' association, became president of the new league.
In April 2016, it was announced that Serie A was selected by the International Football Association Board to test video replays, which were initially private for the 2016–17 season, allowing them to become a live pilot phase, with replay assistance implemented in the 2017–18 season. On the decision, FIGC President Carlo Tavecchio said, "We were among the first supporters of using technology on the pitch and we believe we have everything required to offer our contribution to this important experiment."
For most of Serie A's history, there were 16 or 18 clubs competing at the top level. Since 2004–05, however, there have been 20 clubs altogether. One season (1947–48) was played with 21 teams for political reasons. Below is a complete record of how many teams played in each season throughout the league's history;
During the season, which runs from August to May, each club plays each of the other teams twice; once at home and once away, totalling 38 games for each team by the end of the season. Thus, in Italian football a true round-robin format is used. In the first half of the season, called the "andata", each team plays once against each league opponent, for a total of 19 games. In the second half of the season, called the "ritorno", the teams play in exactly the same order that they did in the first half of the season, the only difference being that home and away situations are switched. Since the 1994–95 season, teams are awarded three points for a win, one point for a draw and no points for a loss.
The top four teams in the Serie A qualify straight to the UEFA Champions League group stages (from the 2017–18 season). Teams finishing fifth and sixth qualify for the UEFA Europa League tournament. A third UEFA Europa League spot is reserved for the winner of the Coppa Italia. If the Coppa Italia champion already qualified for European football by finishing among the top six teams in Serie A, the seventh-ranked team in Serie A is awarded the UEFA Europa League spot. The three lowest-placed teams are relegated to Serie B.
From 2005–06 season if two or more teams are tied in points (for any place), the deciding tie-breakers are as follows:
Until 2004–05 season, a playoff would be used to determine the champions, European spots or relegation, if the two teams were tied on points. Any play-off was held after the end of regular season. The last championship playoff occurred in the 1963–64 season when Bologna and Inter both finished on 54 points. Bologna won the play-off 2–0.
Prior to 1929, many clubs competed in the top level of Italian football as the earlier rounds were competed up to 1922 on a regional basis then interregional up to 1929. Below is a list of Serie A clubs who have competed in the competition when it has been a league format (66 in total).
There are 67 teams that have taken part in 88 Serie A championships in a single round that was played from the 1929–30 season until the 2019–20 season. The teams in bold compete in Serie A currently. Internazionale is the only team that has played Serie A football in every season.
Serie A had logos that featured its sponsor Telecom Italia (TIM). The logo that was introduced in 2010, had minor change in 2016 due to the change of the logo of Telecom Italia itself. In August 2018, a new logo was announced.
In the past, individual clubs competing in the league had the rights to sell their broadcast rights to specific channels throughout Italy, unlike in most other European countries. Currently, the two broadcasters in Italy are the satellite broadcaster Sky Italia and streaming platform DAZN for its own pay television networks; RAI is allowed to broadcast only highlights (in exclusive from 13:30 to 22:30 CET).
This is a list of television rights in Italy (since 2018–19):
Since the 2010–11 season, Serie A clubs have negotiated television rights collectively rather than on an individual club basis, having previously abandoned collective negotiation at the end of the 1998–99 season.
In the 1990s, Serie A was at its most popular in the United Kingdom when it was shown on "Football Italia" on Channel 4, although it has actually appeared on more UK channels than any other league, rarely staying in one place for long since 2002. Serie A has appeared in the UK on BSB's The Sports Channel (1990–91), Sky Sports (1991–92), Channel 4 (1992–2002), Eurosport (2002–04), Setanta Sports and Bravo (2004–07), Channel 5 (2007–08), ESPN (2009–13), BT Sport (2013–2018), Eleven Sports Network (2018), Premier and FreeSports (2019–present).
Bold indicates clubs which play in the 2019–20 Serie A.
Boldface indicates a player still active in Serie A. "Italics" indicates a player active outside Serie A.
Unlike La Liga, which imposed a quota on the number of non-EU players on each club, Serie A clubs could sign as many non-EU players as available on domestic transfer.
During the 1980s and 1990s, most Serie A clubs signed a large number of players from foreign nations (both EU and non-EU members). Notable foreign players to play in Serie A during this era included Irish international Liam Brady, England internationals Paul Gascoigne and David Platt, France's Michel Platini and Laurent Blanc, Lothar Matthäus and Jürgen Klinsmann from Germany, Dutchmen Ruud Gullit and Dennis Bergkamp, and Argentina's Diego Maradona.
But since the 2003–04 season, a quota has been imposed on each of the clubs limiting the number of non-EU, non-EFTA and non-Swiss players who may be signed from abroad each season, following provisional measures introduced in the 2002–03 season, which allowed Serie A and B clubs to sign only one non-EU player in the 2002 summer transfer window.
In the middle of the 2000–01 season, the old quota system was abolished, which no longer limited each team to having more than five non-EU players and using no more than three in each match. Concurrent with the abolishment of the quota, the FIGC had investigated footballers that used fake passports. Alberto and Warley, Alejandro Da Silva and Jorginho Paulista of Udinese; Fábio Júnior and Gustavo Bartelt of Roma; Dida of Milan; Álvaro Recoba of Inter; Thomas Job, Francis Zé, Jean Ondoa of Sampdoria; and Jeda and Dede of Vicenza were all banned in July 2001 for lengths ranging from six months to one year. However, most of the bans were subsequently reduced.
The number of non-EU players was reduced from 265 in 2002–03 season to 166 in 2006–07 season. It also included players who received EU status after their respective countries joined the EU (see 2004 and 2007 enlargement), which made players such as Adrian Mutu, Valeri Bojinov, Marek Jankulovski and Marius Stankevičius EU players.
The rule underwent minor changes in August 2004, June 2005, June 2006. and June 2007.
Since the 2008–09 season, three quotas have been awarded to clubs that do not have non-EU players in their squad (previously only newly promoted clubs could have three quotas); clubs that have one non-EU player have two quotas. Those clubs that have two non-EU players, are awarded one quota and one conditional quota, which is awarded after: 1) Transferred 1 non-EU player abroad, or 2) Release 1 non-EU player as free agent, or 3) A non-EU player received EU nationality. Clubs with three or more non-EU players, have two conditional quotas, but releasing two non-EU players as free agent, will only have one quota instead of two. Serie B and Lega Pro clubs cannot sign non-EU player from abroad, except those followed the club promoted from Serie D.
Large clubs with many foreigners usually borrow quotas from other clubs that have few foreigners or no foreigners in order to sign more non-EU players. For example, Adrian Mutu joined Juventus via Livorno in 2005, as at the time Romania was not a member of the EU. Other examples include Júlio César, Victor Obinna and Maxwell, who joined Internazionale from Chievo (first two) and Empoli respectively.
On 2 July 2010, the above conditional quota reduced back to one, though if a team did not have any non-EU players, that team could still sign up to three non-EU players. In 2011 the signing quota reverted to two.
Serie A also imposed Homegrown players rule, a modification of Homegrown Player Rule (UEFA). Unlike UEFA, Serie A at first did not cap the number of players in first team squad at 25, meaning the club could employ more foreigners by increasing the size of the squad. However, a cap of 25 (under-21 players were excluded) was introduced to 2015–16 season (in 2015–16 season, squad simply require 8 homegrown players but not require 4 of them from their own youth team). In the 2016–17 season, the FIGC sanctioned Sassuolo for fielding ineligible player, Antonino Ragusa. Although the club did not exceed the capacity of 21 players that were not from their own youth team (only Domenico Berardi was eligible as youth product of their own) as well as under 21 of age (born 1995 or after, of which four players were eligible) in their 24-men call-up, It was reported that on Lega Serie A side the squad list was not updated.
In 2015–16 season, the following quota was announced.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15496
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Inhalant
Inhalants are a broad range of household and industrial chemicals whose volatile vapors or pressurized gases can be concentrated and breathed in via the nose or mouth to produce intoxication (called "getting high" in slang), in a manner not intended by the manufacturer. They are inhaled at room temperature through volatilization (in the case of gasoline or acetone) or from a pressurized container (e.g., nitrous oxide or butane), and do not include drugs that are sniffed after burning or heating. For example, amyl nitrite (poppers), nitrous oxide and toluene – a solvent widely used in contact cement, permanent markers, and certain types of glue – are considered inhalants, but smoking tobacco, cannabis, and crack are not, even though these drugs are inhaled as smoke.
While a small number of inhalants are prescribed by medical professionals and used for medical purposes, as in the case of inhaled anesthetics and nitrous oxide (an anxiolytic and pain relief agent prescribed by dentists), this article focuses on inhalant use of household and industrial propellants, glues, fuels and other products in a manner not intended by the manufacturer, to produce intoxication or other psychoactive effects. These products are used as recreational drugs for their intoxicating effect. According to a 1995 report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the most serious inhalant abuse occurs among homeless children and teens who "... live on the streets completely without family ties." Inhalants are the only substance which is used more by younger teens than by older teens. Inhalant users inhale vapor or aerosol propellant gases using plastic bags held over the mouth or by breathing from a solvent-soaked rag or an open container. The practices are known colloquially as "sniffing", "huffing" or "bagging".
The effects of inhalants range from an alcohol-like intoxication and intense euphoria to vivid hallucinations, depending on the substance and the dose. Some inhalant users are injured due to the harmful effects of the solvents or gases or due to other chemicals used in the products that they are inhaling. As with any recreational drug, users can be injured due to dangerous behavior while they are intoxicated, such as driving under the influence. In some cases, users have died from hypoxia (lack of oxygen), pneumonia, cardiac failure or arrest, or aspiration of vomit. Brain damage is typically seen with chronic long-term use of solvents as opposed to short-term exposure.
Even though many inhalants are legal, there have been legal actions taken in some jurisdictions to limit access by minors. While solvent glue is normally a legal product, a Scottish court has ruled that supplying glue to children is illegal if the store knows the children intend to abuse the glue. In the US, thirty-eight of 50 states have enacted laws making various inhalants unavailable to those under the age of 18, or making inhalant use illegal.
Inhalants can be classified by the intended function. Most inhalant drugs that are used non-medically are ingredients in household or industrial chemical products that are not intended to be concentrated and inhaled. A small number of recreational inhalant drugs are pharmaceutical products that are used illicitly.
Another way to categorize inhalants is by their product category. There are three main product categories: solvents; gases; and medical drugs which are used illicitly.
A wide range of volatile solvents intended for household or industrial use are inhaled as recreational drugs. This includes petroleum products (gasoline and kerosene), toluene (used in paint thinner, permanent markers, contact cement and model glue), and acetone (used in nail polish remover). These solvents vaporize at room temperature. Ethanol (the alcohol which is normally drunk) is sometimes inhaled, but this cannot be done at room temperature. The ethanol must be converted from liquid into gaseous state (vapor) or aerosol (mist), in some cases using a nebulizer, a machine that agitates the liquid into an aerosol. The sale of nebulizers for inhaling ethanol was banned in some US states due to safety concerns.
A number of gases intended for household or industrial use are inhaled as recreational drugs. This includes chlorofluorocarbons used in aerosols and propellants (e.g., aerosol hair spray, aerosol deodorant). A gas used as a propellant in whipped cream aerosol containers, nitrous oxide, is used as a recreational drug. Pressurized canisters of propane and butane gas, both of which are intended for use as fuels, are used as inhalants.
Several medical anesthetics are used as recreational drugs, including diethyl ether (a drug that is no longer used medically, due to its high flammability and the development of safer alternatives) and nitrous oxide, which is widely used in the 2010s by dentists as an anti-anxiety drug during dental procedures. Diethyl ether has a long history of use as a recreational drug. The effects of ether intoxication are similar to those of alcohol intoxication, but more potent. Also, due to NMDA antagonism, the user may experience all the psychedelic effects present in classical dissociatives such as ketamine in forms of thought loops and feeling of mind being disconnected from one's body. Nitrous oxide is a dental anesthetic which is used as a recreational drug, either by users who have access to medical-grade gas canisters (e.g., dental hygienists or dentists) or by using the gas contained in whipped cream aerosol containers. Nitrous oxide inhalation can cause pain relief, depersonalisation, derealisation, dizziness, euphoria, and some sound distortion.
It is also possible to classify inhalants by the effect they have on the body. Some solvents act as depressants, causing users to feel relaxed or drowsy. Many inhalants act primarily as asphyxiant gases, with their primary effect due to oxygen deprivation. Nitrous oxide can be categorized as a dissociative drug, as it can cause visual and auditory hallucinations. Other agents may have more direct effects at receptors, as inhalants exhibit a variety of mechanisms of action. The mechanisms of action of many non-medical inhalants have not been well elucidated. Anesthetic gases used for surgery, such as nitrous oxide or enflurane, are believed to induce anesthesia primarily by acting as NMDA receptor antagonists, open channel blockers that bind to the inside of the calcium channels on the outer surface of the neuron, and provide high levels of NMDA receptor blockade for a short period of time.
This makes inhaled anesthetic gases different from other NMDA antagonists, such as ketamine, which bind to a regulatory site on the NMDA-sensitive calcium transporter complex and provide slightly lower levels of NMDA blockade, but for a longer and much more predictable duration. This makes a deeper level of anesthesia achievable more easily using anesthetic gases but can also make them more dangerous than other drugs used for this purpose.
Inhalants can also be classified by chemical structure. Classes include:
Inhalant users inhale vapors or aerosol propellant gases using plastic bags held over the mouth or by breathing from an open container of solvents, such as gasoline or paint thinner. Nitrous oxide gases from whipped cream aerosol cans, aerosol hairspray or non-stick frying spray are sprayed into plastic bags. Some nitrous oxide users spray the gas into balloons. When inhaling non-stick cooking spray or other aerosol products, some users may filter the aerosolized particles out with a rag. Some gases, such as propane and butane gases, are inhaled directly from the canister. Once these solvents or gases are inhaled, the extensive capillary surface of the lungs rapidly absorb the solvent or gas, and blood levels peak rapidly. The intoxication effects occur so quickly that the effects of inhalation can resemble the intensity of effects produced by intravenous injection of other psychoactive drugs.
Ethanol is also inhaled, either by vaporizing it by pouring it over dry ice in a narrow container and inhaling with a straw or by pouring alcohol in a corked bottle with a pipe, and then using a bicycle pump to make a spray. Alcohol can be vaporized using a simple container and open-flame heater. Medical devices such as asthma nebulizers and inhalers were also reported as means of application. The practice gained popularity in 2004, with marketing of the device dubbed AWOL (Alcohol without liquid), a play on the military term AWOL (Absent Without Leave). AWOL, created by British businessman Dominic Simler, was first introduced in Asia and Europe, and then in United States in August 2004. AWOL was used by nightclubs, at gatherings and parties, and it garnered attraction as a novelty, as people 'enjoyed passing it around in a group'. AWOL uses a nebulizer, a machine that agitates the liquid into an aerosol. AWOL's official website states that "AWOL and AWOL 1 are powered by "Electrical Air Compressors" while AWOL 2 and AWOL 3 are powered by "electrical oxygen generators"", which refer to a couple of mechanisms used by the nebulizer drug delivery device for inhalation. Although the AWOL machine is marketed as having no downsides, such as the lack of calories or hangovers, Amanda Shaffer of "Slate" describes these claims as "dubious at best". Although inhaled alcohol does reduce the caloric content, the savings are minimal. After expressed safety and health concerns, sale or use of AWOL machines was banned in a number of American states.
The effects of solvent intoxication can vary widely depending on the dose and what type of solvent or gas is inhaled. A person who has inhaled a small amount of rubber cement or paint thinner vapor may be impaired in a manner resembling alcohol inebriation. A person who has inhaled a larger quantity of solvents or gases, or a stronger chemical, may experience stronger effects such as distortion in perceptions of time and space, hallucinations, and emotional disturbances. The effects of inhalant use are also modified by the combined use of inhalants and alcohol or other drugs.
In the short term, many users experience headache, nausea and vomiting, slurred speech, loss of motor coordination, and wheezing. A characteristic "glue sniffer's rash" around the nose and mouth is sometimes seen after prolonged use. An odor of paint or solvents on clothes, skin, and breath is sometimes a sign of inhalant abuse, and paint or solvent residues can sometimes emerge in sweat.
According to NIH, even a single session of inhalant abuse "can disrupt heart rhythms and lower oxygen levels", which can lead to death. "Regular abuse can result in serious harm to the brain, heart, kidneys and liver."
Statistics on deaths caused by inhalant abuse are difficult to determine. It may be severely under-reported, because death is often attributed to a discrete event such as a stroke or a heart attack, even if the event happened because of inhalant abuse. Inhalant use or abuse was mentioned on 144 death certificates in Texas during the period 1988–1998 and was reported in 39 deaths in Virginia between 1987 and 1996 from acute voluntary exposure to abused inhalants.
Regardless of which inhalant is used, inhaling vapours or gases can lead to injury or death. One major risk is hypoxia (lack of oxygen), which can occur due to inhaling fumes from a plastic bag, or from using proper inhalation mask equipment (e.g., a medical mask for nitrous oxide) but not adding oxygen or room air. Another danger is freezing the throat. When a gas that was stored under high pressure is released, it cools abruptly and can cause frostbite if it is inhaled directly from the container. This can occur, for example, with inhaling nitrous oxide. When nitrous oxide is used as an automotive power adder, its cooling effect is used to make the fuel-air charge denser. In a person, this effect is potentially lethal. Many inhalants are volatile organic chemicals and can catch fire or explode, especially when combined with smoking. As with many other drugs, users may also injure themselves due to loss of coordination or impaired judgment, especially if they attempt to drive.
Solvents have many potential risks in common, including pneumonia, cardiac failure or arrest, and aspiration of vomit. The inhaling of some solvents can cause hearing loss, limb spasms, and damage to the central nervous system and brain. Serious but potentially reversible effects include liver and kidney damage and blood-oxygen depletion. Death from inhalants is generally caused by a very high concentration of fumes. Deliberately inhaling solvents from an attached paper or plastic bag or in a closed area greatly increases the chances of suffocation. Brain damage is typically seen with chronic long-term use as opposed to short-term exposure. Parkinsonism (see: Signs and symptoms of Parkinson's disease) has been associated with huffing.
Female inhalant users who are pregnant may have adverse effects on the fetus, and the baby may be smaller when it is born and may need additional health care (similar to those seen with alcohol – fetal alcohol syndrome). There is some evidence of birth defects and disabilities in babies born to women who sniffed solvents such as gasoline.
In the short term, death from solvent abuse occurs most commonly from aspiration of vomit while unconscious or from a combination of respiratory depression and hypoxia, the second cause being especially a risk with heavier-than-air vapors such as butane or gasoline vapor. Deaths typically occur from complications related to excessive sedation and vomiting. Actual overdose from the drug does occur, however, and inhaled solvent abuse is statistically more likely to result in life-threatening respiratory depression than intravenous use of opiates such as heroin. Most deaths from solvent abuse could be prevented if individuals were resuscitated quickly when they stopped breathing and their airway cleared if they vomited. However, most inhalant abuse takes place when people inhale solvents by themselves or in groups of people who are intoxicated. Certain solvents are more hazardous than others, such as gasoline.
In contrast, a few inhalants like amyl nitrate and diethyl ether have medical applications and are not toxic in the same sense as solvents, though they can still be dangerous when used recreationally. Nitrous oxide is thought to be particularly non-toxic, though heavy long-term use can lead to a variety of serious health problems linked to destruction of vitamin B12 and folic acid.
The hypoxic effect of inhalants can cause damage to many organ systems (particularly the brain, which has a very low tolerance for oxygen deprivation), but there can also be additional toxicity resulting from either the physical properties of the compound itself or additional ingredients present in a product. Organochlorine solvents are particularly hazardous; many of these are now restricted in developed countries due to their environmental impact.
Toxicity may also result from the pharmacological properties of the drug; excess NMDA antagonism can completely block calcium influx into neurons and provoke cell death through apoptosis, although this is more likely to be a long-term result of chronic solvent abuse than a consequence of short-term use.
Sudden sniffing death syndrome is commonly known as SSDS.
Inhaling butane gas can cause drowsiness, unconsciousness, asphyxia, and cardiac arrhythmia. Butane is the most commonly misused volatile solvent in the UK and caused 52% of solvent-related deaths in 2000. When butane is sprayed directly into the throat, the jet of fluid can cool rapidly to −20 °C by adiabatic expansion, causing prolonged laryngospasm.
Some inhalants can also indirectly cause sudden death by cardiac arrest, in a syndrome known as "sudden sniffing death". The anaesthetic gases present in the inhalants appear to sensitize the user to adrenaline and, in this state, a sudden surge of adrenaline (e.g., from a frightening hallucination or run-in with aggressors), may cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia.
Furthermore, the inhalation of any gas that is capable of displacing oxygen in the lungs (especially gases heavier than oxygen) carries the risk of hypoxia as a result of the very mechanism by which breathing is triggered. Since reflexive breathing is prompted by elevated carbon dioxide levels (rather than diminished blood oxygen levels), breathing a concentrated, relatively inert gas (such as computer-duster tetrafluoroethane or nitrous oxide) that removes carbon dioxide from the blood without replacing it with oxygen will produce no outward signs of suffocation even when the brain is experiencing hypoxia. Once full symptoms of hypoxia appear, it may be too late to breathe without assistance, especially if the gas is heavy enough to lodge in the lungs for extended periods. Even completely inert gases, such as argon, can have this effect if oxygen is largely excluded.
Even though solvent glue is normally a legal product, there is a case where a court has ruled that supplying glue to children is illegal. Khaliq v HM Advocate was a Scottish criminal case decided by the High Court of Justiciary on appeal, in which it was decided that it was an offence at common law to supply glue sniffing materials that were otherwise legal in the knowledge that they would be used recreationally by children. Two shopkeepers in Glasgow were arrested and charged with supplying to children "glue-sniffing kits" consisting of a quantity of petroleum-based glue in a plastic bag. They argued there was nothing illegal about the items that they had supplied. On appeal, the High Court took the view that, even though glue and plastic bags might be perfectly legal, everyday items, the two shopkeepers knew perfectly well that the children were going to use the articles as inhalants and the charge on the indictment should stand. When the case came to trial at Glasgow High Court the two were sentenced to three years' imprisonment.
"Thirty-eight of 50 [US] states have enacted laws making various inhalants unavailable to those under the age of 18. Other states prohibit the sale of these items to anyone without recognition of purpose for purchase. Some states mandate laws against using these products for purposes of getting high, while some states have laws about possessing certain inhalants. Nearly every state imposes fines and jail terms for violation of their specific laws."
"Connecticut law bans the unauthorized manufacture or compounding, possession, control, sale, delivery, or administration of any "restricted substance". It defines restricted substances as... specific volatile substances if they are sold, compounded, possessed or controlled, or delivered or administered to another person for breathing, inhaling, sniffing, or drinking to induce a stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect. Violators can be fined up to $100." As well, 24 states "ban the use, possession, or sale or other distribution of inhalants... like glue and solvents."
"Louisiana prohibits the sale, transfer, or possession of model glue and inhalable toluene substances to minors. In Ohio, it is illegal to inhale certain compounds for intoxication—a common, general prohibition other states have enacted.
Some states draw their prohibitions more narrowly... In Massachusetts, retailers must ask minors for identification before selling them glue or cement that contains a solvent that can release toxic vapors."
"New Jersey... prohibits selling or offering to sell minors products containing chlorofluorocarbon that is used in refrigerant."
The sale of alkyl nitrite-based poppers was banned in Canada in 2013. Although not considered a narcotic and not illegal to possess or use, they are considered a drug. Sales that are not authorized can now be punished with fines and prison. Since 2007, reformulated poppers containing isopropyl nitrite are sold in Europe because only isobutyl nitrite is prohibited. In France, the sale of products containing butyl nitrite, pentyl nitrite, or isomers thereof, has been prohibited since 1990 on grounds of danger to consumers. In 2007, the government extended this prohibition to all alkyl nitrites that were not authorized for sale as drugs. After litigation by sex shop owners, this extension was quashed by the Council of State on the grounds that the government had failed to justify such a blanket prohibition: according to the court, the risks cited, concerning rare accidents often following abnormal usage, rather justified compulsory warnings on the packaging.
In the United Kingdom, poppers are widely available and frequently (legally) sold in gay clubs/bars, sex shops, drug paraphernalia head shops, over the Internet and on markets. It is illegal under Medicines Act 1968 to sell them advertised for human consumption, and to bypass this, they are usually sold as odorizers. In the U.S., originally marketed as a prescription drug in 1937, amyl nitrite remained so until 1960, when the Food and Drug Administration removed the prescription requirement due to its safety record. This requirement was reinstated in 1969, after observation of an increase in recreational use. Other alkyl nitrites were outlawed in the U.S. by Congress through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. The law includes an exception for commercial purposes. The term "commercial purpose" is defined to mean any use other than for the production of consumer products containing volatile alkyl nitrites meant for inhaling or otherwise introducing volatile alkyl nitrites into the human body for euphoric or physical effects. The law came into effect in 1990. Visits to retail outlets selling these products reveal that some manufacturers have since reformulated their products to abide by the regulations, through the use of the legal cyclohexyl nitrite as the primary ingredient in their products, which are sold as video head cleaners, polish removers, or room odorants.
In the United States, possession of nitrous oxide is legal under federal law and is not subject to DEA purview. It is, however, regulated by the Food and Drug Administration under the Food Drug and Cosmetics Act; prosecution is possible under its "misbranding" clauses, prohibiting the sale or distribution of nitrous oxide for the purpose of human consumption as a recreational drug. Many states have laws regulating the possession, sale, and distribution of nitrous oxide. Such laws usually ban distribution to minors or limit the amount of nitrous oxide that may be sold without special license. For example, in the state of California, possession for recreational use is prohibited and qualifies as a misdemeanour. In New Zealand, the Ministry of Health has warned that nitrous oxide is a prescription medicine, and its sale or possession without a prescription is an offence under the Medicines Act. This statement would seemingly prohibit all non-medicinal uses of the chemical, though it is implied that only recreational use will be legally targeted. In India, for general anaesthesia purposes, nitrous oxide is available as Nitrous Oxide IP. India's gas cylinder rules (1985) permit the transfer of gas from one cylinder to another for breathing purposes. Because India's Food & Drug Authority (FDA-India) rules state that transferring a drug from one container to another (refilling) is equivalent to manufacturing, anyone found doing so must possess a drug manufacturing license.
Inhalant drugs are often used by children, teenagers, incarcerated or institutionalized people, and impoverished people, because these solvents and gases are ingredients in hundreds of legally available, inexpensive products, such as deodorant sprays, hair spray, contact cement and aerosol air fresheners. However, most users tend to be "... adolescents (between the ages of 12 and 17)." In some countries, chronic, heavy inhalant use is concentrated in marginalized, impoverished communities. Young people who become chronic, heavy inhalant abusers are also more likely to be those who are isolated from their families and community. The article "Epidemiology of Inhalant Abuse: An International Perspective" notes that "[t]he most serious form of obsession with inhalant use probably occurs in countries other than the United States where young children live on the streets completely without family ties. These groups almost always use inhalants at very high levels (Leal et al. 1978). This isolation can make it harder to keep in touch with the sniffer and encourage him or her to stop sniffing."
The article also states that "... high [inhalant use] rates among barrio Hispanics almost undoubtedly are related to the poverty, lack of opportunity, and social dysfunction that occur in barrios" and states that the "... same general tendency appears for Native-American youth" because "... Indian reservations are among the most disadvantaged environments in the United States; there are high rates of unemployment, little opportunity, and high rates of alcoholism and other health problems." There are a wide range of social problems associated with inhalant use, such as feelings of distress, anxiety and grief for the community; violence and damage to property; violent crime; stresses on the juvenile justice system; and stresses on youth agencies and support services.
Glue and gasoline (petrol) sniffing is also a problem in parts of Africa, especially with street children. In India and South Asia, three of the most widely abused inhalants are the Dendrite brand and other forms of contact adhesives and rubber cements manufactured in Kolkata, and toluenes in paint thinners. Genkem is a brand of glue which had become the generic name for all the glues used by glue-sniffing children in Africa before the manufacturer replaced n-hexane in its ingredients in 2000.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has reported that glue sniffing is at the core of "street culture" in Nairobi, Kenya, and that the majority of street children in the city are habitual solvent users. Research conducted by Cottrell-Boyce for the African Journal of Drug and Alcohol Studies found that glue sniffing amongst Kenyan street children was primarily functional – dulling the senses against the hardship of life on the street – but it also provided a link to the support structure of the "street family" as a potent symbol of shared experience.
Similar incidents of glue sniffing among destitute youth in the Philippines have also been reported, most commonly from groups of street children and teenagers collectively known as "Rugby" boys, which were named after a brand of toluene-laden contact cement. Other toluene-containing substances have also been subject to abuse, most notably the Vulca Seal brand of roof sealants. Bostik Philippines, which currently owns the Rugby and Vulca Seal brands, has since responded to the issue by adding bitterants such as mustard oil to their Rugby line, as well as reformulating it by replacing toluene with xylene. Several other manufacturers have also followed suit.
Another very common inhalant is Erase-X, a correction fluid that contains toluene. It has become very common for school and college students to use it, because it is easily available in stationery shops in India. This fluid is also used by street and working children in Delhi.
In the UK, marginalized youth use a number of inhalants, such as solvents and propellants. In Russia and Eastern Europe, gasoline sniffing became common on Russian ships following attempts to limit the supply of alcohol to ship crews in the 1980s. The documentary "Children Underground" depicts the huffing of a solvent called Aurolac (a product used in chroming) by Romanian homeless children. During the Interbellum the inhalation of ether (etheromania) was widespread in some regions of Poland, especially in Upper Silesia—tens of thousands of people were affected by this problem.
In Canada, Native children in the isolated Northern Labrador community of Davis Inlet were the focus of national concern in 1993, when many were found to be sniffing gasoline. The Canadian and provincial Newfoundland and Labrador governments intervened on a number of occasions, sending many children away for treatment. Despite being moved to the new community of Natuashish in 2002, serious inhalant abuse problems have continued. Similar problems were reported in Sheshatshiu in 2000 and also in Pikangikum First Nation. In 2012, the issue once again made the news media in Canada. In Mexico, the inhaling of a mixture of gasoline and industrial solvents, known locally as "Activo" or "Chemo", has risen in popularity among the homeless and among the street children of Mexico City in recent years. The mixture is poured onto a handkerchief and inhaled while held in one's fist.
In the US, ether was used as a recreational drug during the 1930s Prohibition era, when alcohol was made illegal. Ether was either sniffed or drunk and, in some towns, replaced alcohol entirely. However, the risk of death from excessive sedation or overdose is greater than that with alcohol, and ether drinking is associated with damage to the stomach and gastrointestinal tract. Use of glue, paint and gasoline became more common after the 1950s. Model airplane glue-sniffing as problematic behavior among youth was first reported in 1959, and increased in the 1960s. Abuse of aerosol sprays became more common in the 1980s, as older propellants such as CFCs were phased out and replaced by more environmentally friendly compounds such as propane and butane. Most inhalant solvents and gases are not regulated under drug laws such as the United States' Controlled Substances Act. However, many US states and Canadian cities have placed restrictions on the sale of some solvent-containing products to minors, particularly for products widely associated with sniffing, such as model cement. The practice of inhaling such substances is sometimes colloquially referred to as huffing, sniffing (or glue sniffing), dusting, or chroming.
Australia has long faced a petrol (gasoline) sniffing problem in isolated and impoverished aboriginal communities. Although some sources argue that sniffing was introduced by United States servicemen stationed in the nation's Top End during World War II or through experimentation by 1940s-era Cobourg Peninsula sawmill workers, other sources claim that inhalant abuse (such as glue inhalation) emerged in Australia in the late 1960s. Chronic, heavy petrol sniffing appears to occur among remote, impoverished indigenous communities, where the ready accessibility of petrol has helped to make it a common substance for abuse.
In Australia, petrol sniffing now occurs widely throughout remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, Western Australia, northern parts of South Australia and Queensland. The number of people sniffing petrol goes up and down over time as young people experiment or sniff occasionally. "Boss", or chronic, sniffers may move in and out of communities; they are often responsible for encouraging young people to take it up.
A 1983 survey of 4,165 secondary students in New South Wales showed that solvents and aerosols ranked just after analgesics (e.g., codeine pills) and alcohol for drugs that were abused. This 1983 study did not find any common usage patterns or social class factors. The causes of death for inhalant users in Australia included pneumonia, cardiac failure/arrest, aspiration of vomit, and burns. In 1985, there were 14 communities in Central Australia reporting young people sniffing. In July 1997, it was estimated that there were around 200 young people sniffing petrol across 10 communities in Central Australia. Approximately 40 were classified as chronic sniffers. There have been reports of young Aboriginal people sniffing petrol in the urban areas around Darwin and Alice Springs.
In 2005, the Government of Australia and BP Australia began the usage of opal fuel in remote areas prone to petrol sniffing. Opal is a non-sniffable fuel (which is much less likely to cause a high) and has made a difference in some indigenous communities.
One of the early musical references to inhalant use occurs in the 1974 Elton John song "The Bitch Is Back", in the line "I get high in the evening sniffing pots of glue." Inhalant use, especially glue sniffing, is widely associated with the late-1970s punk youth subculture in the UK and North America. Raymond Cochrane and Douglas Carroll claim that when glue sniffing became widespread in the late 1970s, it was "adopted by punks because public [negative] perceptions of sniffing fitted in with their self-image" as rebels against societal values. While punks at first used inhalants "experimentally and as a cheap high, adult disgust and hostility [to the practice] encouraged punks to use glue sniffing as a way of shocking society." As well, using inhalants was a way of expressing their anti-corporatist DIY (do it yourself) credo; by using inexpensive household products as inhalants, punks did not have to purchase industrially manufactured liquor or beer.
One history of the punk subculture argues that "substance abuse was often referred to in the music and did become synonymous with the genre, glue sniffing especially" because the youths' "faith in the future had died and that the youth just didn't care anymore" due to the "awareness of the threat of nuclear war and a pervasive sense of doom." In a BBC interview with a person who was a punk in the late 1970s, they said that "there was a real fear of imminent nuclear war—people were sniffing glue knowing that it could kill them, but they didn't care because they believed that very soon everybody would be dead anyway."
A number of 1970s punk rock and 1980s hardcore punk songs refer to inhalant use. The Ramones, an influential early US punk band, referred to inhalant use in several of their songs. The song "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" describes adolescent boredom, and the song "Carbona not Glue" states, "My brain is stuck from shooting glue." An influential punk fanzine about the subculture and music took its name ("Sniffin' Glue") from the Ramones song. The 1980s punk band The Dead Milkmen wrote a song, "Life is Shit" from their album "Beelzebubba", about two friends hallucinating after sniffing glue. Punk-band-turned-hip-hop group the Beastie Boys penned a song "Hold it Now – Hit It", which includes the line "cause I'm beer drinkin, breath stinkin, sniffing glue." Pop punk band Sum 41 wrote a song, "Fat Lip", which refers to a character who does not "make sense from all the gas you be huffing..." The song "Lança-perfume", written and performed by Brazilian popstar Rita Lee, became a national hit in 1980. The song is about chloroethane and its widespread recreational sale and use during the rise of Brazil's carnivals.
Inhalants are referred to by bands from other genres, including several grunge bands—an early 1990s genre that was influenced by punk rock. The 1990s grunge band Nirvana, which was influenced by punk music, penned a song, "Dumb", in which Kurt Cobain sings "my heart is broke / But I have some glue/help me inhale / And mend it with you". L7, an all-female grunge band, penned a song titled "Scrap" about a skinhead who inhales spray-paint fumes until his mind "starts to gel". Also in the 1990s, the Britpop band Suede had a UK hit with their song "Animal Nitrate" whose title is a thinly veiled reference to amyl nitrite. The Beck song "Fume" from his "Fresh Meat and Old Slabs" release is about inhaling nitrous oxide. Another Beck song, "Cold Ass Fashion", contains the line "O.G. – Original Gluesniffer!" Primus's 1998 song "Lacquer Head" is about adolescents who use inhalants to get high. Hip hop performer Eminem wrote a song, "Bad Meets Evil", which refers to breathing "... ether in three lethal amounts." The Brian Jonestown Massacre, a retro-rock band from the 1990s, has a song "Hyperventilation", which is about sniffing model-airplane cement. Frank Zappa's song "Teenage Wind" from 1981 has a reference to glue sniffing: "Nothing left to do but get out the 'ol glue; Parents, parents; Sniff it good now..."
A number of films have depicted or referred to the use of solvent inhalants. In the 1980 comedy film "Airplane!", the character of McCroskey (Lloyd Bridges) refers to his inhalant use when he states, "I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue." In the 1996 film "Citizen Ruth", the character Ruth (Laura Dern), a homeless drifter, is depicted inhaling patio sealant from a paper bag in an alleyway. In the tragicomedy "Love Liza", the main character, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, plays a man who takes up building remote-controlled airplanes as a hobby to give him an excuse to sniff the fuel in the wake of his wife's suicide.
Harmony Korine's 1997 "Gummo" depicts adolescent boys inhaling contact cement for a high. Edet Belzberg's 2001 documentary "Children Underground" chronicles the lives of Romanian street children addicted to inhaling paint. In "The Basketball Diaries", a group of boys are huffing carbona cleaning liquid at 3 minutes and 27 seconds into the movie; further on, a boy is reading a diary describing the experience of sniffing the cleaning liquid.
In the David Lynch film "Blue Velvet", the bizarre and manipulative character played by Dennis Hopper uses a mask to inhale amyl nitrite. In "Little Shop of Horrors", Steve Martin's character dies from nitrous oxide inhalation. The 1999 independent film "Boys Don't Cry" depicts two young low-income women inhaling aerosol computer cleaner (compressed gas) for a buzz. In "The Cider House Rules", Michael Caine's character is addicted to inhaling ether vapors.
In "Thirteen", the main character, a teen, uses a can of aerosol computer cleaner to get high. In the action movie "Shooter", an ex-serviceman on the run from the law (Mark Wahlberg) inhales nitrous oxide gas from a number of Whip-It! whipped cream canisters until he becomes unconscious. The South African film "The Wooden Camera" also depicts the use of inhalants by one of the main characters, a homeless teen, and their use in terms of socio-economic stratification. The title characters in "Samson and Delilah" sniff petrol; in Samson's case, possibly causing brain damage.
In the 2004 film "Taxi", Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon are trapped in a room with a burst tank containing nitrous oxide. Queen Latifah's character curses at Fallon while they both laugh hysterically. Fallon's character asks if it is possible to die from nitrous oxide, to which Queen Latifah's character responds with "It's laughing gas, stupid!" Neither of them suffered any side effects other than their voices becoming much deeper while in the room.
In the French horror film "Them", (2006) a French couple living in Romania are pursued by a gang of street children who break into their home at night. Olivia Bonamy's character is later tortured and forced to inhale aurolac from a silver-colored bag. During a flashback scene in the 2001 film "Hannibal", Hannibal Lecter gets Mason Verger high on amyl nitrite poppers, then convinces Verger to cut off his own face and feed it to his dogs.
The science fiction story "Waterspider" by Philip K. Dick (first published in January 1964 in "If" magazine) contains a scene in which characters from the future are discussing the culture of the early 1950s. One character says: "You mean he sniffed what they called 'airplane dope'? He was a 'glue-sniffer'?", to which another character replies: "Hardly. That was a mania among adolescents and did not become widespread in fact until a decade later. No, I am speaking about imbibing alcohol."
The book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" describes how the two main characters inhale diethyl ether and amyl nitrite.
In the comedy series "Newman and Baddiel in Pieces", Rob Newman's inhaling gas from a foghorn was a running joke in the series. One episode of the "Jeremy Kyle Show" featured a woman with a 20-year butane gas addiction. In the series "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", Charlie Kelly has an addiction to huffing glue. Additionally, season nine episode 8 shows Dennis, Mac and Dee getting a can of gasoline to use as a solvent, but instead end up taking turns huffing from the canister.
A 2008 episode of the reality show "Intervention" (season 5, episode 9) featured Allison, who was addicted to huffing computer duster for the short-lived, psychoactive effects. Allison has since achieved a small but significant cult following among bloggers and YouTube users. Several remixes of scenes from Allison's episode can be found online. Since 2009, Allison has worked with drug and alcohol treatment centers in Los Angeles County. In the third episode of season 5 of "American Dad!", titled "Home Adrone", Roger asks an airline stewardess to bring him industrial adhesive and a plastic bag. In the seventh episode of the fourteenth season of South Park, Towelie, an anthropomorphic towel, develops an addiction to inhaling computer duster. In the show "Squidbilles", the main character Early Cuyler is often seen inhaling gas or other substances.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15501
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Iceman (Marvel Comics)
Iceman (Robert Louis Drake) is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics and is a founding member of the X-Men. Created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, the character first appeared in "The X-Men" #1 (September 1963).
Iceman is a mutant born with superhuman abilities. He has the ability to manipulate ice and cold by freezing water vapor around him. This allows him to freeze objects, as well as turn his body into ice.
The character received widespread media attention when it was revealed that he was gay in "All-New X-Men" #40. Iceman is notable for being one of the most prominent gay characters in comic books.
The character has been frequently present in X-Men and Spider-Man-related comics, video games, animated series, and movies. Shawn Ashmore portrayed Iceman in the "X-Men" films, and voices the character in "The Super Hero Squad Show".
Created by writer Stan Lee and artist/co-writer Jack Kirby, the character first appeared in "X-Men" #1 (September 1963). Lee later admitted that Iceman was created essentially as a copy of the Human Torch, only using the opposite element for his power.
Iceman was featured in two self-titled limited comic book miniseries, one in 1984–85 written by J. M. DeMatteis and another in the 2000s by Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett, with art by Karl Kerschl. DeMatteis said of the first series, "It was my idea, so there was no one to blame but myself. I'll just say that it was a mistake and if the series made any sense whatsoever it was due to [editor] Bob Budiansky. That was a case where the editor's input was really needed—and Bob was a big help."
A mainstay in most X-Men titles, Iceman has been a main character in both "Uncanny X-Men" and the second volume of "X-Men" and was also featured in "The Champions" from 1975 to 1978 and "The New Defenders" from 1983 to 1986 as a member. He was a main character in the first volume of "X-Factor", and a star in flashback stories when he was a teenager in "X-Men: The Hidden Years" and "X-Men: First Class".
In April 2015, in issue 40 of "All-New X-Men", a time-displaced version of the teenaged Iceman was revealed as gay by his teammate, Jean Grey, who discerned this with her telepathic ability. This raised questions, because the character's adult, present-day counterpart had previously been portrayed dating women. In "Uncanny X-Men" #600, which was published in November that year, the young Iceman confronts his older self, who confirms that he is gay as well but repressed his true self, not wanting to be both gay and a mutant. In 2017, Iceman received his first ongoing solo series, which focused on the adult Bobby Drake coming to terms with life as an out gay man, his Omega-level superpowers, his legacy as a hero and fighting some of the biggest villains in the Marvel Universe. The book had been cancelled, with its last issue being in early 2018. However, Marvel later reversed the decision and announced that a new book written by original writer Sina Grace will be a part of their Fresh Start initiative and will be released in 2019.
Robert Louis "Bobby" Drake was born in Floral Park, Long Island, New York, to William Robert Drake and Madeline Beatrice Bass-Drake. His father is Irish-American Catholic, and his mother is Jewish. Bobby's powers first manifested when he was on a date with Judy Harmon, and a local bully by the name of Rocky Beasely tried to take Judy away for himself. Knowing Judy could not put up a good fight, Bobby pointed his hand at Beasely and encased him in a block of ice. Later, the local townspeople, having heard of the incident, came looking for him in the form of an angry mob. The local sheriff had no choice but to put Bobby in jail for his own "protection". While Bobby sat in his cell at the sheriff station, the outer wall was blown open, and a young man named Scott Summers walked in and offered to take Bobby with him. After Bobby turned him down, the two mutants got into a short battle, which was soon ended by the arrival of Professor Charles Xavier.
After Xavier spoke with Bobby and his parents, Bobby's parents suggested that he go with Professor Xavier to his "school for gifted youngsters". Bobby took the suggestion and left with Professor Xavier and Cyclops to become the second member of the X-Men. He is later joined by Henry "Hank" McCoy, Jean Grey, and Warren Worthington III as the founding members of the X-Men. Drake remains self-conscious regarding the fact that he is the youngest member of the group. Appearing in his original snow covered form, he first battles Magneto along with the rest of the team, and later the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Bobby Drake's first girlfriend is Zelda. Not long after, he takes on a new ice-covered form. He then teams up with the Human Torch for the first time. The two would become close friends as time went on. With the X-Men, he visits the Savage Land and meets Ka-Zar for the first time. He then battles the Juggernaut, and is badly injured in his first battle against the Sentinels. He next battles Magneto by himself. Later, he visits Subterranea for the first time. Then, he and Beast battle the Maha Yogi. During his original stint with the X-Men, Drake pursues a relationship with Lorna Dane, although the relationship does not last. Iceman is among the original X-Men captured by Krakoa, leading to a new incarnation of X-Men of which he is not a member. With most of the original team, he quits the X-Men.
Iceman moves to the American west coast to attend UCLA and becomes a founding member of The Champions of Los Angeles. However, the Champions soon dissolve.
Iceman is then abducted by Master Mold, and alongside Angel, he encounters the Hulk. Iceman next aids the Thing in battling the Circus of Crime. Drake retires from life as a superhero to earn a college degree in accounting – but apparently at a college on the east coast, not UCLA. While in college, he briefly rejoins the X-Men to rescue the captives of Arcade's henchman, Miss Locke.
Iceman is reunited with Beast, encounters Cloud, and then returns as a full-time superhero in an incarnation of the Defenders alongside his former teammates, Angel and Beast. He also battles Professor Power's Secret Empire while with the Defenders. After the Defenders disband, Drake embarks on his career as an accountant.
Some time later, Iceman encounters Mirage, the "daughter" of Oblivion. Iceman journeys back in time and meets his parents before he was born, and battles Oblivion and Mirage. He then reconciles with his parents.
The original X-Men, including Iceman, reunite to form the superhero team X-Factor. With this new team, he encounters Apocalypse for the first time.
During his time with the team, Loki captures Bobby, hoping to use him to gain control over the Frost Giants. Loki enhances Bobby's powers and then extracts them to restore the size of the Frost Giants. Iceman is rescued by Thor. Loki's tampering increases Bobby's powers to such an extent that he begins to lose control of his abilities. During a later battle with the Right, he is fitted with a power-dampening belt which actually helps him control his abilities. Once able only to sheathe his own body in a protective coating of ice, Bobby finds he can encase the entirety of the Empire State Building. With time, Bobby gains sufficient control over his augmented powers and is able to stop using the inhibitor belt. Believing he has achieved his full potential, Bobby does not attempt to develop his abilities further.
With X-Factor, Bobby then defeats Apocalypse's Horsemen. Iceman helps watch over many of the younger superheroes, something he once was. Most notably, he and Beast help Boom Boom gain a more normal life. For a brief while, he also helps supervise the New Mutants and their sister team, the X-Terminators. They, in turn, save him from the deadly kiss of Infectia.
Bobby also develops a romantic relationship with Opal Tanaka. After a session of ice sledding, she discovers threatening mail in her mailbox, a precursor to harassment by her cybernetically-enhanced relatives of the Tatsu Clan of the Yakuza, which Bobby helps her out with.
After the "Muir Island Saga", Iceman rejoins the X-Men along with the rest of X-Factor.
When he rejoined the X-Men it seemed that he learned to control his powers and no longer needed the inhibitor belt, this made him believe he reached the limit of his powers. The X-Men were separated into two groups, Iceman was placed in the gold team, led by Storm, along with fellow original X-Men Jean Grey (now without a code name) and Archangel.
One day he took Opal to eat with his parents, however his dad began humiliating her because of her Japanese heritage. The four are attacked by the Cyber-Samurai, which added to William Drake's prejudices about the girl. When Bobby came across Mikhail Rasputin he used his mutant abilities on him. Bobby discovered that his potential was still far from being reached as he converted his body into ice, not just covered by it. By turning his entire body to ice, instead of just wearing an icy exterior, Bobby now was capable of using his power in new, aggressive ways, adding spikes and padding to his ice structure.
Too busy with the many threats that the X-Men faced every day, Bobby let his relationship with Opal deteriorate and, when they finally saw each other again after weeks, it was only to save her from an attack by mutant haters. Annoyed that she could only gain his attention by nearly getting killed, Opal broke off their relationship.
Later, as he was checking on Emma Frost who was in a comatose state after the mutant Trevor Fitzroy unleashed the mutant-hunting Sentinels on Emma Frost and her students known as the Hellions, the mansion was hit by an electricity breakdown. Emma woke up disoriented, possessed Bobby's mind, and used his powers in ways Bobby never had; she froze an entire river and traveled through water. She was looking for her pupils but after finding out they were dead, she left Bobby's body.
Bobby invites Rogue to tag along on a visit to his parents. Wrongly assuming a romantic relation, his father disapproves of Rogue, verbally attacking them with the same prejudices he expressed with Opal. This time, Bobby had enough and left after telling his father that he should just accept the fact that he is a mutant and he would never fit the definition he has of normal. He was upset that Emma exhibited greater control of his powers than he had. Since Rogue was having problems with Gambit, the two of them go on a road trip to ease their minds.
During the Legion Quest, Iceman was one of the X-Men who went back in time to stop Legion from killing Magneto. They succeed, but only partially. Legion does not kill Magneto, but instead accidentally murdered Xavier, his own father, years before Legion had been conceived much less born. This paradox caused the events of the Age of Apocalypse. At the last moment before the original reality ended, Iceman's fellow X-Men, Rogue and Gambit shared a kiss. When reality resumed, Rogue's mind-absorbing touch renders Gambit comatose. Having absorbed some secret haunting memories, she needs to get away from the X-Men and Iceman volunteers to join her on a road trip, though at the same time he was starting to see visions of Emma Frost. When Gambit awoke from his coma, he tracked them down and confronted Rogue about what she saw in his mind. She broke off their relationship, Iceman and Gambit returned to the X-Men.
When the entity known as Onslaught first appeared, Iceman was chosen as one of his test subjects, along with Storm, Cyclops and Wolverine. They were pitted against a servant of Onslaught named Post, in a specific battle area of harsh environment to test the extent of their abilities. They won and were returned to the mansion. However, Iceman's chest had been shattered in his ice form during battle, making it impossible to change back to human form. He confronted Emma Frost and demanded to know what she did to his powers in his body and how to save himself. She refused to help since she knew that Bobby would have to do it himself. When he captured her with his ice powers, she telepathically showed him his insecurities. By confronting Opal and his father in her simulation, Iceman realized that Emma was right and managed to transform back to his human body with his chest fully intact.
When Graydon Creed was running for President (with a heavy anti mutant campaign), Bobby was chosen to infiltrate in the campaign. His father stood out in a crowd and spoke in favor of the mutants, which came as a surprise to Bobby. His father's connection with Bobby was discovered, so the people that worked for Graydon captured him and almost beat him to death. Bobby decided to stay away from the X-Men for a while to be with his dad.
Zero Tolerance came across and Bobby found and helped Cecilia Reyes who was trying to keep a secret that she was a mutant. They also joined with Charlotte Jones and the morlock Marrow. After Bastion was defeated, he took Cecilia and Marrow to the mansion, and soon left the X-Men again for a while to be with his parents.
Much later, the X-Men found evidence in one of Destiny's journals of a group known as the Twelve, including Xavier, Magneto, Cyclops, Phoenix, Iceman, Polaris, Storm, Cable, Bishop, Sunfire, Mikhail Rasputin and the Living Monolith. They also learned that the Apocalypse's Horsemen had been kidnapping these mutants from around the globe. Iceman was captured in the woods near his home by Deathbird, who had become the Horseman War. Gathering the remaining Twelve, the X-Men traveled to Egypt and confronted Apocalypse and the Skrulls. Apocalypse and his forces captured all of the Twelve during the battle, using them in a ritual to give the Chaos-Bringer a new body and incredible power. Magneto and Polaris created opposite magnetic polarities, Iceman, Storm, and Sunfire provided elemental extremes, Cyclops, Phoenix, and Cable gave the sheer power of family, Xavier represented the power of mind and Bishop and Mikhail stood for time and space, while the Monolith linked all their energies together. Nate Grey was to be Apocalypse's new host, a powerhouse to store his massive lifeforce. The Twelve managed to free themselves and Cyclops sacrificed his own body and life force to keep Apocalypse from getting Nate. Though the new Apocalypse was defeated, Cyclops seemed lost forever.
After that incident, Iceman helped the Beast to secretly enter Genosha, as he wanted to study the legacy-infected mutates. When the High Evolutionary released his anti-mutation wave, they were trapped in the war-ravaged country. With the aid of Magneto, they escaped and joined forces with the rest of the scattered X-Men. They raided the Evolutionary's satellite, disabled the mutation field and defeated Sinister, who had been manipulating the Evolutionary.
Iceman was recruited by the living ship Prosh, along with other mutants, like Jean Grey, Mystique, Toad and Juggernaut, to preserve evolution and save it. In this journey Iceman developed his powers even further, which led him to no longer be afraid of the natural course of his powers and he returned to the X-Men. He joined a new team of X-Men, consisting of Angel, Nightcrawler, Wolverine and Chamber. He was using his abilities in a whole new way now, just channeling the power and not turning his body into ice.
During a heated battle with a recently evolved Black Tom Cassidy, he received a chest wound. After returning to normal his chest did not fully recover and some parts of it remained icy, and he was unable to return them to normal. At first he became afraid of it but in time it made him gain a new attitude in life, even rude at some times.
Nobody seemed to realize it at the time, but evidently this was an early sign of Iceman undergoing a secondary mutation of his own. When he repeatedly tried to evade his regular medical check-ups, school nurse Annie Ghazikhanian recognized that something odd was going on with him and pressured him to show her the wound. Bobby made her promise not to tell anyone and showed her that parts of his chest are now made of ice and he is unable to change them back to flesh and blood. Iceman wonders if he will entirely turn into ice on a permanent basis.
He developed an attitude that, to some of the newer addition to the X-Men, like Stacy X, Juggernaut and Northstar, he comes across as rather arrogant, denouncing their status as team members, as they have not been around as long as he. Iceman even went as far as offending Nightcrawler by claiming that only the original five, and no one else, has the right to call themselves an X-Man.
Bobby was further frustrated when Havok and Polaris announced their imminent wedding, him having carried a torch for Lorna for quite some time. In his frustration he turned to Annie, who had problems with the wedding too, as she was secretly in love with Havok. The nurse surprised him with the accusation of him being a racist – feeling comfortable as a mutant who could pass like a human when needed, opposed to being a fully obvious mutant or a "mere" human. With his secondary mutation manifesting, though, Iceman was in danger of losing this status. Shocked by the truth of her words, Bobby fully opened up about his fears, that as a man fully made of ice he could never feel the warmth of a physical relationship again. Touched, Annie allowed him to kiss her, but when Havok called off the wedding, wanting to be with Annie instead, she quickly dumped Bobby.
Upon encountering Azazel and his followers, Iceman's body is shattered from the neck down. Afterward, he regains his entire ice form, but cannot change back to his human appearance. As a result, Bobby becomes both bitter and despondent because of this drastic change.
Iceman joins Rogue's team after she tells him that she wants him as a member. Their first mission as a team is to fight a new threat, a powerful group known as the Children of the Vault. The team is successful and during this time, Bobby learns that he can be completely destroyed but then pull himself back together again. It was shown several times during the arc.
The next mission for the team was to locate a man called Pandemic and defeat him. The team was again successful, but Rogue was infected with a virus called Strain 88. Cable took the team, including Bobby, to his island so Rogue could get treatment.
While on Cable's island, the team and Iceman began working to defeat the Shi'ar weapon known as the Hecatomb. During the chaos, he shared a passionate kiss with Mystique. Even as he did so, he saved many lives by containing the explosion of the Conquistador, and, later, the Hecatomb itself.
As the team recovers from Hecatomb attack in Rogue's childhood home, it appears that Mystique and Iceman begin a romantic relationship. This was a front, as Mystique was using Iceman and the X-Men as a Marauder spy for Mister Sinister. Marauders soon infiltrated the house; they attempt to gain access to Destiny's Diaries on the order of Mr. Sinister (who has been gathering information about the future from anybody and anything that could foretell the future). Bobby and Cannonball escape from the Marauders in the X-Jet, with help from Emma Frost. They are pursued by Sunfire; they manage to get the better of him and take him prisoner, but not before he manages to cripple the jet. While Sunfire is unconscious, Iceman and Sam discuss the Mauraders' plan to eliminate all precognitive mutants and anyone with knowledge of the future as well as retrieving Destiny's Diaries before the Marauders can. During this time, Bobby displayed sub-atomic control of energy transfers when he prevented Sunfire from using his fire-based powers.
Cannonball and Bobby, telepathically prompted by Emma Frost, attempt to recover the diaries which are hidden in a dilapidated brewery. Mr. Sinister uses the reverse-engineered version of Xavier's Cerebro to track the pair of X-Men to the brewery. The Marauders attack Cannonball and Iceman and overtake them. Bobby, while in his ice form, suffers a gunshot wound from Mystique, which severs one of his arms above the elbow. Mister Sinister, who takes Cannonball prisoner, attempts to telepathically erase his mind so that the X-Men will find him as an empty shell. Iceman attacks Sinister, distracting him, which allows both of the X-Men to escape.
The New X-Men team decided to raid the headquarters of the Purifiers in Washington, D.C., but were forced to retreat. Pixie teleported them back to the mansion in a rush, but the entire team was scattered between D.C. and Westchester. Iceman, after recovering from his injuries, volunteered to go look for them and was given telepathic directions by Emma Frost.
Iceman was successful in finding the New X-Men, most of them injured. On the way back, they found that the O*N*E* Sentinels guarding the Xavier Institute had become infected by nano-Sentinels and attacked the school. Iceman and New X-Man X-23 helped out in the battle with the O*N*E* Sentinels. With the help of Dust and X-23, the X-Men were able to survive this battle but the nano-Sentinel infected human escaped.
Soon, Iceman participated in the final battle against the Marauders, the Acolytes, and Predator X. He was one of the X-Men who came running in to fight Predator X after it swallowed Wolverine whole. However, he also witnesses his mentor, Professor Xavier, "killed" by Bishop's bullet, which was not meant for him.
Iceman arrives in San Francisco, where he was set to meet Hepzibah, Warpath, and Angel. All four are caught in the effects of a citywide illusion created by Martinique Jason, who used her powers to transform the city into a hippie paradise. Now calling himself "Frosty", he and the others are sent by Martinique to confront Scott Summers and Emma Frost. Emma Frost is able to break up the illusion and free everyone. They eventually set up their base of operations in San Francisco as X-Men.
Iceman is one of the X-Men that assists in fighting the Skrull invasion in San Francisco.
Iceman rescues Colossus from Venom and is later made a part of a team to battle Emma Frost's Dark X-Men. During the final battle on Utopia, Iceman teams up with the X-Students to take on Mimic. Iceman had the labor of providing water to the population. He attempted to use humor to keep everyone's spirits up even though he believed that the situation was helpless and that the X-Men were living in the last days of mutantkind. Bobby then helped defeat Predator X and also helped stop Selene's resurrected army's invasion of Utopia.
During the battle with Bastion's Nimrod Sentinels, Iceman is severely injured following an attack from one of them that reversed his ice form and left him with burns on his body. He is only there for a short time because his mutant powers help him minimize the injuries he suffered and he is seen back in battle alongside Psylocke and the other X-Men.
Early solicitations show that after Wolverine and Cyclops have a major falling out, Wolverine decides to branch off and open "The Jean Grey School for Higher Learning" back in New York. Iceman is the first person Wolverine approaches and recruits to his new X-Men squad as both a professor and teammate. Iceman is chosen because Wolverine feels he has the kind of spirit the new school needs. He also has an off-and-on romantic relationship with Kitty Pryde.
When the Terrigen became toxic for mutants, Iceman was one of the recruits in Storm's new team dedicated to protecting mutants from the Terrigen by leading them to X-haven. Iceman mostly works alongside Nightcrawler, helping him search for Colossus after he is transformed into one of Apocalypse's new horsemen. Iceman and Nightcrawler manage to track Colossus to Egypt, where he ambushes them and almost kills them until another squad of X-Men comes in to help. After that Iceman joins the X-Men when they declare war against the Inhumans after discovering that in a matter of weeks the Terrigen will render earth as completely uninhabitable for mutants.
Iceman is one of the few heroes summoned by Mr. Fantastic to help the Future Foundation against the villainous being known as the Griever. However, Iceman is not one of the few heroes who were part of Fantastic Four's expanded members, when one of the original four, Human Torch noticed his presence during the battle. Iceman claims that he was with the Fantastic Four in an "untold story" during the Atlantean's past invasion led by Namor, but Human Torch replies that story Iceman made-up was "not-canon".
After being outed as gay by the time-displaced Jean Grey, the younger time-displaced Iceman confronts his older self, asking him why he has been presenting as straight for most of his adult life. The older Bobby breaks down and admits that he has known he was gay for a long time but forcibly repressed that part of himself, fearful of how others would react. He further acknowledges that he was scared to reveal his true self to the world due to already facing prejudice for being a mutant and not wanting to receive hatred for another part of himself. Following all of this, Bobby decides to take a break from the limelight and focus on himself, declining to join the new X-team formed by Kitty Pryde, instead acting as a reserve member and teaching classes at the Xavier School. After a training session with his younger self, Bobby sees the time-displaced Iceman head out for a date with his boyfriend Romeo while he tries to set up an online dating profile to meet guys. He receives a text from his mother stating that his father has had a heart attack so Bobby rushes to the hospital only to be chastises by his father for missing family events due to his commitments as a superhero. Following a brief battle in the hospital, Bobby's parents ask him to leave, angry that their mutant son is bringing yet more trouble into their lives. On a mission with Kitty to rescue a new mutant, she confronts Bobby about being gay, asking why he could not tell her himself, meaning she had to find out from a secondary source. She reassures him that she only wants to help him and lets him know she is there if he ever wants to talk but suggests he should come out to his parents. Bobby arranges dinner with his family but he is constantly subjected anti-mutant rhetoric from his parents. The dinner is interrupted by a gang of Purifiers but, although Iceman takes them down quickly and the lives of his parents, they are angry that their house has been destroyed because of him and send him away (although his mother promises to try and convince his father to visit him at the X-Mansion. When the mutant that he and Kitty rescues goes missing, Iceman tracks him to a nearby nightclub where he discovers that Daken is responsible for luring him away. Daken tries to flirt with Bobby to distract him but Iceman freezes him and attempts to convince the mutant to return to the Xavier School, though he refuses. Daken mocks Bobby, saying that he can smell his fear and insecurity. Upon returning, Kitty surprises Bobby by revealing that his parents have arrived for a visit. He tells them he is gay and they both react negatively, angry that their son is both a mutant and a gay man. They chastise him for letting everyone else find out before them and try to convince him that he is straight, due to having been with women in the past. The family argument is interrupted by Juggernaut, who attacks the school looking for the young X-Men. Iceman defeats him by pushing his powers and returns to the mansion to find his father is still there. He had obtained Bobby's draft of a coming out letter from Kitty and the two men begin to reconcile.
Bobby reconnects with his former Champions teammates, Angel, Hercules, Ghost Rider and Darkstar, so they reminisce about their time with Black Widow. Bobby runs into a guy, Judah, while out shopping and he agrees to meet him that night at a local gay bar, with the rest of the Champions acting as his wingmen. The date appears to be going well but is interrupted by an attack by some Sentinels. Bobby's relationship with Judah continues to develop and he decides to move to L.A. to be closer to him. While fighting Pyro with his younger self, Bobby explains that his mother has finally made contact with him for the first time since he came out and that she wants to invite both of them to dinner. Time-displaced Iceman agrees on the condition that Bobby tries to talk sense into Romeo, who hasn't called him in weeks. Meanwhile, Daken begins training his new mutant protégée for a secret mission. When both the younger Bobby and the older Bobby arrive at the restaurant, their parents see the younger Bobby as a chance to raise a new son in a way that suits them but the time-displaced Iceman refuses, saying that he is still gay and wants to live life on his own terms before they both storm out. During Bobby's moving away party at the X-Mansion, Daken uses the Purifiers to distract the other X-Men while he and his apprentice infiltrate the school and ambush Bobby. The young mutant uses his levelled-up powers to increase Daken's strength by turning him into Apocalypse's horseman Death and he mortally wounds Judah with his claws before engaging Iceman in combat. Bobby manages to defeat Daken with a kiss which freezes Death's powers but Daken escapes and Judah breaks up with Bobby because his life is too much for him to deal with.
After teaming with Bishop to help the Morlocks who came under threat by Mister Sinister, Bobby finds himself approached by Emma Frost who asks him for his help. Ignoring Kitty's protests, he agrees and Emma explains that her Father, who subjected her brother Christian to conversion therapy before having him institutionalized, has recently let him out and reinstalled him as the new heir to the Frost business empire. When they arrive, they discover that Christian has murdered their Father and is exhibiting his own powers. Bobby and Emma help to free Christian from his mental breakdown and Emma decides to stay with him. Joining with his friends Spider-Man and Firestar, Bobby discovers that Sinister was behind the attack on the Morlocks and confronts him in his safehouse. Sinister, intent on trying to unlock the secrets of Iceman's DNA by dissecting him, sends forth an army of experimental ice creatures but Bobby's Omega Level powers absorb them all into him and he fires Mister Sinister into space. Celebrating his birthday, Bobby is confronted by Ice Wizard, a future version of himself from an alternate timeline. Ice Wizard warns Bobby that he must quit the X-Men and stop using his powers to avoid a world-destroying series of events happening. He explains that Daken seduces him and manipulates him into sacrificing the other X-Men before betraying him and gaining Thanos-level powers. Bobby is adamant that this won't happen and the two engage in battle. Jean Grey arrives and Bobby finally confronts her for the actions of her younger self when she outed him. Bobby explains to Ice Wizard that he is going to live life on his terms and that nobody, not even his future self, is going to decide for him. Bobby returns to his birthday celebration where Christian arrives and hands him a large sum of money which Bobby gives to the Morlocks. A content Bobby messages Judah, asking if he would like to meet up as friends.
Following the war with the Phoenix Five, as Cyclops begins to lash out against government oppression of mutants, a chance comment by Bobby about how the old Cyclops wouldn't tolerate what he is currently doing inspires Beast to travel back in time and recruit to stop Cyclops. The team decides to stay in the present instead of returning into the past. They are now called the All-New X-Men and led by Kitty Pryde. The past and present Bobby are particularly shocked when they see each other. The younger Bobby is especially shocked by the older Bobby's Omega level powers, like creating ice golems, and especially his future "Ice Wizard" self in the Battle of the Atom. Eventually he and the All-New X-Men and the Guardians of the Galaxy travel to the Shiar Empire to rescue Jean Grey from a trial for the genocide that her future Dark Phoenix self committed. The team is then teleported into the Ultimate Marvel universe, where he stumbles into Mole Man's lair. He proudly creates his first ice golem in order to escape.
Returning to their universe, the team are reunited with Cyclops when they are called upon to aid the Guardians of the Galaxy again in retrieving the fabled Black Vortex. Cyclops, Iceman and Groot become superpowered by the Vortex before returning it to Captain Marvel.
Later, the younger, time-displaced Bobby is forced to confront being gay by his teammate, Jean, who privately asks him why he calls women "hot", when she knows via her psychic abilities that he is gay. This causes the younger Bobby to speculate as to the complicated identity issues faced by his older self and the decisions his older self may have made in the time between them. Together with the young Jean, the young Bobby confronts his older self, who admits to being gay, having 'concealed' that part of himself so that he could have avoid being prejudiced against for another part of himself.
Bobby joins the time-displaced Cyclops, Angel and Beast, as well as Kid Apocalypse, All-New Wolverine and Oya as they road-trip around America trying to make their own mark on the world. Bobby is initially reluctant to talk about his sexuality with his teammates until Oya and Kid Apocalypse take him to a gay club in an attempt to make him more comfortable. He embarrasses himself and runs into Romeo, an Inhuman with the ability to manipulate and feel others' emotions. Romeo makes Bobby more comfortable and the two begin a relationship. The two are later caught in the middle when the X-Men declare war on the Inhumans. Bobby joins the X-Men when they attack New Attilan but quickly breaks off from the battle to find Romeo, with the two escaping together.
After the X-Men's war against the Inhumans for the Terrigen ends, Iceman joins the rest of the young X-Men on an attempted return to their original timeline but they quickly realize that theirs isn't part of the Earth 616 timeline, leaving them stuck in that present time with no knowledge where they were originally from. Upon learning this, Iceman joins the rest of the young X-Men and leaves the rest of the X-Men to find their place in the world. Iceman then joins Magneto in Madripoor along with the rest of the time-displaced X-Men; however, due to a lack of trust in their new leader, the X-Men make plans and train in case Magneto returns to his former villainous ways to kill them. Instead of training with his teammates, Iceman spends most of his time trying to reach out to his new Inhuman boyfriend Romeo unsuccessfully, placing him into a stupor.
Iceman possesses the power to instantly decrease the temperature of ambient water vapor in his immediate environment to below zero degrees Celsius, thereby freezing it into ice. He is able to make ice that will not break unless he wills it to. In this manner he is able to quickly form a great variety of ice structures, including projectiles, shields, ladders, baseball bats, etc. Iceman often makes ice slides which form rapidly beneath and behind his feet, moving him along the slick surface at high speeds. He is also able to form exceedingly complicated structures within relative short time, such as miniature cities. Originally, Iceman's own body temperature would lower dramatically when his powers were active, reaching within a few tenths of a second (now his body usually converts to organic ice; see below). Iceman is immune to sub-zero temperatures; he is also able to perceive the thermal energy level of objects around him. Because cold is the absence of heat, Iceman does not actually 'emanate' cold; rather, he decreases thermal energy. As mentioned by writer Mike Carey, Iceman is "an Omega-level mutant ... [and] has powers that can influence the ecosystem of the entire world." Iceman has yet to tap into his full mutant potential, but over the years he has taken more interest in developing his abilities.
In his early appearances, Iceman generally covered his body in a thick layer of what appeared to be snow; hence he looked more like a traditional snowman than an ice-man. Upon further training in the use of his powers, he was able to fashion an armor of solid ice around his body when using his powers, which afforded him some degree of protection against concussive force and projectiles. Later on, he manifested the ability to convert the tissue of his body into organic ice. He sometimes augments his organic ice form with razor sharp adornments to his shoulders, elbows, knees, and fists. Iceman has also been able to move rapidly to another distant location while in his organic ice form, being able to deposit his bodily mass into a river and reconstitute his entire mass a great distance away in a matter of minutes (by temporarily merging his molecules with those of the river). On one occasion, Iceman suffered a severe chest injury while in his ice form and was able to heal himself by converting back into his normal human form.
Iceman is also able to reconstitute his organic ice form if any part of it is damaged, or even if it is completely shattered, without permanently harming himself. He can temporarily add the mass of a body of water to his own, increasing his mass, size, and strength. He can survive not only as ice, but as liquid water and water vapor. He can also transform his body from a gaseous state back to a solid, although it is physically and mentally taxing. Iceman can also freeze sea water, as seen during the "" story arc. While he usually does not use his powers in lethal ways, his powers are so vast that they extend to the molecular level, to the point that he can freeze all of the molecules of an object/being with a thought; he once froze every single molecule of water within the body of David Haller. Iceman is also able to dissolve his own icy constructs.
Iceman's powers were pushed to their limit while possessed by Emma Frost, who used Iceman to discover the fate of her Hellions. During this time Iceman was able to control all forms of moisture, freeze fluids inside people's bodies, travel as a liquid, solid or gas. Not even the combined might of the X-Men Gold team was able to stop Emma Frost in Iceman's body. Following this, Bobby confronted Emma about how she was able to use his powers so effectively. While together they made some initial progress, she refused to train him further. Instead he turned to Storm because they share similar elemental powers and she agreed to tutor him.
When Iceman was injected with Mister Sinister's neuro-inhibiter by Mystique, he was able to save himself by drawing in all of the ambient moisture around him, rapidly replacing his poisoned cells with healthy material before the injection could kill him.
During the 2013–2014 "Battle of the Atom" storyline, Iceman's future self revealed that he has the ability to create semi-independent ice structures that can act on their own, although one of these structures—demonstrating a Hulk-like physique and intellect—has gone on to join the future version of the Brotherhood.
Aside from his superhuman powers, Iceman is also a fair hand-to-hand combatant, and received combat training at Xavier's School as well as coaching from the Black Widow and Hercules while serving with the Champions of Los Angeles. Iceman has taken as much combat training as Cyclops or Beast.
According to writer Mike Carey "one of Iceman's best personality traits is that emotionally Bobby Drake is like the ice he manipulates—not cold but transparent. 'He's devastatingly honest. He is very up-front with his emotions and his thoughts all the time.'" "Also, he's obviously incredibly brave both in terms of facing external, physical danger as well as facing up to unpleasant situations and admitting his own mistakes."
Iceman had a brief relationship with a Japanese-American New Yorker named Opal Tanaka. He subsequently exhibited strong feelings for his fellow X-Man Polaris, but she did not return those feelings, due to her feelings towards Havok. Northstar developed an unrequited crush for Iceman during their time on the same team, though Iceman never did find out about this. Iceman later had a brief relationship with the Xavier School's nurse, Annie, but she eventually left him for Havok, who had just left Polaris at the altar. When Iceman attempted to rekindle his relationship with Polaris, that too ended abruptly, and Polaris returned to Havok. Iceman then had a relationship with the X-Men's enemy Mystique, who later betrayed him, despite her continued fixation on him, in as much as she stated that she would either kill him or cure him of his personal uncertainty.
Iceman has long-lasting friendships with Spider-Man, Firestar and the Human Torch.
In "All-New X-Men" #40, the time-displaced Iceman is revealed to be gay, which eventually forces the youth to confront the adult version of himself about the matter. As both speak, the adult Iceman confirms the fact and that he had put all his energy into just being an X-Man as he couldn't cope with being a mutant and gay simultaneously. With the help of his younger self and Jean Grey, however, he finally comes to terms with his own sexuality, and comes out to fellow gay X-Man Anole in "Extraordinary X-Men" #6. The end of the Extermination X-Men event saw the redirecting of the time displaced version of Bobby back into the "closet" when he returned to his original timeline alongside the other X-Men, due to a mind lock by Jean Grey, even though the current version retains his memories and remains an out gay man.
Iceman is Roberto Trefusis in the miniseries "Marvel 1602", a member of the group of "witchbreeds" founded by Carlos Javier and led by Scotius Summerisle. He is the nephew of naval commander Sir Francis Drake. As in the Marvel Universe, he generates ice and can assume a physical ice form.
In the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, Bobby, along with the rest of the X-Men, is trained by Magneto. Because Magneto is harder on his students than Professor X, Bobby lacks his 616-counterpart's sense of humor. Instead, Bobby becomes very cold and inhuman, making his teammates feel uncomfortable. In addition to his normal abilities, Bobby is capable of breaking down his body and merging it with another body of water to travel great distances in a matter of seconds. He can bring others along through a process that he calls "moisture molecular inversion", though it is a painful process for the passengers. Bobby is also able to reconstitute his body from broken pieces. Just before Apocalypse's defeat, Colossus stormed right through Iceman, causing him to fall into pieces in an attempt to reach his sister. A couple of months later, Iceman, Exodus, Wild Child, and Morph were sent on a secret mission by Magneto; for a time, only Wild Child's fate was revealed.
Iceman returned in the "Uncanny X-Force" arc "The Dark Angel Saga", when the title team was forced to travel to the AoA reality. He abandoned the X-Men during a battle with the minions of Weapon X, who had by this time been transformed into that world's new Apocalypse, a defection later revealed to be the result of Iceman's having lost faith in his X-Men's ability to save their world. He was soon brought to Earth-616 by the Dark Beast, where he joined forces with Archangel on his quest to eradicate all life on Earth so he could create a new evolution process. Tired of seeing the people he cared about being killed fighting what he thought to be an unwinnable war, Drake agreed to help Archangel – despite the latter's now being the mainstream Marvel Universe's version of Drake's X-Men's arch-enemy, Apocalypse – in exchange for transport to the relative paradise that was Earth-616.
After X-Force defeated Archangel, Bobby managed to escape with McCoy and most of Archangel's other minions, but eventually broke away from them and went into hiding, living a life of hedonistic bliss in Madripoor. The "Age of Apocalypse" version of Nightcrawler – who, after being brought to Earth-616 along with the rest of his world's X-Men to help take down Archangel, decided to stay behind there in order to track down and kill the various villains who also came to the mainstream Marvel Universe – eventually tracked Bobby down to execute him for his treason. Nightcrawler is quickly overwhelmed by Drake's avatars, but eventually forces Iceman into a factory boiler room, where there's not enough moisture in the air for him to effectively use his powers. Nightcrawler quickly disables his former friend, and shoves him into an incinerator, killing the once noble hero.
During the miniseries "Earth X", Bobby had become trapped in his ice form, making him vulnerable to melting. He moves to the Arctic regions of Earth, and made an ice city for himself and the Inuit. Due to a series of events where Earth's orbital path moves, Bobby is able to return to the United States to aid in the battle against the demon Mephisto.
In the alternate timeline of the "House of M" storyline, Iceman was seen in Magneto's army during his rise to power. Bobby later appears as one of the Horsemen of Apocalypse because Apocalypse rescued Bobby from a mutant internment camp that his parents had sent him to. Magneto sends Apocalypse to dispose of his rival Black Panther; when Apocalypse is attacked en route by Black Panther's allies, Iceman aids him by freezing Namor solid and attempting to attack Storm, but he is severely injured by Sunfire.
A zombified Iceman appears in "Marvel Zombies: Dead Days" alongside zombies Wolverine and Cyclops. Ultimately, he is seen attacking Magneto. But Iceman perished at the hands of the Master Of Magnetism himself when Iceman is cut apart.
In the Mutant X universe, the Asgardian god Loki amplified Bobby's powers to a dangerous level, leaving him unable to touch any living thing without killing it. Despite this, he retains a jovial and optimistic personality. When Havok has a disagreement with Magneto and decides to leave the X-Men, Ice-Man is one of those who follow him, becoming a founding member of the Six, who eventually come to be considered the world's premiere mutant team.
After the New Exiles land on the world of warring empires, they encounter Dame Emma Frost, head of Britain's Department X and founder of Force-X. This team includes Roberta "Bobby" Drake, a female version of Bobby who is code named Aurion and displays ice-based abilities.
In the alternate future witnessed in the "Battle of the Atom" storyline, Iceman's had truly evolved to become Sir Robert, the wizard-like Icemaster. As one of the most respected X-Men, he had incredible control over his powers and could even grow a beard! Though never outright mentioned, he may had a relationship with Kitty Pryde and even fathered a son with her, denoting the existence of Carmen Drake, a boy with the powers of both Iceman and Shadowcat. He has also developed the ability to create semi-independent ice structures that can act on their own, although one of these structures, possessing a Hulk-like physique and intellect, has gone on to join the future version of the Brotherhood, resulting in the Brotherhood using the duplicate to reinforce the illusion of themselves as the future X-Men. The duplicate Iceman was defeated by the O5 Iceman, the present Iceman, and the future Iceman during the battle in the past (Prompting the youngest Iceman to note that they only needed one more Iceman for a five-a-side basketball team).
Icemaster later returned to the mainstream marvel universe and confronts Iceman about trusts and decisions. He does it in order to prevent him from doing the same mistakes Icemaster did in the future. Knowing he had little time left, Icemaster eventually revealed to Iceman that after beginning a relationship with Daken, they both led the X-Men to space in order to prevent the Shi'ar from overwhelm the Earth and lay waste to it. However Icemaster would discover that Daken's plan was actually to obtain the M'Kraan Crystal in the first place, killing in the process the other X-Men and later Deathbird herself. Icemaster attempts to stop Daken, but he is seconds too late as having the Nexus of all Realities made Daken a Thanos-level player in the cosmos, and he acted as such. Icemaster eventually became convinced, after seeing Bobby's character growth, that his present self had matured beyond what he remembered, leaving the future open for new decisions to be made. With his mission apparently completed, Icemaster turns into thin air soon afterwards.
In the alternate reality of "X-Men: Ronin" Iceman is a murderous ninja in the employ of the Hellfire Club. He works with Pyro and Avalanche as part of the 'Shadowcat Clan' and battles the X-Men.
New Excalibur battles an evil counterpart of Iceman, who is a member of the Shadow-X, the X-Men of an alternate reality in which Professor X was possessed by the Shadow King. They are brought to Earth-616 as a result of M-Day. He appeared to be mute and died during the final battle against Albion.
In "Edge of Spider-verse: Web of Fear", a Spider-Man who is a member of the Captain Britain Corps witnesses Morlun about to kill Spider-Man. Later, a larger picture is shown of Firestar and Iceman lying dead, with Ms. Lion being left out, mourning her comrades.
Iceman appears in "X-Men Noir" as one of the X Men, a crew of talented criminals. He is depicted as being very short-tempered and paranoid. He is dubbed "Iceman", and angrily insists others refer to him that way, due to his custom of using an icepick as a weapon.
In the Ultimate Marvel continuity, Bobby Drake is the youngest founding member of the X-Men. He ran away from his family at the peak of government-supported Sentinel attacks, fearing his family would be killed in such an attack.
Ultimate Iceman never had the snowman look of his counterpart, instead generating a flexible ice armor from the beginning. Bobby establishes himself as a valuable asset, single-handedly taking out the Ultimates once with a gigantic ice wall ("see Ultimate War"), as well as single-handedly halting an invasion by Colonel Wraith and Weapon X. He was only able to be stopped by Rogue, who was in temporary possession of Marvel Girl's telepathy. Professor X has stated that Bobby is one of the three most powerful X-Men. During the "World Tour" arc, after enlarging his armor to form a gigantic ice troll, Bobby is greatly injured by Proteus, which resulted in a lawsuit issued by his parents against Xavier. Bobby eventually rebels against his parents, and later returns to the X-Men.
While Bobby was away from the X-Men on a vacation, he had a girlfriend, but Professor Xavier erased all memories of her from Bobby's mind when he told her too much about the X-Men (he presumably also erased the girl's memories). Upon her acceptance into the X-Men, Bobby begins to date Rogue. The pair date for a considerable amount of time, but eventually break up due to Bobby's growing feelings for Shadowcat and Rogue's feelings for Gambit. Eventually Rogue leaves, and Bobby starts to date Kitty. After this, the two rekindle their relationship, but problems erupted.
In "Ultimate X-Men" #80, Bishop and Hammer, time-travelers from the future, comment on how powerful Bobby will one day become. Cyclops disbanded the X-Men in "Ultimate X-Men" #81 and Bishop and Storm created a new team. Iceman stayed at the Institute as a student only until Xavier returned and reformed his X-Men.
Professor X is later revealed to be alive and the X-Men return to the Xavier Institute, which is also when Iceman rejoins the X-Men line up. Jean Grey soon discovers that fellow X-Man, Colossus, is using a drug called Banshee to enhance his mutant abilities. The X-Men are highly against this, but Colossus manages to convince Rogue, Dazzler, Angel, Nightcrawler, and Cyclops to join him on his own X-Men team. Iceman remains on Professor X's drug-free X-Men and fights the Banshee enhanced X-Men. Xavier's X-Men win and the two teams combine again with nobody using drugs.
The Ultimatum Wave hits the X-Men next killing several of the X-Men (Beast, Dazzler, and Nightcrawler). Magneto and the Brotherhood attack the world and Iceman helps the world's heroes fight them off. Most of the X-Men die, but Iceman (alongside Rogue, Storm, Colossus, and Jean Grey) is able to survive Magneto's attack. He is last seen demolishing the X-Mansion alongside Rogue and Jean Grey and burying the deceased X-Men in its place. He finds it hard to destroy their home, but he feels it to be the right thing to do now that Professor Xavier is dead.
Later, Bobby Drake is kicked out of his home for being a mutant. With nowhere else to go, Kitty suggests to Peter Parkers' Aunt May that he move in with her, Peter, Gwen Stacy, and Johnny Storm (who also recently moved in their household). Aunt May agrees and enrolls Bobby at Midtown High under the guise of Bobby Parker, one of Peters' cousins and shaves his hair off to help keep his, Peter's and Johnny's secret identities safe.
Without knowing where to go after Peter's death, Bobby Drake asked Kitty Pride if Johnny could come with them searching for a place where to live and hide from authorities. They found the Morlock Tunnels where they live now and help mutants in danger. Firstly they rescued Rogue, who joined them, and later Jimmy Hudson (the son of Wolverine), came to them for help after escaping Stryker's imprisonment along with other mutants he freed.
In "X-Men Fairy Tales" (issue #1), Iceman appears as a white wolf with icy breath named Kori (Japanese for ice). Before he is reached by , he appears to have lost faith in friendship.
In "", Iceman appears as one of the instrumental characters in the defeat of Cassandra Nova and Khan and one of the few surviving X-Men.
In the films, "X-Men", "X2", "", and "", he is played by Shawn Ashmore. Bobby is one of the first students to reach out to Rogue and begins a romantic relationship with her. In "X2", he has an uneasy friendship/rivalry with Pyro. His relationship with his family is also strained, and his brother actually turns Bobby in to the police out of jealousy. In "X-Men: The Last Stand", his relationship with Rogue appears to be deteriorating, strained by their inability to have physical contact and by his close friendship with Kitty Pryde. During a battle with Pyro, now working for Magneto's Brotherhood, he achieves the ability to transform into his ice form from the comics. In the original dystopian timeline of "", Iceman is more powerful, transforming into ice and travelling on ice slides, but is nevertheless killed while fighting the Sentinels. After Kitty and Wolverine change the timeline, Iceman is seen once again in a relationship with Rogue at the Xavier Mansion. Bobby's scenes vary in the "Days of Future Past" known as "The Rogue Cut", where he is killed by Sentinels while helping Rogue and Magneto to escape.
In the novelization for "X-Men: The Last Stand", Iceman saves Pyro from the destruction of The Dark Phoenix Saga.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15505
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Isidore of Seville
Isidore of Seville (; ; Cartagena, c. 560 – Seville, 4 April 636), was a scholar and, for over three decades, Archbishop of Seville. He is widely regarded, in the oft-quoted words of the 19th-century historian Montalembert, as "the last scholar of the ancient world."
At a time of disintegration of classical culture, and aristocratic violence and illiteracy, he was involved in the conversion of the Arian Visigothic kings to Catholicism, both assisting his brother Leander of Seville, and continuing after his brother's death. He was influential in the inner circle of Sisebut, Visigothic king of Hispania. Like Leander, he played a prominent role in the Councils of Toledo and Seville. The Visigothic legislation that resulted from these councils influenced the beginnings of representative government.
His fame after his death was based on his "Etymologiae", an etymological encyclopedia which assembled extracts of many books from classical antiquity that would have otherwise been lost.
Isidore was born in Cartagena, Spain, a former Carthaginian colony, to Severianus and Theodora. Both Severianus and Theodora belonged to notable Hispano-Roman families of high social rank. His parents were members of an influential family who were instrumental in the political-religious maneuvering that converted the Visigothic kings from Arianism to Catholicism. The Catholic Church celebrates him and all his siblings as known saints:
Isidore received his elementary education in the Cathedral school of Seville. In this institution, the first of its kind in Iberia, a body of learned men including Archbishop Leander of Seville taught the trivium and quadrivium, the classic liberal arts. Isidore applied himself to study diligently enough that he quickly mastered Latin, and acquired some Greek, and Hebrew.
Two centuries of Gothic control of Iberia incrementally suppressed the ancient institutions, classic learning, and manners of the Roman Empire. The associated culture entered a period of long-term decline. The ruling Visigoths nevertheless showed some respect for the outward trappings of Roman culture. Arianism meanwhile took deep root among the Visigoths as the form of Christianity that they received.
Scholars may debate whether Isidore ever personally embraced monastic life or affiliated with any religious order, but he undoubtedly esteemed the monks highly.
After the death of Leander of Seville on 13 March 600 or 601, Isidore succeeded to the See of Seville. On his elevation to the episcopate, he immediately constituted himself as the protector of monks.
Isidore recognized that the spiritual and material welfare of the people of his See depended on the assimilation of remnant Roman and ruling barbarian cultures, and consequently attempted to weld the peoples and subcultures of the Visigothic kingdom into a united nation. He used all available religious resources toward this end and succeeded. Isidore practically eradicated the heresy of Arianism and completely stifled the new heresy of Acephali at its very outset. Archbishop Isidore strengthened religious discipline throughout his See.
Archbishop Isidore also used resources of education to counteract increasingly influential Gothic barbarism throughout his episcopal jurisdiction. His quickening spirit animated the educational movement centered on Seville. Isidore introduced Aristotle to his countrymen long before the Arabs studied Greek philosophy extensively.
In 619, Isidore of Seville pronounced anathema against any ecclesiastic who in any way should molest the monasteries.
Isidore presided over the Second Council of Seville, begun on 13 November 619, in the reign of King Sisebut, a provincial council attended by eight other bishops, all from the ecclesiastical province of Baetica in southern Spain. The Acts of the Council fully set forth the nature of Christ, countering the conceptions of Gregory, a Syrian representing the heretical Acephali.
Based on a few surviving canons found in the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, Isidore is known to have presided over an additional provincial council around 624.
The council dealt with a conflict over the See of Écija, and wrongfully stripped bishop Martianus of his see, a situation that was rectified by the Fourth Council of Toledo. It also addressed a concern over Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity by Sisebut failing to present their children for baptism.
The records of the council, unlike the First and Second Councils of Seville were not preserved in the Hispana, a collection of canons and decretals likely edited by Isidore himself.
All bishops of Hispania attended the Fourth National Council of Toledo, begun on 5 December 633. The aged Archbishop Isidore presided over its deliberations and originated most enactments of the council.
Through Isidore's influence, this Council of Toledo promulgated a decree, commanding all bishops to establish seminaries in their cathedral cities along the lines of the cathedral school at Seville, which had educated Isidore decades earlier. The decree prescribed the study of Greek, Hebrew, and the liberal arts and encouraged interest in law and medicine. The authority of the Council made this education policy obligatory upon all bishops of the Kingdom of the Visigoths. The council granted remarkable position and deference to the king of the Visigoths. The independent Church bound itself in allegiance to the acknowledged king; it said nothing of allegiance to the Bishop of Rome.
Isidore of Seville died on 4 April 636 after serving more than 32 years as archbishop of Seville.
Isidore's Latin style in the "Etymologiae" and elsewhere, though simple and lucid, reveals increasing local Visigothic traditions.
Isidore was the first Christian writer to try to compile a "summa" of universal knowledge, in his most important work, the "Etymologiae" (taking its title from the method he uncritically used in the transcription of his era's knowledge). It is also known by classicists as the "Origines" (the standard abbreviation being "Orig"). This encyclopedia — the first such Christian epitome—formed a huge compilation of 448 chapters in 20 volumes.
In it, as Isidore entered his own terse digest of Roman handbooks, miscellanies and compendia, he continued the trend towards abridgements and summaries that had characterised Roman learning in Late Antiquity. In the process, many fragments of classical learning are preserved which otherwise would have been hopelessly lost; "in fact, in the majority of his works, including the "Origines", he contributes little more than the mortar which connects excerpts from other authors, as if he was aware of his deficiencies and had more confidence in the "stilus maiorum" than his own" his translator Katherine Nell MacFarlane remarks.
Some of these fragments were lost in the first place because Isidore's work was so highly regarded—Braulio called it "quaecunque fere sciri debentur", "practically everything that it is necessary to know"—that it superseded the use of many individual works of the classics themselves, which were not recopied and have therefore been lost: "all secular knowledge that was of use to the Christian scholar had been winnowed out and contained in one handy volume; the scholar need search no further".
The fame of this work imparted a new impetus to encyclopedic writing, which bore abundant fruit in the subsequent centuries of the Middle Ages. It was the most popular compendium in medieval libraries. It was printed in at least ten editions between 1470 and 1530, showing Isidore's continued popularity in the Renaissance. Until the 12th century brought translations from Arabic sources, Isidore transmitted what western Europeans remembered of the works of Aristotle and other Greeks, although he understood only a limited amount of Greek. The "Etymologiae" was much copied, particularly into medieval bestiaries.
Isidore's "De fide catholica contra Iudaeos" furthers Augustine of Hippo's ideas on the Jewish presence in Christian society. Like Augustine, Isidore accepted the necessity of the Jewish presence because of their expected role in the anticipated Second Coming of Christ. In "De fide catholica contra Iudaeos", Isidore exceeds the anti-rabbinic polemics of earlier theologians by criticizing Jewish practice as deliberately disingenuous.
He contributed two decisions to the Fourth Council of Toledo: Canon 60 calling for the forced removal of children from parents practicing Crypto-Judaism and their education by Christians, and Canon 65 forbidding Jews and Christians of Jewish origin from holding public office.
Isidore's authored more than a dozen major works on various topics including mathematics, holy scripture, and monastic life, all in Latin:
Isidore was one of the last of the ancient Christian philosophers and was contemporary with Maximus the Confessor. He has been called the most learned man of his age by some scholars, and he exercised a far-reaching and immeasurable influence on the educational life of the Middle Ages. His contemporary and friend, Braulio of Zaragoza, regarded him as a man raised up by God to save the Iberian peoples from the tidal wave of barbarism that threatened to inundate the ancient civilization of Hispania.
The Eighth Council of Toledo (653) recorded its admiration of his character in these glowing terms: "The extraordinary doctor, the latest ornament of the Catholic Church, the most learned man of the latter ages, always to be named with reverence, Isidore". This tribute was endorsed by the Fifteenth Council of Toledo, held in 688, and later in 1598 by Pope Clement VIII. Isidore was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1722 by Pope Innocent XIII.
Isidore was interred in Seville. His tomb represented an important place of veneration for the Mozarabs during the centuries after the Arab conquest of Visigothic Hispania. In the middle of the 11th century, with the division of Al Andalus into taifas and the strengthening of the Christian holdings in the Iberian peninsula, Ferdinand I of León and Castile found himself in a position to extract tribute from the fractured Arab states. In addition to money, Abbad II al-Mu'tadid, the Abbadid ruler of Seville (1042–1069), agreed to turn over St. Isidore's remains to Ferdinand I. A Catholic poet described al-Mutatid placing a brocaded cover over Isidore's sarcophagus, and remarked, "Now you are leaving here, revered Isidore. You know well how much your fame was mine!" Ferdinand had Isidore's remains reinterred in the then-recently constructed Basilica of San Isidoro in León. Today, many of his bones are buried in the cathedral of Murcia, Spain.
In Dante's "Paradiso" (X.130), Isidore is mentioned among theologians and Doctors of the Church alongside the Scot Richard of St. Victor and the Englishman Bede the Venerable.
The University of Dayton has named their implementation of the Sakai Project in honour of Saint Isidore.
His likeness, along with that of Leander of Sevile and Ferdinand III of Castile, is depicted on the crest badge of Sevilla FC.
The Order of St. Isidore of Seville is a chivalric order formed on January 1, 2000. An international organisation, the order aims to honour Saint Isidore as patron saint of the Internet, alongside promoting Christian chivalry online. , Isidore has not been officially named the patron saint of the Internet.
St. Isidore Island in Antarctica is named after the saint.
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Lesser Poland
Lesser Poland, often known by its Polish name Małopolska (), is a historical region situated in southern and south-eastern Poland. Its capital and largest city is Kraków. Throughout centuries, Lesser Poland developed a separate culture featuring diverse architecture, folk costumes, dances, cuisine, traditions and a rare Lesser Polish dialect. The region is rich in historical landmarks, monuments, castles, natural scenery and UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The region should not be confused with the modern Lesser Poland Voivodeship, which covers only the southwestern part of Lesser Poland. Historical Lesser Poland was much larger than the current voivodeship that bears its name. It reached from Bielsko-Biała in the southwest as far as to Siedlce in the northeast. It consisted of the three voivodeships of Kraków, Sandomierz and Lublin.
It comprised almost 60,000 km2 in area; today's population in this area is about 9,000,000 inhabitants. Its landscape is mainly hilly, with the Carpathian Mountains and Tatra Mountain Range in the south; it is located in the basin of the upper Vistula river. It has been noted for its mighty aristocracy ("magnateria") and wealthy nobility ("szlachta").
Between the 14th and 18th century, the Lesser Poland Province of the Polish Crown also encompassed the historical region of Red Ruthenia. In the era of partitions, the southern part of Lesser Poland became known as Galicia, which was under Austrian control until Poland regained its independence in 1918. As a result of this long-lasting division, many inhabitants of the northern part of Lesser Poland (including those in such cities as Lublin, Radom, Kielce and Częstochowa) do not recognize their Lesser Polish identity.
However, while Lublin "(Lubelskie)" was declared an independent Voivodeship as early as 1474, it still has speakers of the Lesser Polish dialect.
Across history, many ethnic and religious minorities existed in Lesser Poland as they fled persecution from other areas or countries. Poland's once tolerant policy towards these minorities allowed them to flourish and create separate self-governing communities. Some minorities still remain, but are on the verge of extinction, most notably Wymysorys-speaking Vilamovians, Halcnovians, Gorals, Lemkos, Uplanders, and once Polish Jews and Walddeutsche Germans.
Lesser Poland lies in the area of the upper confluence of the Vistula river and covers a large upland, including the Świętokrzyskie Mountains with the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland further west, Małopolska Upland, Sandomierz Basin, and Lublin Upland. Unlike other historical parts of the country, such as Kujawy, Mazovia, Podlachia, Pomerania, or Greater Poland, Lesser Poland is mainly hilly, with Poland's highest peak, Rysy, located within the borders of the province. Flat are northern and central areas of the province – around Tarnobrzeg, Stalowa Wola, Radom and Siedlce, also valleys of the main rivers – the Vistula, the Pilica, and the San. Apart from Rysy, there are several other peaks located in the province – Pilsko, Babia Góra, Turbacz, as well as Łysica in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains. The southern part of the province is covered by the Carpathian Mountains, which are made of smaller ranges, such as Pieniny, Tatry, and Beskidy.
Almost the whole area is located in the Vistula Basin, with the exception of the western and southern parts, belonging to the Odra and Dunaj Basins. The main rivers of the province are the Vistula, upper Warta, Soła, Skawa, Raba, Dunajec, Wisłok, Wisłoka, San, Wieprz, Przemsza, Nida, Kamienna, Radomka, and Pilica. The major lakes of the province are Lake Rożnów, Lake Czchów, Lake Dobczyce, Lake Czorsztyn, Lake Czaniec, Lake Międzybrodzie, Lake Klimkówka and Żywiec Lake. Most of them are man-made reservoirs.
Lesser Poland stretches from the Carpathians in the south to Pilica and Liwiec rivers to the north. It borders Mazovia to the north, Podlaskie to the northeast, Red Ruthenia to the east, Slovakia to the south, Silesia to the west, and Greater Poland to the northwest. Currently, the region is divided between Polish voivodeships – Lesser Poland Voivodeship (whole), Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship (whole), Silesian Voivodeship (eastern half), Podkarpackie Voivodeship (western part), Masovian Voivodeship (southern part), Łódź Voivodeship (southeastern corner), and Lublin Voivodeship (western part).
In Silesian Voivodeship, the border between Silesia and Lesser Poland is easy to draw, because, with only a few exceptions, it goes along boundaries of local counties. In the south, it goes along the western boundary of the ancient Duchy of Teschen, with the borderline along the Biała river, with Zwardoń, Milówka and Rajcza located in Lesser Poland. Bielsko-Biała is a city made up of two parts – Lesser Poland's Biala (also called "Biala Krakowska"), makes up the eastern half of the city, and only in 1951 was it merged with Silesian Bielsko. Further north, the border goes along the western boundaries of the cities of Jaworzno, and Sosnowiec, along the Przemsza and Brynica rivers. Then it goes northwest, leaving Czeladź, Siewierz, Koziegłowy, Blachownia, Kłobuck and Krzepice within Lesser Poland. From Krzepice, the border goes eastwards, towards Koniecpol, and along the Pilica river, with such towns as Przedborz, Opoczno, Drzewica, Białobrzegi, and Kozienice located within Lesser Poland. East of Białobrzegi, the boundary goes mainly along the Radomka river, to the Vistula. East of the Vistula, the boundary goes north of Łaskarzew and Żelechów, and south of Mazovian town of Garwolin, turning northwest. The northernmost point of the province is marked by the Liwiec river, with both Siedlce, and Łuków being part of Lesser Poland. The line then goes south, with Miedzyrzec Podlaski being part of the historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and Radzyń Podlaski as well as Parczew left in Lesser Poland.
Between the Vistula and the Bug Rivers, the eastern border of Lesser Poland goes west of Leczna, but east of Krasnystaw and Szczebrzeszyn, both of which historically belong to Red Ruthenia. Further south, Lesser Poland includes Frampol, and Biłgoraj, which lie in the southeastern corner on Lesser Poland's historical Lublin Voivodeship, close to the border with Red Ruthenia. The border then goes west of Biłgoraj, turning south, towards Leżajsk (which belongs to Red Ruthenia). The boundary between Lesser Poland and Red Ruthenia was described by Ukrainian historian and geographer Myron Korduba as being along the line Dukla – Krosno – Domaradz – Czudec – Krzeszów nad Sanem. The border towns of Lesser Poland were: Rudnik, Kolbuszowa, Ropczyce, Sędziszów Małopolski, Strzyżów, Jasło, Gorlice, and Biecz. The southern border of Lesser Poland goes along the Carpathian Mountains, and, except in a few cases, it has not changed for centuries. The cities of Leżajsk, Rzeszów, Sanok, Brzozów, and Krosno do not belong to historical Lesser Poland, as they are part of Red Ruthenia (Lwów Voivodeship).
Historically, Lesser Poland was divided into two lands - Kraków Land and Sandomierz Land, both of which emerged after the Testament of Bolesław III Krzywousty. In the 14th century, Sandomierz Voivodeship and Kraków Voivodeship were created, and in 1474, Lublin Voivodeship was carved out of three Sandomierz Voivodeship counties, located on the right bank of the Vistula. Historian Adolf Pawiński, who in the late 19th century was the director of the Polish Central Archives of Historical Records, estimated in his book "Polska XVI wieku pod względem geograficzno-statystycznym", that the size of Kraków Voivodeship was 19,028 km2. Sandomierz Voivodeship had an area of 25,762 km2, and Lublin Voivodeship had an area of 11,033 km2. Together with the Duchy of Siewierz (607 km2), and the parts of Spiš that belonged to Poland after the Treaty of Lubowla (1211 km2), the total area of Lesser Poland was 57,640 square kilometers. Apart from the three historic lands, Lesser Poland includes other smaller regions, such as Podhale, Ponidzie, and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie.
Zygmunt Gloger in his work "Historical geography of land of ancient Poland" ("Geografia historyczna ziem dawnej Polski") states that according to a Polish custom, whenever a new village was formed next to an older one, the name of the new entity was presented with an adjective "little" (or "lesser"), while the old village was described as "greater". The same procedure was used in naming these two Polish provincesthe "older" one, the cradle of the Polish state, was called "Greater Poland", while her "younger sister", which became part of Poland a few years later, was called "Lesser Poland". The name Greater Poland ("Polonia Maior") was for the first time used in 1242, by princes Boleslaw and Przemysław I, who named themselves "Duces Majoris Poloniae" ("Princes of the Older Poland"). Lesser Poland, or "Polonia Minor", appeared for the first time in historical documents in 1493, in the Statutes of Piotrków, during the reign of King Jan Olbracht, to distinguish this province from Greater Poland ("Polonia Maior").
In the first years of Polish statehood, southern Lesser Poland was inhabited by the West Slavic tribe of Vistulans, with two major centers in Kraków and Wiślica. Their land, which had probably been part of Great Moravia, and Bohemia, was annexed by Mieszko I of Poland some time in the late 10th century. Cosmas of Prague in his "Chronicle of Bohemians" wrote: "Polish prince Mieszko, a cunning man, seized by ruse the city of Kraków, killing with sword all Czechs he found there". Northern part of Lesser Poland (Lublin and Sandomierz) was probably inhabited by another tribe, the Lendians, and Dr Antoni Podraza, historian of the Jagiellonian University claims that ancient division of Lesser Poland into two major parts – Land (Duchy) of Kraków, and Land (Duchy) of Sandomierz, is based on the existence of two Slavic tribes in the area. However, exact location of the Lendians has not been determined to this day. Some historians speculate that they occupied Red Ruthenia, and their center was in Przemyśl.
Around the year 1000, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kraków was created, and its borders covered whole area of Lesser Poland. During the reign of Casimir I the Restorer, Kraków for the first time became the capital of Poland (around 1040), since Greater Poland and Silesia, with main Polish urban centers, such as Gniezno and Poznań were ravaged by Duke Bretislaus I of Bohemia. In 1138, following the Testament of Bolesław III Krzywousty, the country was divided between his sons (see also Fragmentation of Poland). Bolesław III Wrymouth created the Seniorate Province, which, among others, consisted of Kraków. At the same time, Lesser Poland was divided into two parts, when its eastern part formed the Duchy of Sandomierz, carved by the ruler for his son Henry of Sandomierz.
During the fragmentation period, both lands of Lesser Poland were frequently ruled by the same prince. Among them were Bolesław IV the Curly, Mieszko III the Old, Casimir II the Just, Leszek I the White, Bolesław V the Chaste, Leszek II the Black, Władysław I the Elbow-high, and King of Bohemia, Wenceslaus II of Bohemia, who united Lesser Poland in 1290/1291. The province was pillaged during the Mongol invasion of Poland, when a combined army of Kraków and Sandomierz was destroyed by Baidar in the Battle of Chmielnik. The loss was so heavy that Norman Davies wrote: "At Chmielnik, the assembled nobility of Małopolska perished to a man." During their 1241, 1259, and 1287 invasions, the Mongols burned major cities of Lesser Poland, killing thousands of people. Furthermore, the province, especially its northeastern part, was often raided by the Lithuanians, Rusyns, Yotvingians, and Old Prussians. The city of Lublin suffered most frequently – among others, it was burnt by the Rusyns in 1244, the Lithuanians 1255, the Prussians in 1266, and the Yotvingians in 1282. Another center of the province, Sandomierz, was destroyed by the Tartars in 1260, and burnt by the Lithuanians in 1349.
Unlike other Polish provinces, especially Silesia, Lesser Poland did not undergo further fragmentation, and in the early 14th century became the core of the reunited nation (together with Greater Poland). The period of nation's fragmentation came to a symbolic end on 30 January 1320, when Władysław I the Elbow-high was crowned as King of Poland. The ceremony took place in Kraków's Wawel Cathedral, and the king of the reunited country decided to choose Kraków as the capital. Through 14th and 15th centuries, Lesser Poland's position as the most important province of the nation was cemented. It became visible during the reign of Casimir III the Great, who favored less known Lesser Poland's noble families, at the expense of Greater Poland's nobility. The reign of Casimir the Great was a period of growing prosperity of Lesser Poland. With high density of population, fertile soils and rich deposits of minerals (especially salt in Bochnia and Wieliczka, as well as lead in Olkusz), the province was the richest part of Poland. After annexation of Red Ruthenia, Lesser Poland lost its status of the borderland, and both regions created an economic bridge between Poland and the ports of the Black Sea. The king, who drew Jewish settlers from across Europe to his country, built several castles along western border of Lesser Poland, with the most notable ones in Skawina, Pieskowa Skała, Będzin, Lanckorona, Olkusz, Lelów, Bobolice, Krzepice, Ogrodzieniec, Ojców, Olsztyn, Bobolice, Mirów (see also Eagle Nests Trail). Furthermore, he built or strengthened castles in other parts of the province, such as Szydlow, Chęciny, Wiślica, Radom, Niedzica, Opoczno, Lublin, Sandomierz, as well as the Wawel Castle. Also, during his reign (1333–1370), Casimir the Great founded on Magdeburg rights several cities, urbanizing hitherto rural province. Among major Lesser Poland's cities founded by the King, there are:
In the Kingdom of Poland, Lesser Poland was made of three voivodeships – Kraków Voivodeship, Sandomierz Voivodeship, and Lublin Voivodeship, created in 1474 out of eastern part of the Sandomierz Voivodeship. Borders of the province remained unchanged until 1772. The only exception was large part of contemporary Upper Silesia (the area around Bytom, Toszek, Siewierz, and Oświęcim), which belonged to Duchy of Kraków until 1179. In that year, prince of Kraków Casimir II the Just, handed these lands to Prince of Opole Mieszko I Tanglefoot. The Duchy of Siewierz, ruled since 1443 by the Archbishop of Kraków, merged with Lesser Poland in 1790. Other Silesian realms lost in 1179, also returned to Lesser Poland – Duchy of Zator (in 1513), and Duchy of Oświęcim (1564). Both duchies merged into a Silesian County of the Kraków Voivodeship, and shared the fate of Lesser Poland. Apart from Jews, among other ethnic minorities of the province were the Walddeutsche, who settled the borderland of Lesser Poland and Red Ruthenia (14th through 17th centuries). In the Middle Ages, the Germans inhabited several cities of Lesser Poland, especially Kraków and Sandomierz (see Rebellion of wójt Albert).
In the late Middle Ages, Lesser Poland gradually became the center of Polish statehood, with Kraków being the capital of the country from the mid-11th century until 1596. Its nobility ruled Poland when Queen Jadwiga was too young to control the state, and the Union of Krewo with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the brainchild of Lesser Poland's szlachta.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, Lesser Poland remained the most important part of the country. After the death of Casimir the Great, Lesser Poland's nobility promoted Louis I of Hungary as the new king, later supporting his daughter Jadwiga of Poland in exchange for Privilege of Koszyce. Since Jadwiga, crowned on 16 October 1384, was too young to rule the country, Poland was in fact governed by the Lesser Poland's nobility, who decided to find her a husband, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Jogaila. Consequently, unions of Poland and Lithuania at Krewo and Horodło were the brainchildren of Lesser Poland's nobility, among whom the most influential individuals were Spytek z Melsztyna, and cardinal Zbigniew Olesnicki. Other famous Lesser Poland's families are Lubomirski family, Kmita family, Tarnowski family, Potocki family, Sobieski family, Koniecpolski family, Ossolinski family, Poniatowski family.
Since Lesser Poland was the most important province of the country, several important events took place on its territory. In 1364, Casimir the Great called the Congress of Kraków, and in 1401, the Union of Vilnius and Radom was signed. In 1505 in Radom, the Sejm adopted the Nihil novi title, which forbade the King to issue laws without the consent of the nobility. In the same year, also in the same city, Polish law was codified in the Łaski's Statute, and the Crown Tribunal (the highest appeal court in the Crown of the Polish Kingdom) held its sessions in Lublin. In 1525, the Treaty of Kraków was signed, ending the Polish–Teutonic War. Lesser Poland also is home to the oldest Polish university – the Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364 by Casimir the Great, and several outstanding figures of early Polish culture were born here, such as Jan Kochanowski, Mikołaj Rej, Jan z Lublina, Mikołaj Gomółka, Maciej Miechowita, Marcin Kromer, Łukasz Górnicki, and Mikołaj Radomski.
In the 16th century, Lesser Poland retained its position as the most important province of the country. As no major conflicts took place on its territory, it was the center of Renaissance in Poland. The province was home to numerous scholars, writers and statesmen, and it was here where Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was created in 1569 (see Union of Lublin). In the Commonwealth, Lesser Poland proper was the base of the Province of Lesser Poland, which covered southern lands of the vast country. The province was made of Lesser Poland itself, also Red Ruthenia, Volhynia, Podolia, and Ukrainian voivodeships – Kijów Voivodeship, Czernihów Voivodeship, and Bracław Voivodeship, which, until 1569, had been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The period in Polish history known as the Polish Golden Age was very fortunate for Lesser Poland. Kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty, especially Sigismund I the Old (himself born in Lesser Poland's Kozienice), and his son Sigismund II Augustus (born in Kraków), resided in Kraków, which was the capital of the immense Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth. Lesser Poland's prosperity was reflected in numerous examples of Renaissance architecture complexes, built across the province. In 1499, hitherto Gothic Wawel Castle was damaged in a fire, and a few years later, Sigismund I, with help of the best native and foreign artists (such as Francesco the Florentine, Bartholomeo Berrecci or Niccolo Castiglione) refurbished the complex into a splendid Renaissance palace. Furthermore, in the early 16th century, several palaces were built in Lesser Poland – in Drzewica, Szydłowiec, Ogrodzieniec, and Pieskowa Skała. The province became rich mostly due to the grain trade, conducted along the Vistula, and among cities which prospered in the 16th century, there are Kraków, Sandomierz, Lublin, Kazimierz Dolny, Pilzno, Tarnów, Radom, Biecz. In later years of the 16th century, further palaces were built or remodelled in Baranow Sandomierski, and Niepołomice.
In the early 16th century, Protestant Reformation spread across the Commonwealth, and Lesser Poland became one of early centers of the movement, when students from Wittenberg brought the news to Cracow. In the first years of the century, professor of Jagiellonian University Jakub of Iłża (Jakub z Ilzy, died 1542) became one of the main promoters of the movement in the region. He actively supported the notions of Martin Luther, and in 1528 was called to the Bishop of Kraków's court. Convinced of heresy, he was forced to leave Poland in 1535. Reformation soon became very popular among Lesser Poland's nobility, especially Calvinism, and according to one estimate, some 20% of local szlachta converted from Roman Catholicism. They were attracted by Calvinism's democratic character, and Lesser Poland's center of the movement was set in the town of Pińczów, which came to be known as "Sarmatian Athens". It was in Pińczów, where a local nobleman converted a Roman Catholic parish into a Protestant one, opened a Calvinist Academy, and published its Antitrinitarian confession in 1560 and in 1561. Several Calvinist synods took place in Lesser Poland – the first one in Słomniki (1554), Pińczów (the first united Synod of Poland and Lithuania – 1556 1561), and Kraków (1562). In 1563, also in Pińczów, the so-called Brest Bible was translated into Polish language. In 1570, the Sandomierz Agreement was signed by a number of Protestant groups, with the exception of the Polish Brethren, another religious group very influential in Lesser Poland. The Brethren had their center in Lesser Poland's village of Raków, where a main Arian printing press, as well as a college, known as Akademia Rakowska ("Gymnasium Bonarum Artium") founded in 1602 were located. Among distunguished European scholars associated with the school, there were Johannes Crellius, Corderius, and Valentinus Smalcius (who translated into German the Racovian Catechism).
In 1572, the Jagiellon dynasty died out, and next year, Henry III of France became first elected king of the country. After his short reign, and War of the Polish Succession (1587–88), which also took place in Lesser Poland, the new ruler was Stephen Báthory of Poland, who died in 1586. The ruler from Transylvania was followed by Sigismund III Vasa of Sweden, whose election marked gradual decline of the province. Sigismund's eyes were set on Sweden, and for many years he concentrated his efforts on a futile attempt to regain his former Swedish throne (see Polish–Swedish union, War against Sigismund). Therefore, Lesser Poland, located in southwestern corner of the Commonwealth, began to lose its importance, which was marked in 1596, when Sigismund moved his permanent residence, court and the crown headquarters to centrally-located Warsaw.
Even though first half of the 17th century was filled with wars, all major conflicts did not reach Lesser Poland, and the province continued to prosper, which was reflected in its castles and palaces, such as the enormous Krzyztopor. Apart from minor wars, such as Zebrzydowski Rebellion, and Kostka-Napierski Uprising, the province remained safe. Cossacks of the Khmelnytsky Uprising reached as far west as Zamość and Lwów, but did not enter Lesser Poland. The province did not witness other wars, such as Polish–Swedish War (1626–29), Polish–Muscovite War (1605–18), Polish–Ottoman War (1620–21), and Smolensk War. Nevertheless, Lesser Poland's nobility took active part in these conflicts – Marina Mniszech, the daughter of Voivode of Sandomierz, Jerzy Mniszech, was wife of False Dmitriy I, as well as False Dmitriy II. Furthermore, Lesser Poland's lands, especially its northeastern part, became a base for Polish troops, fighting the Cossacks, and King John II Casimir Vasa often stayed in Lublin with his court, preparing military campaigns in Ukraine. The situation changed with the outbreak of the Russo-Polish War (1654–1667). In October 1655, the Russo-Cossack armies under Ivan Vyhovsky entered eastern Lesser Poland, reaching the Vistula, and pillaging Lublin, Puławy, and Kazimierz Dolny. The invaders quickly retreated, but a few months later, Lesser Poland was flooded by the Swedes.
Swedish invasion of Poland had catastrophic consequences for the hitherto prosperous province. The attackers, supported by their allies from Transylvania, seized whole Lesser Poland, reaching as far south as Nowy Targ, Nowy Sącz, and Żywiec. All major cities were looted and burned, and some of them, like Radom, did not recover until the 19th century. The Swedes captured and pillaged Sandomierz (where they destroyed the Royal Castle, and after the invasion, the city never recovered), Opoczno, Lublin, Kazimierz Dolny Pilzno, Szydlow, Szydłowiec, Tarnów, Kielce, Kraśnik, and Kraków. The invaders seized the capital of Lesser Poland after a short siege, and their occupation of the province was confirmed after their victories in the Battle of Wojnicz, and the Battle of Golab. In those years, one of the most important and symbolic events in the history of the nation took place in Lesser Poland. It was the Siege of Jasna Góra, which, according to some accounts, turned the course of the war. Furthermore, following the Treaty of Radnot, Lesser Poland was invaded in January 1657 by George II Rákóczi, whose troops caused more destruction. Foreign armies were not chased out of Lesser Poland until 1657, Kraków itself was recaptured on 18 August 1657. After these invasions, the province was ruined, with hundreds of villages, towns and cities burned. The population decreased (the urban population by nearly half), the peasantry starved, and like other parts of the Commonwealth, Lesser Poland was devastated. The period of peace lasted for about forty years, when in 1700, another major conflict, the Great Northern War began. Lesser Poland once again became a battleground, with Battle of Kliszów taking place there in 1702, and the Sandomierz Confederation formed in 1704.
After the conflict, Lesser Poland began a recovery, which was hampered by several other factors. Province's cities frequently burned (Lublin 1719, Nowy Targ 1784, Nowy Sącz, Dukla 1758, Wieliczka 1718, Miechów 1745, Drzewica), there also were numerous outbreaks of plagues and typhus (in 1707–1708, some 20,000 died in Kraków and its area)
Lesser Poland was one of main centers of the Bar Confederation. On 21 June 1786 in Kraków, local confederation was announced, and on the same day Voievode of Kraków, Michal Czarnocki, urged his citizens to join the movement. Soon afterwards, Kraków was captured by the Russian troops, and the center of Lesser Poland's insurgency moved to the mountainous south – areas around Dukla and Nowy Sącz. During the Confederation, several battles and skirmishes took place there. In 1770, after the Battle of Iwonicz, the Russians ransacked Biecz. The movement ended in 1772, and its decline was connected with the Partitions of Poland. Another local center of the movement was Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa, which was defended by Kazimierz Pulaski for almost two years (1770–1772).
The Partitions of Poland began earlier in Lesser Poland than in other provinces of the country. In 1769, Austrian Empire annexed a small territory of Spisz, and next year, the towns of Czorsztyn, Nowy Sącz and Nowy Targ. In 1771, the Russians and the Prussians agreed on the first partition of the country, and in early 1772, Austrian Emperor Maria Theresa decided to join the two powers. In the first partition of the Commonwealth, the Austrians seized the territory which would later be called Galicia, and which included southwestern corner of Lesser Poland (south of the Vistula river), with Żywiec, Tarnów, and Biecz, but without major urban centers of the province, such as Kraków, Sandomierz, Radom, Lublin, Częstochowa, and Kielce.
Second Partition of Poland (1793) did not result in significant changes of boundaries in the area, as the Austrian Empire did not participate in it. However, the Prussians moved on, and in 1793 they annexed northwestern corner of the province, together with the city of Częstochowa, and its vicinity, which became part of the newly created province of South Prussia. Therefore, in late 1793, Lesser Poland was already divided between three countries – Austrian Empire (south of the Vistula), Kingdom of Prussia (Częstochowa and northwestern corner), and still existing Commonwealth. After the Third Partition (1795), most of Lesser Poland was annexed by Austria, with all major cities. Prussia managed to seize a small, western part of the province, with the towns of Siewierz, Zawiercie, Będzin, and Myszków, calling this land New Silesia, while the Austrians decided to name newly acquired lands of northern Lesser Poland West Galicia. In 1803, West Galicia was merged with Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, but retained some autonomy. Lesser Poland was one of major centers of Polish resistance against the occupiers. On 24 March 1794 in Kraków, Tadeusz Kościuszko announced the general insurrection (see Kościuszko Uprising), mobilising all able males of Lesser Poland. Two weeks later, Battle of Raclawice took place, ending with a Polish victory. The uprising was suppressed by combined Prusso – Russian forces, and among battles fought in Lesser Poland, there is Battle of Szczekociny.
During Napoleonic Wars, the Duchy of Warsaw was created by Napoleon Bonaparte out of Polish lands which had been granted to Prussia in the Partitions. In 1809, after the Polish–Austrian War, and the Treaty of Schönbrunn, the Duchy was expanded, when northern Lesser Poland was added to its territory (with Kielce, Radom, and Lublin). Following the Congress of Vienna, Duchy of Warsaw was turned into Russian-ruled Congress Poland, and historical capital of the province, Kraków, was turned into Free City of Kraków, which also included the towns of Trzebinia, Chrzanów, Jaworzno, and Krzeszowice. In Congress Poland, the lands of Lesser Poland were initially divided between four palatinates – Palatinate of Kraków (with capital in Kielce), Palatinate of Sandomierz (with capital in Radom), Palatinate of Lublin, and Palatinate of Podlasie (with capital in Siedlce), (see also Administrative division of Congress Poland). Later, the palatinates were turned into governorates. Thus, Russian part of Lesser Poland was divided into Kielce Governorate, Lublin Governorate, Radom Governorate, Siedlce Governorate, and Piotrków Governorate (western counties, with Częstochowa and industrial area of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie). Borders of these administrative units did not reflect historical boundaries of the province.
Most of the November Uprising, which began in 1830, missed Lesser Poland, as major battles took place in the area around Warsaw. In early 1831, when Russian forces advanced into Congress Poland, some skirmishes took place in northern counties of the province – at Puławy, Kurow, and Kazimierz Dolny. In early 1846, a group of Polish patriots attempted a failed uprising in the Free City of Kraków. The insurrection was quickly suppressed by the Austrian troops, and as a result, the Free City was annexed by the Austrian Empire. In the same year, Austrian part of Lesser Poland was witness to a massacre of Polish nobility by the peasantry, known as Galician slaughter. The peasants, led by Jakub Szela, murdered about 1000 nobles, and destroyed about 500 manors. These events took place in three counties – Sanok, Jasło and Tarnów.
Northern and central Lesser Poland (the part of the province which was taken by the Russian Empire) was one of the main centers of the January Uprising (1863–1864). In the first days of the insurrection, skirmishes with the Russian Army took place in such towns, as Łuków, Kraśnik, Szydłowiec, Bodzentyn, and Suchedniów. Since the Poles were poorly armed, the Russians did not have major problems with them, and soon afterwards, the insurrectionists decided to organize military camps. Among biggest camps in Lesser Poland, there were Ojców (3000 soldiers), and Wąchock, where Marian Langiewicz gathered up to 1500 people. The uprising died out by early spring of 1864, and among counties where it continued for the longest time, was the extreme northeastern corner of Lesser Poland, around Łuków, where reverend Stanisław Brzóska was active. Since Russian military supremacy was crushing, the Poles were forced to limit their actions to guerrilla warfare. Among the biggest battles which took place in Lesser Poland there are: Battle of Szydłowiec (23 January 1863); Battle of Miechów (17 February 1863); Battle of Małogoszcz (24 February 1863); Battle of Staszów (17 February 1863); Battle of Pieskowa Skała (4 March 1863); two Battles of Opatów (25 November 1863, 21 February 1864).
As a result of their support of the failed insurrection, several Lesser Poland's towns lost their charters and were turned into villages. Among them were Kraśnik, Bodzentyn, Opatów, Iłża, Małogoszcz, Wąchock, Busko-Zdrój, Jędrzejów, Cmielow, Zwoleń, Drzewica, Wierzbica, Czeladź, Kazimierz Dolny, Wolborz, Stopnica, Daleszyce, Wiślica, Pajęczno, Lipsko, Pacanów, Ożarów, Wolbrom, Proszowice, Nowe Miasto Korczyn, Włoszczowa, Przysucha, Opole Lubelskie.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lesser Poland remained one of the centers of Polish culture, especially the city of Kraków, where Jagiellonian University was one of only two Polish-language colleges of that period (the other one was University of Lwów). Another significant center of national culture was the town of Puławy, where in the late 18th century, a local palace owned by Czartoryski family became a museum of Polish national memorabilia and a major cultural and political centre. A number of prominent artists, both representing Romanticism, and Positivism was born in Lesser Poland, including Wincenty Pol (born in Lublin), Stefan Żeromski (born near Kielce), Aleksander Świętochowski (born near Łuków in extreme northeast corner of Lesser Poland), Walery Przyborowski (born near Kielce), Piotr Michałowski, Helena Modjeska, Henryk Wieniawski (born in Lublin), Leon Wyczolkowski (born near Siedlce), Juliusz Kossak (born in Nowy Wiśnicz), Jozef Szujski (born in Tarnów). In the early 20th century, Lesser Poland, especially its part which belonged to Austria-Hungary, was a center of a cultural movement called Young Poland. Many artists associated with the movement were born in Lesser Poland, with the most prominent including Wladyslaw Orkan, Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, Xawery Dunikowski, Jacek Malczewski, Jozef Mehoffer, and Stanisław Wyspiański.
Since Austrian part of Poland enjoyed a wide autonomy, the province of Galicia, whose western part was made of Lesser Poland, became a hotbed of Polish conspirational activities. In anticipation of a future war, Galician Poles, with help of their brethren from other parts of the divided country, created several paramilitary organizations, such as Polish Rifle Squads, and Riflemen's Association. The capital of Lesser Poland, Kraków, was a key center of pro-independence movements, with such individuals, as Józef Piłsudski, being actively involved in those activities. In August 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, Pilsudski's Legions crossed the Austrian – Russian border north of Kraków, and entered Congress Poland. However, the Pilsudski and his soldiers were disappointed to see that the inhabitants of Kielce did not welcome them with joy. The division of Lesser Poland was more visible than ever.
During World War I, Lesser Poland became one of main theaters of the Eastern Front. Russian push into the territory of Austria – Hungary resulted in the Battle of Galicia. Among other major battles which took place in Lesser Poland, there are the Battle of the Vistula River, and the Gorlice-Tarnów Offensive. After Russian troops had retreated east, whole province was under control of the Austrians and the Germans, and northern Lesser Poland was part of the German-sponsored Kingdom of Poland (1916–1918). In later stages of the conflict, the divided province once again became a center of Polish independence movement. An independent Polish government was re-proclaimed in northern Lesser Poland's city of Lublin, on 7 November 1918. Soon afterwards, it formed the basis of the new government of the country. In other parts of the province, other governments were formed – Polish Liquidation Commission in Kraków, also the short-lived Republic of Tarnobrzeg.
The division of Lesser Poland along the Vistula river, which lasted from 1772 until 1918, is visible even today. For more than 100 years, southern Lesser Poland (Kraków, Tarnów, Biala Krakowska, and Nowy Sącz) was administered by Austria, while northern, larger part of the province (Częstochowa, Sosnowiec, Kielce, Radom, Lublin, Sandomierz) was forcibly part of the Russian Empire. Inhabitants of Austrian part of Poland enjoyed limited autonomy, with Polish language institutions, such as Jagiellonian University. At the same time, Russian-controlled Poland was subject to Russification. As a result of decades of this division, most inhabitants of the areas stolen by Russia are not aware of their Lesser Poland's heritage. Furthermore, current administrative boundaries of the country still reflect the defunct border between the former Russian and Austria–Hungarian Empires.
In 1918, when Second Polish Republic was created, whole historical Lesser Poland became part of restored Poland. The historical area of the province was divided between four voivodeships: Kraków Voivodeship (whole), Kielce Voivodeship (whole), Lwów Voivodeship (northwestern corner), and Lublin Voivodeship (western part). Furthermore, in the counties of central Lesser Poland, another administrative unit, Sandomierz Voivodeship was planned, but due to the outbreak of World War II, it was never created. Boundaries between two major Lesser Poland voivodeships – Kraków, and Kielce, were the same as pre-1914 boundaries of Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Nevertheless, in the interbellum period, the notion of Lesser Poland was frequently associated only with former Austrian province of Galicia. Therefore, Western Galicia to the San river, was called "Western Lesser Poland", while Eastern Galicia, east of the San, with the city of Lwów, was called "Eastern Lesser Poland" (voivodeships of Tarnopol, Stanisławów, and Lwów).
In late 1918, Lesser Poland emerged as one of main centers of fledgling Polish administration and independence movement. According to historian Kazimierz Banburski of Tarnów's District Museum, Tarnów was the first Polish city which became independent, after 123 years of oppression. On 31 October 1918, at 8 am, Tarnów's inhabitants began disarming demoralized Austrian soldiers, and after three hours, the city was completely in Polish hands. On 28 October 1918, Polish Liquidation Committee was created in Kraków. A few days later, socialist peasants founded the Republic of Tarnobrzeg. In the night of 6/7 November 1918, "Polish People's Republic" was proclaimed in Lublin, by Ignacy Daszynski and other activists. In 1919, the legislative election took place in Lesser Poland without major problems.
At that time Lesser Poland, like other provinces of the country, faced several problems. Even though major post-World War I conflicts (such as Polish–Soviet War) did not take place there, it suffered from unemployment, overpopulation, and poverty, especially in towns and countryside. Furthermore, Polish government had to connect parts of the hitherto divided country. There was no direct rail link between Kraków, and Kielce, Radom, and Lublin, and until 1934, when line from Kraków to Tunel was opened, all travelers had to go via Sosnowiec – Maczki. Lack of rail communication between former Austrian and former Russian parts of Lesser Poland is visible even today. Between Kraków and Dęblin, there are only two rail bridges along the Vistula. Residents of the province tried to improve their conditions using legal means, but when it turned out to be impossible, they took to fighting (1923 Kraków riot, 1937 peasant strike in Poland). As if to exacerbate the desperate situation, Lesser Poland witnessed a catastrophic flood in 1934, after which the government decided to construct dams on local rivers.
Even though Lesser Poland's countryside was almost exclusively Polish, its towns and cities were inhabited by numerous Jews, whose communities were very vibrant. In Kraków, Jews made 25% of the population, in Lublin – 31%, in Kielce – 30%, and in Radom – 32%. Apart from the Jews, and Gypsies scattered in the south, there were no other significant national minorities in interbellum Lesser Poland.
Since Lesser Poland was safely located in the middle of the country, away from both German and Soviet border, in the mid-1930s Polish government initiated one of the most ambitious project of the Second Polish Republic – Central Industrial Region, which was located almost exclusively in Lesser Poland. Even though the project was never completed, several plants were constructed, both in Old-Polish Industrial Region, and in other counties of the province. The brand new city of Stalowa Wola was established in dense forests, around a steel mill. In the late 1930s, Lesser Poland was quickly changing, as construction of several factories, and job opportunities caused influx of rural inhabitants to the towns. Such towns, as Dębica, Starachowice, Puławy, or Kraśnik, quickly grew, with their population rising. Earlier, in 1927, Lesser Poland's Dęblin became a major center of Polish aviation, when Polish Air Force Academy was opened there, and in Mielec, PZL Mielec was opened, which was the largest aerospace manufacturer in Poland. Central Industrial Region, however, did not affect western counties of Lesser Poland, which had already been urbanized and industrialized (Biala Krakowska, Żywiec, Kraków, Jaworzno, Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, Zawiercie, and Częstochowa). The government of Poland planned further investments, such as a major East – West rail line, linking Volhynia, and Upper Silesia, but they never materialized. Desperate situation and lack of jobs caused thousands of inhabitants of Lesser Poland (especially from its southern part) to leave their land, mostly for the United States of America, but also Brazil, and Canada.
Lesser Poland remained a center of Polish culture, with Kraków's Jagiellonian University, AGH University of Science and Technology, and Catholic University of Lublin, which was opened in 1918. Several important figures of interbellum political, military, and cultural life of Poland were born in Lesser Poland. Among them were Wincenty Witos, Władysław Sikorski, Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, Józef Haller, Władysław Belina-Prażmowski, Tadeusz Kutrzeba, Feliks Koneczny, Stefan Żeromski, Tadeusz Peiper, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Witold Gombrowicz, Jan Kiepura, Stefan Jaracz. In 1920, in Lesser Poland's town of Wadowice, Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, was born.
On 1 September 1939, armed forces of Nazi Germany attacked Poland (see: Invasion of Poland). Lesser Poland, due to its proximity to the then-border with Germany, became a battleground on the first day of the invasion. The Germans attacked the province both in its northwest (area west of Częstochowa), and in the south (Podhale), along the border with Slovakia, Third Reich's ally.
Lesser Poland was defended by the following Polish armies:
After a few days the Battle of the Border was lost, and forces of German Army Group South advanced deep into Lesser Poland's territory. Polish troops resisted fiercely, and among major battles in initial stages of the war, which took place in Lesser Poland, there are Battle of Mokra, Battle of Jordanów, and Battle of Węgierska Górka. By 6 September, Polish forces were in general retreat and Marshal of Poland Edward Rydz-Śmigły ordered all troops to fall back to the secondary lines of defences at the Vistula and San Rivers. German units entered Częstochowa on 3 September (where on the next day they murdered hundreds of civilians), Kielce on 5 September, Kraków on 6 September, and Radom on 8 September (see also Battle of Radom). Within a week, almost whole Lesser Poland was under Nazi occupation. Northeastern part of the province, the area of Lublin, was held by the Poles until 17 September, but eventually, and after fierce battles (see Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski), all Lesser Poland was firmly under Nazi control. First draft of Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact stipulated that northeastern Lesser Poland (east of the Vistula river) was to be occupied by the Soviet Union, and forces of the Red Army reached the area of Lublin after 20 September, but withdrew east on 28 September.
On 12 October 1939, upon a decree of Adolf Hitler, General Government, a separate region of the Greater German Reich was created, with Hans Frank as its Governor-General. Its capital was established in Kraków, and it covered most of the area of historical Lesser Poland, except for its western counties, which were directly incorporated into Nazi Germany's Upper Silesia Province (Będzin, Sosnowiec, Zawiercie, Biała, Żywiec, Chrzanów, Olkusz).
In Lesser Poland, like in all provinces of the occupied country, the Nazis ruled with savage brutality, killing hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, both Polish and Jewish (see: World War II crimes in Poland, Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland, Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, German AB-Aktion in Poland, Sonderaktion Krakau). The Auschwitz concentration camp, located at the border of Lesser Poland and Upper Silesia, was opened on 14 June 1940, and on 1 October 1941, the Germans opened Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin. The third concentration camp in Lesser Poland was in Kraków's district of Płaszów. In late 1939 and early 1940, in Lesser Poland's spa of Zakopane, and in Kraków, several Gestapo–NKVD Conferences took place, during which the mutual cooperation between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union was discussed.
Anti-Nazi resistance was particularly strong in Lesser Poland, and it was in the extreme northwestern corner of the province (around Opoczno), that armed struggle against the occupiers began in late 1939 and early 1940 (see Henryk Dobrzański). Structures of the Home Army were well-developed in the region. Lesser Poland's independent areas of the Home Army were located in Kraków, Kielce-Radom, and Lublin. During Operation Tempest in mid-1944, several Lesser Poland's towns were liberated, also uprising in Kraków was prepared, but never realized. Apart from the Home Army, other resistance groups were strong in the province, such as pro-Communist Armia Ludowa, peasant's Bataliony Chłopskie, and right-wing National Armed Forces, with its Holy Cross Mountains Brigade.
In all major Lesser Poland's cities, Jewish ghettos were opened, with the biggest ones in Kraków, and Lublin. At first the Nazis were planning to create a so-called "reservation" for European Jews, located around Lesser Poland's town of Nisko (see Nisko Plan), but they changed the plan, and decided to murder all Jews. Condemned to death, Jews in Lesser Poland took to fighting (see Częstochowa Ghetto Uprising), but their efforts failed. As a result of The Holocaust in Poland, once thriving and numerous Jewish population of Lesser Poland was decimated.
In the summer of 1944, after Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive, Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht from eastern Lesser Poland. The city of Lublin was captured by the Soviets on 22 July 1944, Stalowa Wola – on 1 August, and Sandomierz, on the left bank of the Vistula – on 18 August. The front line stabilized along the Vistula for about six months (with some bridgeheads on the western bank on the Vistula – see Battle of Studzianki), and in early 1945, Soviet Vistula–Oder Offensive began, which pushed Germans to the gates of Berlin. The Soviets entered Kielce on 15 January, Częstochowa – on 17 January, and Kraków on 19 January. On 27 January, the Red Army entered Sosnowiec. In took the Soviets much longer to clear the areas in the mountains – they did not enter Żywiec until 5 April 1945.
Together with the Red Army, NKVD and Soviet authorities followed, whose purpose was to make Poland a Communist country, with a puppet government, formed as Polish Committee of National Liberation. Since 1 August 1944, the provisional government was officially headquartered in Lesser Poland's Lublin. Thousands of people took to the forests, to continue their fight for free Poland (see Anti-communist resistance in Poland (1944–46)). Lesser Poland again was one of the main centers of the resistance. Several skirmishes took place in the province, including Battle of Kuryłówka. The Communists did not hesitate to kill those rebels they captured (Public execution in Dębica (1946)), and by 1947, the resistance movement was crushed. The last Polish cursed soldier, Józef Franczak, was killed in 1963 near Świdnik in northeastern Lesser Poland. Also, all victims of the 1951 Mokotów Prison execution were members of Lesser Poland's branch of Freedom and Independence. Another well-known anti-Communist fighter from Lesser Poland is Józef Kuraś, who was active in the southern region of Podhale.
In early 1945, the lands of Lesser Poland were divided between three voivodeships – those of Kraków, Lublin, and Kielce. Since summer 1945, several counties were transferred to neighboring voivodeships – eastern Lesser Poland (Dębica, Jasło, Mielec) became part of Rzeszów Voivodeship, while western counties of Będzin and Zawiercie were transferred to Katowice Voivodeship. In 1950, the city of Częstochowa became part of Katowice Voivodeship, and next year, the city of Bielsko-Biała was created out of Lesser Poland's Biala Krakowska, and Upper Silesia's Bielsko. The new city became part of Katowice Voivodeship. Lesser Poland was further divided in 1975, when territorial reform was carried out (see Voivodeships of Poland (1975–1988)). Counties were abolished, and several small voivodeships were created, in such Lesser Poland's towns and cities, as Tarnobrzeg, Tarnów, Nowy Sącz, Bielsko-Biała, Radom, Częstochowa, and Siedlce.
The government of Communist Poland invested in heavy industry, following the pre-1939 idea of Central Industrial Area. In Kraków, a new district of Nowa Huta was constructed in the 1950s. In Częstochowa and Zawiercie, the steelworks were significantly expanded, and in early 1970, the government initiated construction of Katowice Steelworks, which, despite its name, is located in Lesser Poland's Dąbrowa Górnicza. To connect Katowice Steelworks with Soviet plants, in late 1970s Broad Gauge Metallurgy Line was opened, which crossed Lesser Poland from west to east. Among other major factories, opened in Lesser Poland during Communist rule, there are:
Other Lesser Poland's major plants were significantly expanded after 1945, including Żywiec Brewery, Okocim Brewery, Fablok, Łucznik Arms Factory, FŁT-Kraśnik, Jaworzno Power Station, Siersza Power Plant, Huta Stalowa Wola, Janina Coal Mine, Sobieski Coal Mine, Zakłady Azotowe Tarnów-Mościce. Furthermore, in early 1950s significant sulfur resources were discovered in Tarnobrzeg, as a result of which Siarkopol company was founded, and the city of Tarnobrzeg quickly grew. In 1975, coal was discovered northeast of Lublin, and soon afterwards, Bogdanka Coal Mine and Piaski Coal Mine were opened.
Between 1971 and 1977, Central Trunk Line was opened, which goes along western boundary of the province, and which connects Kraków and Katowice, with Warsaw. In the early 1980s, construction of a highway between Kraków and Katowice began. The 61-kilometer road is now run by Stalexport Autostrada Małopolska, and is part of A4 highway.
Residents of Lesser Poland frequently protested against Communist government. Major centers of anti-Communist resistance were in Kraków, Nowa Huta, Radom, and Lublin. Among major protests that took place in the province were 1968 Polish political crisis (with Kraków as one of major centers of protests), June 1976 protests (in Radom), Lublin 1980 strikes, 31 August 1982 demonstrations in Poland (in several locations), 1988 Polish strikes (with Stalowa Wola as one of major centers). Several anti-Nazi, and anti-Communist leaders hailed from Lesser Poland: Jan Piwnik, Emil August Fieldorf, Leopold Okulicki, Ryszard Siwiec, Stanisław Pyjas, Hieronim Dekutowski, Andrzej Gwiazda, Andrzej Czuma.
A number of key personalities of Communist government were born in Lesser Poland, including Józef Cyrankiewicz, Bolesław Bierut, Edward Gierek, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Czesław Kiszczak, Stanisław Kania, Hilary Minc, Edward Ochab, Michał Rola-Żymierski, Józef Oleksy.
Among prominent personalities of Polish cultural life of the 20th century, who were born in Lesser Poland, there are: Xawery Dunikowski, Witold Gombrowicz, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Sławomir Mrożek, Tadeusz Kantor, Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, Marek Kondrat, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Krzysztof Penderecki, Zbigniew Preisner, Leon Schiller, Jerzy Stuhr, Jan Sztaudynger, Grzegorz Turnau, Jerzy Turowicz.
In 1998, the government of Poland carried out administrative reform of the country. For the first time in history, Lesser Poland Voivodeship was created, with capital in Kraków, and area of 15,108 square kilometers. The new province covers only a small, southwestern part of historical Lesser Poland.
Today, Lesser Poland is divided between several voivodeships: whole Lesser Poland Voivodeship, whole Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, western half of Lublin Voivodeship, western part of Subcarpathian Voivodeship, eastern half of Silesian Voivodeship, southern part of Mazovian Voivodeship and southeastern corner of Łódź Voivodeship (around Opoczno).
There were suggestions that Lesser Poland voivodeship should stretch from Bielsko-Biała, to Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski and Sandomierz. Furthermore, creation of Old Poland Voivodeship was proposed, on the historical lands of northern Lesser Poland. Also, since about half of territory of current Silesian Voivodeship belongs to historical Lesser Poland, there are suggestions to rename it into "Silesian – Lesser Poland Voivodeship".
The list is based on the Polish Central Statistical Office list of 100 biggest cities of Poland, as for 30 June 2008.
In the Kingdom of Poland and Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, several other locations used to be important urban centers of Lesser Poland, but in the course of the time, their significance declined. The main example is Sandomierz, which for hundreds of years was one of the most important cities of Poland, but now is a town of 25,000. Other examples of historically important places, which are now little towns or villages are:
History of industry in Lesser Poland goes back to prehistoric times, when in Świętokrzyskie Mountains, first bloomeries were constructed. In the Middle Ages, first plants were opened in that area, and as a result, Old-Polish Industrial Region was created, which was a major industrial region of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the 17th century, first Polish blast furnaces were constructed in Samsonów by Italian engineer Hieronim Caccio. Apart from iron products, used for military purposes, Old-Polish Industrial Region also manufactured charcoal and glass. In 1782, in Poland there were 34 bloomeries, out of which 27 were located in Old-Polish Industrial Region. Another major industrial area of Lesser Poland is Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, where in the 16th century, lead, silver, and zinc were found. As early as in the 15th century, coal was exctracted in Trzebinia – Siersza, and in the following centuries, especially in the 19th century, several coal mines and steel mills were opened in Zagłębie and in Zagłębie Krakowskie (first coal mine in Jaworzno was opened in 1792). In nearby Olkusz, the history of zinc mining dates to the 12th century when Casimir II the Just set up a mining settlement. Also, in the towns of Wieliczka and Bochnia, salt mines were established in the 12th and 13th centuries (see Bochnia Salt Mine, Wieliczka Salt Mine).
In the 20th century, natural resources were also discovered in central and eastern counties Lesser Poland.
In 1964, the world's largest open-pit sulfur mine was opened in Machów near Tarnobrzeg. Other sulfur deposits in the area of Tarnobrzeg are Jeziorko, Grzybów-Gacki, and Grębów-Wydza. The mine at Machów is now closed. In the late 1960s, eastern Lesser Poland became one of three coal basins of the country, when Lublin Basin was created. Major coal mine in the area is KWK Bogdanka near Łęczna, which is the only coal mine in Poland which has continuously generated a profit. Other Polish coal mines located in Lesser Poland are those found in western part of the province, along the boundary with Upper Silesia – KWK Janina in Jaworzno, KWK Sobieski, and also in Jaworzno. Copper and silver are extracted in Myszków (see Myszków mine).
In the late 1930s, the government of the Second Polish Republic created Central Industrial Region, which was almost exclusively located in Lesser Poland. Currently, within borders of the province, there are following industrial regions:
In 2009, Polityka weekly made its own list of 500 biggest Polish companies. According to the list, second biggest company of the country was Polska Grupa Energetyczna, which, as Polityka stated, is headquartered in Lublin. Third biggest company of Poland in 2009 was "Fiat Auto Poland" from Bielsko-Biała. Other Lesser Polish companies which ranked high were: "BP Poland" from Kraków (ranked 12th), "Emperia Holding" from Lublin (ranked 26th), Kolporter Holding from Kielce (ranked 43rd), and Żywiec Brewery (ranked 44th). Other major companies of Lesser Poland are "Azoty Tarnów", Bank BPH, Bogdanka Coal Mine, Carlsberg Polska, Comarch, "Dębica SA", "Huta Częstochowa", "Huta Katowice", Fablok, FŁT-Kraśnik, Huta Stalowa Wola, "Instal-Lublin", Janina Coal Mine, Jaworzno Power Station, Kozienice Power Station, Łucznik Arms Factory, "Nowiny Cement Plant" near Kielce, Połaniec Power Station, PZL Mielec, PZL-Świdnik, Sobieski Coal Mine, Tadeusz Sendzimir Steelworks.
Since the lands of historical Lesser Poland belong now to different voivodeships, unemployment rate differs from one region to another. In January 2010, in Poland the unemployment rate was 12,7%. In Silesian Voivodeship, eastern half of which is Lesser Poland, it was 9,9%, in Lesser Poland Voivodeship – 10,5%, in Subcarpathian Voivodeship – 16,3%, in Holy Cross Voivodeship – 15,5%, in Lublin Voivodeship – 13,6%, and in Mazovian Voivodeship (southern part of which is Lesser Poland) – 9,6%. In Lesser Poland's cities, the best situation was in Kraków (as for November 2009), where 4,1% had no job. In Bielsko-Biała, the rate was 5,7%, in Lublin – 8,8%, in Siedlce – 9,1%, in Tarnów – 9,2%, in Nowy Sącz – 10%, in Kielce and Częstochowa – 10,1%, in Jaworzno – 10,2%, in Dąbrowa Górnicza – 10,3%, in Sosnowiec – 12,2%, and in Tarnobrzeg – 14,3%. The worst situation on the job market (as for November 2009) was in Radom, where unemployment rate was 20,9% (it made Radom second worst city county of the nation, only after Grudziądz).
Several European roads (see International E-road network) cross Lesser Poland. The most important one is the European route E40, which goes from west to east, across whole Europe. In Lesser Poland, the E40 goes from Jaworzno, via Kraków and Tarnów, towards eastern border of the country. Another main European road in Lesser Poland is the E77, which goes from north to south, via Radom, Kielce and Kraków, to southern border of Poland at Chyżne. Third major European road in Lesser Poland is the E30, which crosses the territory of the province in its extreme northeast corner, in Siedlce. Apart from these roads, Lesser Poland is crossed by the following European routes:
Within borders of historical Lesser Poland, there are two airports – John Paul II International Airport Kraków – Balice, and Katowice International Airport, which is located in the village of Pyrzowice, on the border between Lesser Poland and Upper Silesia. Pyrzowice is part of Gmina Ożarowice, which after Partitions of Poland, and Congress of Vienna belonged to Będzin County of the Russian Empire. In the interbellum, the area of future airport belonged to Lesser Poland's Kielce Voivodeship, and in 1945, was transferred to Katowice Voivodeship (initially "Silesian-Dąbrowa Voivodeship"). In 1998, Ożarowice, together with the airport, was attached to Tarnowskie Góry County, despite the fact that it is not located in Upper Silesia
Further airports in Lesser Poland will be opened in the future – Lublin – Świdnik, Kielce – Obice, and Radom – Sadków. Also, Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport is located on eastern border of the province.
Railroad network of Lesser Poland is very unevenly distributed. It is very dense in the west, along the border with Upper Silesia, and sparse in the east, especially along the Vistula, and around Lublin. All major cities of the province are connected with each other, however traveling from Kraków to Lublin is time-consuming, as trains have to take an extended route, via Kielce, Radom, and Dęblin. Also, there is no direct connection between Tarnów and Kielce, as these cities belonged to different countries before 1918. Underdevelopment of the railroads in northern and eastern Lesser Poland is the result of the policy of the Russian Empire. For military reasons, the Russians were not interested in construction of a dense network of lines along the border with Germany and Austria-Hungary, allowing only the construction of narrow-gauge connections. Along the Vistula, between Kraków and Dęblin (the distance of some 320 kilometers), there are only four rail bridges – in Dęblin (rebuilt after the war, in 1947), in Sandomierz (built in 1928), in Tarnobrzeg-Nagnajów (built in 1961, together with a road bridge), and in Zaduszniki (built in 1979 for the Broad Gauge Metallurgy Line). In Kraków itself, there are three rail bridges over the Vistula.
Among rail hubs of Lesser Poland, there are Bielsko-Biała, Chabówka, Częstochowa, Dąbrowa Górnicza, Dębica, Dęblin, Jaworzno-Szczakowa, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska Lanckorona, Kielce, Koniecpol, Kozłów, Kraków, Lublin, Łuków, Muszyna, Nowy Sącz, Oświęcim, Siedlce, Spytkowice, Skarżysko-Kamienna, Stalowa Wola, Stróże, Sucha Beskidzka, Radom, Tarnów, Trzebinia, Tunel, Zawiercie, and Żywiec.
In the late 1970s, the Communist government built the broad-gauge Broad Gauge Metallurgy Line, which crosses Lesser Poland from west to east along the Vistula.
The historical capital of Lesser Poland – Kraków – is regarded as the cultural capital of Poland, while Zakopane is considered the winter capital of Poland. In 1978, UNESCO placed Kraków's Old Town on the list of World Heritage Sites. From Sandomierz to Kraków goes the re-established Lesser Polish Way, one of the routes of the medieval Way of St. James. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists come to Lesser Poland, to see its historic cities – Sandomierz, Kazimierz Dolny, Zakopane, Biecz, Opatów, Szydłów, Lublin, and Kraków. Famous Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa, spiritual capital of the country, attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, as well as Auschwitz concentration camp (also placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites List). Lesser Poland has many museums, the city of Kraków itself has about sixty of them. Among the most famous are The Czartoryski Museum, The Galicia Jewish Museum, The National Museum, Kraków, Polish Aviation Museum, Sukiennice Museum, and Wawel Castle. There are museums in other locations of the province, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Bielsko-Biała Museum, Holy Father John Paul II Family Home in Wadowice, "Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom", "Lublin Museum", "Museum of Częstochowa", "Museum of Sandomierz Diocese", "Museum of Żywiec Brewery", "Museum of Zagłębie in Będzin", Przypkowscy Clock Museum, "Regional Museum in Wiślica", "Regional Museum in Siedlce", "Tytus Chałubiński Tatra Museum in Zakopane".
Among other major places of interest of the province are: Baranów Sandomierski Castle, Będzin Castle, Chęciny Castle, Czarnolas, Dunajec river castles, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska park (UNESCO World Heritage Sites List), Krzyżtopór, Lipnica Murowana, Lublin Castle, Łysa Góra, Maczuga Herkulesa, Majdanek concentration camp, Niedzica Castle, Ogrodzieniec, Pieskowa Skała, Temple of the Sibyl, Trail of the Eagles' Nests, Wieliczka Salt Mine (UNESCO World Heritage Sites List), Wooden Churches of Southern Lesser Poland (UNESCO World Heritage Sites List). Furthermore, thousands of tourists come to Radom in northern Lesser Poland, to watch the popular, biannual Radom Air Show. Lesser Poland has a number of open-air museums – "Góra Birów" in Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, "Museum of Kielce Village" in Kielce, "Museum of Lublin Village" in Lublin, "Museum of Folk Culture" in Kolbuszowa, "Museum of Radom Village" in Radom, "Vistula River Etnographic Park" in Babice, "Nowy Sącz Etnographic Park" in Nowy Sącz, "Orawa Etnographic Park" in Zubrzyca Górna, "Chabówka Rolling-Stock Heritage Park" in Chabówka. The Małopolska Institute of Culture, located in Kraków, promotes the activities of regional museums and smaller sites of interest.
Lesser Poland is famous for its underground waters and spas, such as Busko-Zdrój, Solec-Zdrój, Nałęczów, Muszyna, Szczawnica, Piwniczna, Wysowa-Zdrój, Rabka, Swoszowice, Żegiestów, Krzeszowice, Wieliczka, and Krynica-Zdrój. Mountains and resorts of the province make it a major center of Polish tourism – Tatra National Park is visited by around 3 million tourists every year.
The following National Parks are located in Lesser Poland:
Lesser Poland is home to Poland's oldest university – Kraków's Jagiellonian University, which was established in 1364. For centuries, it was the only college of the province, and of the whole country. In December 1918, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin was opened, becoming second university of Lesser Poland. In 1944, also in Lublin, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University was established.
There are several technical universities in Lesser Poland – Kraków's AGH University of Science and Technology, and University of Technology, as well as University of Bielsko-Biała, Częstochowa University of Technology, Lublin University of Technology, Kazimierz Pułaski Technical University of Radom, and Kielce University of Technology.
Future teachers may study at Pedagogical University of Cracow, or Jan Długosz University in Częstochowa, and future physicians at Jagiellonian University Medical College, and Medical University of Lublin. Other state colleges are Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków, Agricultural University of Cracow, University of Life Sciences in Lublin, and Cracow University of Economics. Unique in the country is the Polish Air Force Academy, located in Dęblin. Among private colleges of Lesser Poland, there is Wyższa Szkoła Biznesu – National-Louis University in Nowy Sącz.
Since Lesser Poland ceased to exist as a unified region in the late 18th century, during the Partitions of Poland, most of its inhabitants are not aware of their heritage. Even the residents of Jaworzno, a city which for centuries belonged to Kraków Land and only in 1975 was transferred to Katowice Voivodeship (see Voivodeships of Poland (1975–98)), are not familiar with their Lesser Polish roots. In a poll in April 2011, 57% of Jaworzno's inhabitants stated that their city is historically tied with Lesser Poland, but as many as 36% said their city is tied with Upper Silesia. Polish linguist Jan Miodek emphasizes the fact that linguistically, Będzin is closer to Myślenice than to Tarnowskie Góry, only 20 km away. Miodek wrote that even though Upper Silesia and Lesser Poland's Zagłębie Dąbrowskie are industrially and administratively tied, both regions are culturally and linguistically different from each other. Residents of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie are known for their dislike of Upper Silesians, whom they call "hanysy", while the Silesians call them "gorole". In recent years, more inhabitants of Zagłębie become aware of their Lesser Poland's heritage, Also, after Partitions of Poland, when Austrian province of Galicia was created, the cities of Rzeszów and Przemyśl, which are part of historical Red Ruthenia, became to be associated with Lesser Poland. Therefore, currently the notion of Lesser Poland most commonly applies to the two voivodeships which in the past belonged to Austrian Empire – Lesser Poland Voivodeship, and Subcarpathian Voivodeship
Among several Lesser Poland's regional organizations, one of the most important is "Stowarzyszenie Gmin i Powiatów Małopolski" ("The Association of Villages and Counties of Lesser Poland"). It publishes a magazine called "Wspólnota Małopolska" ("Lesser Polish Community"), and every year it chooses a "Lesser Polish Person of the Year" (among winners are John Paul II, Anna Dymna, and Stanisław Dziwisz). "The Association of Villages and Counties of Lesser Poland" has over 120 members from four Polish voivodeships. Among members are cities of Kraków, Częstochowa, Bielsko-Biała, Tarnów, and Przemyśl.
Arguably, the most famous product of Lesser Polish cuisine is the bagel, which was invented in Kraków. Other famous food specialties of the province are oscypek (EU Protected Geographical Status), slivovitz from the village of Łącko, bublik, papal cream cake from Wadowice, Lisiecka Sausage (EU Protected Geographical Status), and Bryndza Podhalańska. Among other popular products that are made in Lesser Poland, there are beers (Browary Lubelskie, Żywiec Beer, and Okocim Beer), pastas and snacks from Lublin's Lubella, Kielce Mayonnaise, coffee substitute beverage INKA from Skawina, chocolates from Kraków's Wawel Factory, juices from Tymbark, vodka Żołądkowa Gorzka produced in Lublin, and Chopin produced in Siedlce.
Folk costumes from Lesser Poland are widely known across the country – a dancing couple, dressed in traditional Kraków costume (Krakowiacy), is presented on the logo of renowned Żywiec beer, and Podhale is one of few Polish regions, where people regularly wear their traditional costumes. Both Kraków and Podhale folk costumes are among most popular garbs in Poland. Other folk costumes from the region are those of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, Sandomierz, Rzeszów, Częstochowa, Kielce, Radom (regarded as the most traditional of all Polish costumes), Opoczno, Holy Cross Mountains, Nowy Sącz, and Lublin. There are several folk festivals in Lesser Poland, such as "On the frontier of Lesser Poland and Mazovia" (in Opoczno), "Folk Festival of Józef Myszka" (in Museum of Radom Village in Iłża), annual "Days of Lesser Poland's Cultural Heritage", "Week of the Beskidy Culture" (in several locations), Wianki in Kraków, "Festival of Old Music and Culture" in Niepołomice, "Festival of Folk Bands and Folk Singers" in Kazimierz Dolny, "International Folklore Meetings of Ignacy Wachowiak" in Lublin, "International Festival of Folklore of Mountain Lands" in Zakopane, Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków. Krakowiak is one of Polish national dances, other popular Lesser Poland's folk dances are "Zbójnicki" from Podhale and dances from Lublin. Among Lesser Poland's customs are Lajkonik, and Kraków szopka.
Several renowned sportspeople and entertainers come from Lesser Poland. Among them are some of the most famous personalities of contemporary Polish sports – boxer Tomasz Adamek, Formula 1 driver Robert Kubica, swimmer Paweł Korzeniowski, skier Justyna Kowalczyk, tennis player Agnieszka Radwańska, football and volleyball stars Jakub Błaszczykowski, Artur Boruc, and Piotr Gruszka. Among late and retired sports stars who were born in the region, there also are Polish Sportspersonalities of the Year: tennis player and Wimbledon finalist Jadwiga Jędrzejowska, skier Józef Łuszczek, ski jumper Stanisław Marusarz, and driver Sobiesław Zasada.
Kraków's major association football teams – KS Cracovia, and Wisła Kraków, are multiple champions of the country, also Stal Mielec won Polish championship twice (1973, 1976), and Garbarnia Kraków once (1931). Other popular football teams from Lesser Poland are Zagłębie Sosnowiec (four time Polish Cup winner), Górnik Łęczna, Korona Kielce, Motor Lublin, Radomiak Radom, Raków Częstochowa, Stal Stalowa Wola, and Sandecja Nowy Sącz.
Besides association football, Lesser Poland's teams were multiple national champions in other sports:
Major sports venues of the province are Stadion Miejski in Kraków, Kielce City Stadium, Marshal Józef Piłsudski Stadium in Kraków, Miejski Stadion Sportowy "KSZO" w Ostrowcu Sw., Stadion Ludowy in Sosnowiec, Dębowiec Sports Arena in Bielsko-Biała, "Hala Legionów" in Kielce, "Hala Globus" in Lublin, "Arena Częstochowa", "Kielce Racetrack", "Hala Sportowa MOSiR" in Radom, Wielka Krokiew in Zakopane.
Among popular rock music bands from Lesser Poland, there are Budka Suflera, Golec uOrkiestra, Maanam, and Zakopower. From Lesser Poland hail composers Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, and Krzysztof Penderecki, as well as singers Basia, Ewa Demarczyk, Justyna Steczkowska, Grzegorz Turnau, Maciej Zembaty. Major music festivals in the province are: "Coke Live Music Festival" in Kraków, "Celtic Music Festival ZAMEK" in Będzin, "Film Music Festival" in Kraków, "Gaude Mater" in Częstochowa, "Boyscout's Festival of School Music" in Kielce, "Summer with Chopin" in Busko-Zdrój, "Festiwal of Shanties" in Kraków, and "Festival of Student Song" in Kraków.
Lesser Polish dialect is spoken in southeastern corner of Poland, both in lands which belong to historical Lesser Poland, and in areas which are not part of the province (around Sieradz and Łęczyca). On the other hand, as seen on the map, Lesser Polish dialect is not spoken in extreme northeast of Lesser Poland, in Siedlce and vicinity, where people rather speak Masovian dialect. Descending from the language of the Vistulans, it is the most numerous dialectal group in modern Poland. According to Wincenty Pol, it is divided into three subdivisions: Sandomierz dialect, Lublin dialect, and Sanok dialect.
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Lesser Polish dialect, together with Greater Polish dialect, contributed to creation of standard Polish, it also greatly influenced Silesian language (see Dialects of the Polish language), as well as dialects of Polish used in southern part of Kresy Wschodnie. Later on, however, its importance diminished and was replaced by Masovian dialect, which became the leading dialect of Polish. After Partitions of Poland, when Lesser Poland was divided between Austria and Russia, northern areas of the province took over many features of the Masovian dialect, while Lesser Polish dialect in Austrian province of Galicia was heavily influenced by German.
According to Multimedia Guide to Polish Dialects, a webpage maintained by University of Warsaw, Lesser Polish dialect is divided into the following subdialects:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18671
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Long-Term Capital Management
Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) was a hedge fund based in Greenwich, Connecticut that used absolute return trading strategies combined with high financial leverage. LTCM was founded in 1994 by John Meriwether, the former vice-chairman and head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers. Members of LTCM's board of directors included Myron S. Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who shared the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a "new method to determine the value of derivatives".
Initially successful with annualized return of over 21% (after fees) in its first year, 43% in the second year and 41% in the third year, in 1998 it lost $4.6 billion in less than four months due to a combination of high leverage and exposure to the 1997 Asian financial crisis and 1998 Russian financial crisis. The master hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Portfolio L.P., collapsed in the late 1990s, leading to an agreement on September 23, 1998, among 14 financial institutions,which included; Bankers Trust, Barclays, Chase Manhattan Bank, Crédit Agricole, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Paribas, Salomon Smith Barney, Société Générale, and UBS, for a $3.6 billion recapitalization under the supervision of the Federal Reserve. The fund liquidated and dissolved in early 2000.
John Meriwether headed Salomon Brothers' bond arbitrage desk until he resigned in 1991 amid a trading scandal. According to Chi-fu Huang, later a Principal at LTCM, the bond arbitrage group was responsible for 80–100% of Salomon's global total earnings from the late 1980s until the early 1990s.
In 1993 Meriwether created Long-Term Capital as a hedge fund and recruited several Salomon bond traders; Larry Hilibrand and Victor Haghani in particular would wield substantial clout and two future winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton. Other principals included Eric Rosenfeld, Greg Hawkins, William Krasker, Dick Leahy, James McEntee, Robert Shustak, and David W. Mullins Jr.
The company consisted of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a company incorporated in Delaware but based in Greenwich, Connecticut. LTCM managed trades in Long-Term Capital Portfolio LP, a partnership registered in the Cayman Islands. The fund's operation was designed to have extremely low overhead; trades were conducted through a partnership with Bear Stearns and client relations were handled by Merrill Lynch.
Meriwether chose to start a hedge fund to avoid the financial regulation imposed on more traditional investment vehicles, such as mutual funds, as established by the Investment Company Act of 1940—funds which accepted stakes from 100 or fewer individuals each with more than $1 million in net worth were exempt from most of the regulations that bound other investment companies. In late 1993, Meriwether approached several high-net-worth individuals in an effort to secure start-up capital for Long-Term Capital Management. With the help of Merrill Lynch, LTCM secured hundreds of millions of dollars from business owners, celebrities and even private university endowments and later the Italian central bank. The bulk of the money, however, came from companies and individuals connected to the financial industry. By 24 February 1994, the day LTCM began trading, the company had amassed just over $1.01 billion in capital.
The core investment strategy of the company was then known as involving convergence trading: using quantitative models to exploit deviations from fair value in the relationships between liquid securities across nations and asset classes. In fixed income the company was involved in US Treasuries, Japanese Government Bonds, UK Gilts, Italian BTPs, and Latin American debt, although their activities were not confined to these markets or to government bonds.
Fixed income securities pay a set of coupons at specified dates in the future, and make a defined redemption payment at maturity. Since bonds of similar maturities and the same credit quality are close substitutes for investors, there tends to be a close relationship between their prices (and yields). Whereas it is possible to construct a single set of valuation curves for derivative instruments based on LIBOR-type fixings, it is not possible to do so for government bond securities because every bond has slightly different characteristics. It is therefore necessary to construct a theoretical model of what the relationships between different but closely related fixed income securities should be.
For example, the most recently issued treasury bond in the US – known as the benchmark – will be more liquid than bonds of similar but slightly shorter maturity that were issued previously. Trading is concentrated in the benchmark bond, and transaction costs are lower for buying or selling it. As a consequence, it tends to trade more expensively than less liquid older bonds, but this expensiveness (or richness) tends to have a limited duration, because after a certain time there will be a new benchmark, and trading will shift to this security newly issued by the Treasury. One core trade in the LTCM strategies was to purchase the old benchmark – now a 29.75-year bond, and which no longer had a significant premium – and to sell short the newly issued benchmark 30-year, which traded at a premium. Over time the valuations of the two bonds would tend to converge as the richness of the benchmark faded once a new benchmark was issued. If the coupons of the two bonds were similar, then this trade would create an exposure to changes in the shape of the typically upward sloping yield curve: a flattening would depress the yields and raise the prices of longer-dated bonds, and raise the yields and depress the prices of shorter-dated bonds. It would therefore tend to create losses by making the 30-year bond that LTCM was short more expensive (and the 29.75-year bond they owned cheaper) even if there had been no change in the true relative valuation of the securities. This exposure to the shape of the yield curve could be managed at a portfolio level, and hedged out by entering a smaller steepener in other similar securities.
Because the magnitude of discrepancies in valuations in this kind of trade is small (for the benchmark Treasury convergence trade, typically a few basis points), in order to earn significant returns for investors, LTCM used leverage to create a portfolio that was a significant multiple (varying over time depending on their portfolio composition) of investors' equity in the fund. It was also necessary to access the financing market in order to borrow the securities that they had sold short. In order to maintain their portfolio, LTCM was therefore dependent on the willingness of its counterparties in the government bond (repo) market to continue to finance their portfolio. If the company was unable to extend its financing agreements, then it would be forced to sell the securities it owned and to buy back the securities it was short at market prices, regardless of whether these were favourable from a valuation perspective.
At the beginning of 1998, the firm had equity of $4.7 billion and had borrowed over $124.5 billion with assets of around $129 billion, for a debt-to-equity ratio of over 25 to 1. It had off-balance sheet derivative positions with a notional value of approximately $1.25 trillion, most of which were in interest rate derivatives such as interest rate swaps. The fund also invested in other derivatives such as equity options.
John Quiggin's book "Zombie Economics" (2010) states, "These derivatives, such as interest rate swaps, were developed with the supposed goal of allowing firms to manage risk on exchange rates and interest rate movements. Instead, they allowed speculation on an unparalleled scale."
LTCM was open about its overall strategy, but very secretive about its specific operations, including scattering trades among banks. And in perhaps a disconcerting note, "since Long-Term was flourishing, no one needed to know exactly what they were doing. All they knew was that the profits were coming in as promised," or at least perhaps what should have been a disconcerting note when looked at in hindsight.
Opaqueness may have made even more of a difference and investors may have had even a harder time judging the risk involved when LTCM moved from bond arbitrage into arbitrage involving common stocks and corporate mergers.
Under prevailing US tax laws, there was a different treatment of long-term capital gains, which were taxed at 20.0 percent, and income, which was taxed at 39.6 percent. The earnings for partners in a hedge fund was taxed at the higher rate applying to income, and LTCM applied its financial engineering expertise to legally transform income into capital gains. It did so by engaging in a transaction with UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) that would defer foreign interest income for seven years, thereby being able to earn the more favourable capital gains treatment. LTCM purchased a call option on 1 million of their own shares (valued then at $800 million) for a premium paid to UBS of $300 million. This transaction was completed in three tranches: in June, August, and October 1997. Under the terms of the deal, UBS agreed to reinvest the $300 million premium directly back into LTCM for a minimum of three years. In order to hedge its exposure from being short the call option, UBS also purchased 1 million of LTCM shares. Put-call parity means that being short a call and long the same amount of notional as underlying the call is equivalent to being short a put. So the net effect of the transaction was for UBS to lend $300 million to LTCM at LIBOR+50 and to be short a put on 1 million shares. UBS's own motivation for the trade was to be able to invest in LTCM – a possibility that was not open to investors generally – and to become closer to LTCM as a client. LTCM quickly became the largest client of the hedge fund desk, generating $15 million in fees annually.
LTCM attempted to create a splinter fund in 1996 called LTCM-X that would invest in even higher risk trades and focus on Latin American markets. LTCM turned to UBS to invest in and write the warrant for this new spin-off company.
LTCM faced challenges in deploying capital as their capital base grew due to initially strong returns, and as the magnitude of anomalies in market pricing diminished over time. James Surowiecki concludes that LTCM grew such a large portion of such illiquid markets that there was no diversity in buyers in them, or no buyers at all, so the wisdom of the market did not function and it was impossible to determine a price for its assets (such as Danish bonds in September 1998).
In Q4 1997, a year in which it earned 27%, LTCM returned capital to investors. It also broadened its strategies to include new approaches in markets outside of fixed income: many of these were not market neutral – they were dependent on overall interest rates or stock prices going up (or down) – and they were not traditional convergence trades. By 1998, LTCM had accumulated extremely large positions in areas such as merger arbitrage (betting on differences between a proprietary view of the likelihood of success of mergers and other corporate transactions would be completed and the implied market pricing) and S&P 500 options (net short long-term S&P volatility). LTCM had become a major supplier of S&P 500 vega, which had been in demand by companies seeking to essentially insure equities against future declines.
Despite the fund's prominent leadership and strong growth at LTCM, a 2014 "Business Insider" article pointed out that there were skeptics from the very beginning:
Investor Seth Klarman believed it was reckless to have the combination of high leverage and not accounting for rare or outlying scenarios. Software designer Mitchell Kapor, who had sold a statistical program with LTCM partner Eric Rosenfeld, saw quantitative finance as a faith, rather than science. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Samuelson was concerned about extraordinary events affecting the market.
Economist Eugene Fama found in his research that stocks were bound to have extreme outliers. Furthermore, he believed that, because they are subject to discontinuous price changes, real-life markets are inherently more risky than models. He became even more concerned when LTCM began adding stocks to their bond portfolio.
Although periods of distress have often created tremendous opportunities for relative value strategies, this did not prove to be the case on this occasion, and the seeds of LTCM's demise were sown before the Russian default of 17 August 1998. LTCM had returned $2.7 bn to investors in Q4 of 1997, although it had also raised a total in capital of $1.066bn from UBS and $133m from CSFB. Since position sizes had not been reduced, the net effect was to raise the leverage of the fund.
Although 1997 had been a very profitable year for LTCM (27%), the lingering effects of the 1997 Asian crisis continued to shape developments in asset markets into 1998. Although this crisis had originated in Asia, its effects were not confined to that region. The rise in risk aversion had raised concerns amongst investors regarding all markets heavily dependent on international capital flows, and this shaped asset pricing in markets outside Asia too.
In May and June 1998 returns from the fund were -6.42% and -10.14% respectively, reducing LTCM's capital by $461 million. This was further aggravated by the exit of Salomon Brothers from the arbitrage business in July 1998. Because the Salomon arbitrage group (where many of LTCM's strategies had first been incubated) had been a significant player in the kinds of strategies also pursued by LTCM, the liquidation of the Salomon portfolio (and its announcement itself) had the effect of depressing the prices of the securities owned by LTCM and bidding up the prices of the securities LTCM was short. According to Michael Lewis in the New York Times article of July 1998, returns that month were circa -10%. One LTCM partner commented that because there was a clear temporary reason to explain the widening of arbitrage spreads, at the time it gave them more conviction that these trades would eventually return to fair value (as they did, but not without widening much further first).
Such losses were accentuated through the 1998 Russian financial crisis in August and September 1998, when the Russian government defaulted on its domestic local currency bonds. This came as a surprise to many investors because according to traditional economic thinking of the time, a sovereign issuer should never need to default given access to the printing press. There was a flight to quality, bidding up the prices of the most liquid and benchmark securities that LTCM was short, and depressing the price of the less liquid securities it owned. This phenomenon occurred not merely in the US Treasury market but across the full spectrum of financial assets. Although LTCM was diversified, the nature of its strategy implied an exposure to a latent factor risk of the price of liquidity across markets. As a consequence, when a much larger flight to liquidity occurred than had been anticipated when constructing its portfolio, its positions designed to profit from convergence to fair value incurred large losses as expensive but liquid securities became more expensive, and cheap but illiquid securities became cheaper. By the end of August, the fund had lost $1.85 billion in capital.
Because LTCM was not the only fund pursuing such a strategy, and because the proprietary trading desks of the banks also held some similar trades, the divergence from fair value was made worse as these other positions were also liquidated. As rumours of LTCM's difficulties spread, some market participants positioned in anticipation of a forced liquidation. Victor Haghani, a partner at LTCM, said about this time "it was as if there was someone out there with our exact portfolio... only it was three times as large as ours, and they were liquidating all at once."
Because these losses reduced the capital base of LTCM, and its ability to maintain the magnitude of its existing portfolio, LTCM was forced to liquidate a number of its positions at a highly unfavorable moment and suffer further losses. A vivid illustration of the consequences of these forced liquidations is given by Lowenstein (2000). He reports that LTCM established an arbitrage position in the dual-listed company (or "DLC") Royal Dutch Shell in the summer of 1997, when Royal Dutch traded at an 8%–10% premium relative to Shell. In total $2.3 billion was invested, half of which was "long" in Shell and the other half was "short" in Royal Dutch.
LTCM was essentially betting that the share prices of Royal Dutch and Shell would converge because in their belief the present value of the future cashflows of the two securities should be similar. This might have happened in the long run, but due to its losses on other positions, LTCM had to unwind its position in Royal Dutch Shell. Lowenstein reports that the premium of Royal Dutch had increased to about 22%, which implies that LTCM incurred a large loss on this arbitrage strategy. LTCM lost $286 million in equity pairs trading and more than half of this loss is accounted for by the Royal Dutch Shell trade.
The company, which had historically earned annualised compounded returns of almost 40% up to this point, experienced a flight to liquidity. In the first three weeks of September, LTCM's equity tumbled from $2.3 billion at the start of the month to just $400 million by September 25. With liabilities still over $100 billion, this translated to an effective leverage ratio of more than 250-to-1.
Historian Niall Ferguson proposed that LTCM's collapse stemmed in part from their use of only five years of financial data to prepare their mathematical models, thus drastically under-estimating the risks of a profound economic crisis. Using ten years of data would have included the 1987 US market crash, while using 80 years of data would have included many minor and major economic downturns including the 1918 Russian sovereign debt default after the First World War and Russian Civil War, highlighting the possibility of a major foreign event causing international repercussions that LTCM seemingly overlooked.
Long-Term Capital Management did business with nearly every important person on Wall Street. Indeed, much of LTCM's capital was composed of funds from the same financial professionals with whom it traded. As LTCM teetered, Wall Street feared that Long-Term's failure could cause a chain reaction in numerous markets, causing catastrophic losses throughout the financial system.
After LTCM failed to raise more money on its own, it became clear it was running out of options. On September 23, 1998, Goldman Sachs, AIG, and Berkshire Hathaway offered then to buy out the fund's partners for $250 million, to inject $3.75 billion and to operate LTCM within Goldman's own trading division. The offer was stunningly low to LTCM's partners because at the start of the year their firm had been worth $4.7 billion. Warren Buffett gave Meriwether less than one hour to accept the deal; the time lapsed before a deal could be worked out.
Seeing no options left, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a bailout of $3.625 billion by the major creditors to avoid a wider collapse in the financial markets. The principal negotiator for LTCM was general counsel James G. Rickards. The contributions from the various institutions were as follows:
In return, the participating banks got a 90% share in the fund and a promise that a supervisory board would be established. LTCM's partners received a 10% stake, still worth about $400 million, but this money was completely consumed by their debts. The partners once had $1.9 billion of their own money invested in LTCM, all of which was wiped out.
The fear was that there would be a chain reaction as the company liquidated its securities to cover its debt, leading to a drop in prices, which would force other companies to liquidate their own debt in a vicious cycle.
The total losses were found to be $4.6 billion. The losses in the major investment categories were (ordered by magnitude):
Long-Term Capital was audited by Price Waterhouse LLP. After the bailout by the other investors, the panic abated, and the positions formerly held by LTCM were eventually liquidated at a small profit to the rescuers. Although termed a bailout, the transaction effectively amounted to an orderly liquidation of the positions held by LTCM with creditor involvement and supervision by the Federal Reserve Bank. No public money was injected or directly at risk, and the companies involved in providing support to LTCM were also those that stood to lose from its failure. The creditors themselves did not lose money from being involved in the transaction.
Some industry officials said that Federal Reserve Bank of New York involvement in the rescue, however benign, would encourage large financial institutions to assume more risk, in the belief that the Federal Reserve would intervene on their behalf in the event of trouble. Federal Reserve Bank of New York actions raised concerns among some market observers that it could create moral hazard since even though the Fed had not directly injected capital, its use of moral suasion to encourage creditor involvement emphasized its interest in supporting the financial system .
LTCM's strategies were compared (a contrast with the market efficiency aphorism that there are no $100 bills lying on the street, as someone else has already picked them up) to "picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer"—a likely small gain balanced against a small chance of a large loss, like the payouts from selling an out-of-the-money naked call option.
In 1998, the chairman of Union Bank of Switzerland resigned as a result of a $780 million loss incurred from the being short put options on LTCM, which had become significantly in-the-money due to LTCM's collapse.
After the bailout, Long-Term Capital Management continued operations. In the year following the bailout, it earned 10%. By early 2000, the fund had been liquidated, and the consortium of banks that financed the bailout had been paid back, but the collapse was devastating for many involved. Mullins, once considered a possible successor to Alan Greenspan, saw his future with the Fed dashed. The theories of Merton and Scholes took a public beating. In its annual reports, Merrill Lynch observed that mathematical risk models "may provide a greater sense of security than warranted; therefore, reliance on these models should be limited."
After helping unwind LTCM, John Meriwether launched JWM Partners. Haghani, Hilibrand, Leahy, and Rosenfeld signed up as principals of the new firm. By December 1999, they had raised $250 million for a fund that would continue many of LTCM's strategies—this time, using less leverage. With the credit crisis of 2008, JWM Partners LLC was hit with a 44% loss from September 2007 to February 2009 in its Relative Value Opportunity II fund. As such, JWM Hedge Fund was shut down in July 2009. Meriwether then launched a third hedge fund in 2010 called JM Advisors Management. A 2014 "Business Insider" article stated that his later two funds used "the same investment strategy from his time at LTCM and Salomon."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18673
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Liberal arts education
Liberal arts education (from Latin "free" and "art or principled practice") is the traditional academic program in Western higher education. "Liberal arts" generally covers four areas: the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Its central academic disciplines include physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, logic, linguistics, literature, history, political science, sociology, psychology, and mathematics. "Liberal arts education" can refer to studies in a liberal arts degree program or to a university education more generally. Such a course of study contrasts with those that are principally vocational, professional, or technical.
Before they became known by their Latin variations ("artes liberales, septem artes liberales", "studia liberalia"), the liberal arts were the continuation of Ancient Greek methods of enquiry that began with a "desire for a universal understanding." Pythagoras argued that there was a mathematical and geometrical harmony to the cosmos or the universe; his followers linked the four arts of astronomy, mathematics, geometry and music into one area of study to form the "disciplines of the mediaeval Quadrivium". In 4th century Athens, the government of the polis, or city-state, respected the ability of rhetoric or public speaking above almost everything else. Eventually rhetoric, grammar and dialectic (logic) became the educational programme of the Trivium. Together they came to be known as the seven liberal arts. Originally these subjects or skills were held by classical antiquity to be essential for a free person (, "worthy of a free person") to acquire in order to take an active part in civic life, something that included among other things participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and participating in military service. While the arts of the quadrivium might have appeared prior to the arts of the trivium by the middle ages educational programmes taught the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) first while the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) were the following stage of education.
Rooted in the basic curriculum – the or "well-rounded education" – of late Classical and Hellenistic Greece, the "liberal arts" or "liberal pursuits" (Latin ) were already so called in formal education during the Roman Empire. The first recorded use of the term "liberal arts" () occurs in by Marcus Tullius Cicero, but it is unclear if he created the term. Seneca the Younger discusses liberal arts in education from a critical Stoic point of view in "Moral Epistles". The exact classification of the liberal arts varied however in Roman times, and it was only after Martianus Capella in the 5th century AD influentially brought the seven liberal arts as bridesmaids to the "Marriage of Mercury and Philology", that they took on canonical form.
The four "scientific" – music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (or astrology) – were known from the time of Boethius onwards as the "quadrivium". After the 9th century, the remaining three arts of the "humanities" – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – were grouped as the "trivium". It was in that two-fold form that the seven liberal arts were studied in the medieval Western university. During the Middle Ages, logic gradually came to take predominance over the other parts of the "trivium".
In the 12th century the iconic image – (Philosophy and seven liberal arts) "–" was produced by Alsatian nun and abbess Herrad of Landsberg with her community of women as part of the "Hortus deliciarum." Their encyclopedia compiled ideas drawn from philosophy, theology, literature, music, arts, and sciences and was intended as a teaching tool for women of the abbey. Compiled between 1167 and 1185 it contained humanity's most significant ideas. The image "Philosophy and seven liberal arts" represents the circle of philosophy, and is presented as a rosette of a cathedral: a central circle and a series of semicircles arranged all around. It shows learning and knowledge organised into seven relations, the or Seven Liberal Arts. Each of these arts find their source in the Greek φιλοσοφία, philosophia, literally “love of wisdom”. St. Albert the Great, a doctor of the Catholic Church, asserted that the seven liberal arts were referred to in Sacred Scripture, saying: "It is written, 'Wisdom hath built herself a house, she hath hewn her out seven pillars' (Proverbs 9:1). This house is the Blessed Virgin; the seven pillars are the seven liberal arts."
In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists and their Northern counterparts, despite in many respects continuing the traditions of the Middle Ages, reversed that process. Re-christening the old trivium with a new and more ambitious name: , and also increasing its scope, they downplayed logic as opposed to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric, and added to them history, Greek, and moral philosophy (ethics), with a new emphasis on poetry as well. The educational curriculum of humanism spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth century and became the educational foundation for the schooling of European elites, the functionaries of political administration, the clergy of the various legally recognized churches, and the learned professions of law and medicine. The ideal of a liberal arts, or humanistic education grounded in classical languages and literature, persisted until the middle of the twentieth century.
Similarly, Wilhelm von Humboldt's educational model in Prussia (now Germany), which later became the role model for higher education also in North America, went beyond vocational training. In a letter to the Prussian king, he wrote:
The philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin has criticized discrepancies between Humboldt's ideals and the contemporary European education policy, which narrowly understands education as a preparation for the labor market, arguing that we need to decide between "McKinsey and Humboldt".
The modern use of the term "liberal arts" consists of four areas: the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Academic areas that are associated with the term liberal arts include:
For example, the core courses for Georgetown University's Doctor of Liberal Studies program cover philosophy, theology, history, art, literature, and the social sciences. Wesleyan University's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program includes courses in visual arts, art history, creative and professional writing, literature, history, mathematics, film, government, education, biology, psychology, and astronomy.
Liberal arts education at the secondary school level prepares students for higher education at a university.
In 2008, the Classical Liberal Arts Academy was established, restoring the study of the seven liberal arts to the preparatory school curriculum, where they were found throughout history. Studies in Classical Grammar begin as early as age 7 and classical Arithmetic and Geometry are started by middle school (ages 12-14). Classical Philosophy and Theology are studied in the high school years (ages 15-18) as students discern and prepare for their future vocations.
Curricula differ from school to school, but generally include language, mathematics, informatics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, art, music, history, philosophy, civics, social sciences, and foreign languages.
In the United States, liberal arts colleges are schools emphasizing undergraduate study in the liberal arts. The teaching at liberal arts colleges is often Socratic, typically with small classes; professors are often allowed to concentrate more on their teaching responsibilities than are professors at research universities.
In addition, most four-year colleges are not devoted exclusively or primarily to liberal arts degrees, but offer a liberal arts degree, and allow students not majoring in liberal arts to take courses to satisfy distribution requirements in liberal arts.
Traditionally, a bachelor's degree in one particular area within liberal arts, with substantial study outside that main area, is earned over four years of full-time study. However, some universities such as Saint Leo University, Pennsylvania State University, Florida Institute of Technology, and New England College have begun to offer an associate degree in liberal arts. Colleges like the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts offer a unique program with only one degree offering, a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, and colleges like the University of Oklahoma College of Liberal Studies offer an online, part-time option for adult and nontraditional students.
Most students earn either a Bachelor of Arts degree or a Bachelor of Science degree; on completing undergraduate study, students might progress to either a liberal arts graduate school or a professional school (public administration, engineering, business, law, medicine, theology).
In most parts of Europe, liberal arts education is deeply rooted. In Germany, Austria and countries influenced by their education system it is called '"humanistische Bildung"' (humanistic education). The term is not to be confused with some modern educational concepts that use a similar wording. Educational institutions that see themselves in that tradition are often a "Gymnasium" (high school, grammar school). They aim at providing their pupils with comprehensive education ("Bildung") to form personality with regard to a pupil's own humanity as well as their innate intellectual skills. Going back to the long tradition of the liberal arts in Europe, education in the above sense was freed from scholastic thinking and re-shaped by the theorists of the Enlightenment; in particular, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Since students are considered to have received a comprehensive liberal arts education at "gymnasia", very often the role of liberal arts education in undergraduate programs at universities is reduced compared to the US educational system. Students are expected to use their skills received at the "gymnasium" to further develop their personality in their own responsibility, e.g. in universities' music clubs, theatre groups, language clubs, etc. Universities encourage students to do so and offer respective opportunities but do not make such activities part of the university's curriculum.
Thus, on the level of higher education, despite the European origin of the liberal arts college, the term "liberal arts college" usually denotes liberal arts colleges in the United States. With the exception of pioneering institutions such as Franklin University Switzerland (formerly known as Franklin College), established as a Europe-based, US-style liberal arts college in 1969, only recently some efforts have been undertaken to systematically "re-import" liberal arts education to continental Europe, as with Leiden University College The Hague, University College Utrecht, University College Maastricht, Amsterdam University College, Roosevelt Academy (now University College Roosevelt), ATLAS University College, Erasmus University College, the University of Groningen, Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts, Leuphana University of Lüneburg and Bard College Berlin, formerly known as the European College of Liberal Arts. As well as the colleges listed above, some universities in the Netherlands offer bachelors programs in Liberal Arts and Sciences (Tilburg University). Liberal arts (as a degree program) is just beginning to establish itself in Europe. For example, University College Dublin offers the degree, as does St. Marys University College Belfast, both institutions coincidentally on the island of Ireland. In the Netherlands, universities have opened constituent liberal arts colleges under the terminology since the late 1990s. The four-year bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Freiburg is the first of its kind in Germany. It started in October 2012 with 78 students. The first Liberal Arts degree program in Sweden was established at Gothenburg University in 2011, followed by a Liberal Arts Bachelor Programme at Uppsala University's Campus Gotland in the autumn of 2013. The first Liberal Arts program in Georgia was introduced in 2005 by American-Georgian Initiative for Liberal Education (AGILE), an NGO. Thanks to their collaboration, Ilia State University became the first higher education institution in Georgia to establish a liberal arts program.
In France, Chavagnes Studium, a Liberal Arts Study Centre in partnership with the Institut Catholique d'études supérieures, and based in a former Catholic seminary, is launching a two-year intensive BA in the Liberal Arts, with a distinctively Catholic outlook. It has been suggested that the liberal arts degree may become part of mainstream education provision in the United Kingdom, Ireland and other European countries. In 1999, the European College of Liberal Arts (now Bard College Berlin) was founded in Berlin and in 2009 it introduced a four-year Bachelor of Arts program in Value Studies taught in English, leading to an interdisciplinary degree in the humanities.
In England, the first institution to retrieve and update a liberal arts education at the undergraduate level was the University of Winchester with their BA (Hons) Modern Liberal Arts programme which launched in 2010. In 2012, University College London began its interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences BASc degree (which has kinship with the liberal arts model) with 80 students. King's College London launched the BA Liberal Arts, which has a slant towards arts, humanities and social sciences subjects. The New College of the Humanities also launched a new liberal education programme. Durham University has both a popular BA Liberal Arts and a BA Combined Honours in Social Sciences programme, both of which allow for interdisciplinary approaches to education. The University of Nottingham also has a Liberal Arts BA with study abroad options and links with its Natural Sciences degrees. In 2016, the University of Warwick launched a three/four-year liberal arts BA degree, which focuses on transdisciplinary approaches and problem-based learning techniques in addition to providing structured disciplinary pathways. And for 2017 entry UCAS lists 20 providers of liberal arts programmes.
In Scotland, the four-year undergraduate Honours degree, specifically the Master of Arts, has historically demonstrated considerable breadth in focus. In the first two years of Scottish MA and BA degrees students typically study a number of different subjects before specialising in their Honours years (third and fourth year). The University of Dundee and the University of Glasgow (at its Crichton Campus) are the only Scottish universities that currently offer a specifically named 'Liberal Arts' degree.
In Slovakia, the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) is located in the Old Town of Bratislava. It is the first liberal arts college in Central Europe. A private, accredited three-year degree-granting undergraduate institution, it opened in September 2006.
The Commission on Higher Education of the Philippines mandates a General Education curriculum required of all higher education institutions; it includes a number of liberal arts subjects, including history, art appreciation, and ethics, plus interdisciplinary electives. Many universities have much more robust liberal arts core curricula; most notably, the Jesuit universities such as Ateneo de Manila University have a strong liberal arts core curriculum that includes philosophy, theology, literature, history, and the social sciences. Forman Christian College is a liberal arts university in Lahore, Pakistan. It is one of the oldest institutions in the Indian subcontinent. It is a chartered university recognized by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan offers a holistic liberal arts and sciences experience to its students through its uniquely tailored liberal core program which is compulsory for all undergraduate degree students. The Underwood International College of Yonsei University, Korea, has compulsory liberal arts course for all the student body.
In India, there are many institutions that offer undergraduate UG or bachelor's degree/diploma and postgraduate PG or master's degree/diploma as well as doctoral PhD and postdoctoral studies and research, in this academic discipline. Manipal Academy of Higher Education – MAHE, an Institution of Eminence as recognised by MHRD of Govt of India in 2018, houses a Faculty of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and also others like Symbiosis & FLAME University in Pune, Ahmedabad University, Ashoka University. Lingnan University and University of Liberal Arts- Bangladesh (ULAB) are also a few such liberal arts colleges in Asia. International Christian University in Tokyo is the first and one of the very few liberal arts universities in Japan. Fulbright University Vietnam is the first liberal arts institution in Vietnam.
Campion College is a Roman Catholic dedicated liberal arts college, located in the western suburbs of Sydney. Founded in 2006, it is the first tertiary educational liberal arts college of its type in Australia. Campion offers a Bachelor of Arts in the Liberal Arts as its sole undergraduate degree. The key disciplines studied are history, literature, philosophy, and theology.
The Millis Institute is the School of Liberal Arts at Christian Heritage College located in Brisbane. Founded by Dr. Ryan Messmore, former President of Campion College, the Millis Institute offers a Bachelor of Arts in the Liberal Arts in which students can choose to major in Philosophy, Theology, History or Literature. It also strongly endorses a 'Study Abroad' program whereby students can earn credit towards their degree by undertaking two units over a five-week program at the University of Oxford. The Millis Institute is currently directed under Dr. Benjamin Myers.
In 1936 St. John's College changed its curriculum to focus on the Great Books of Western Civilization to provide a new sort of education that separated itself from the increasingly specialized nature of higher schooling. This was one of the first instances of a revival for the more classical approach to the liberal arts as expounded by Plato and Cicero. That work was continued by a number of small Catholic liberal arts institutions, like the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, that adopted the Great Books as a core for their Humanities program while at the same time preserving the seven liberal arts as a way of preparing their students to think for themselves rather than accept what their professors told them to think. With the introduction of the Great Books, the liberal arts education was now in direct conversation with the great minds of history who have shaped the modern world as we know it. At the same time these colleges focused on the basic formation of one's intellect that came from exercising the tools of logic, grammar, and rhetoric.
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Lateral consonant
A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English "L", as in "Larry".
For the most common laterals, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the upper teeth (see dental consonant) or the upper gum (see alveolar consonant), but there are many other possible places for laterals to be made. The most common laterals are approximants and belong to the class of liquids, but lateral fricatives and affricates are also common in some parts of the world. Some languages, such as the Iwaidja and Ilgar languages of Australia, have lateral flaps, and others, such as the Xhosa and Zulu languages of Africa, have lateral clicks.
When pronouncing the labiodental fricatives , the lip blocks the airflow in the centre of the vocal tract, so the airstream proceeds along the sides instead. Nevertheless, they are not considered lateral consonants because the airflow never goes over the tongue. No known language makes a distinction between lateral and non-lateral labiodentals. Plosives are never lateral, but they may have lateral release. Nasals are never lateral either, but some languages have lateral nasal clicks. For consonants articulated in the throat (laryngeals), the lateral distinction is not made by any language, although pharyngeal and epiglottal laterals are reportedly possible.
English has one lateral phoneme: the lateral approximant , which in many accents has two allophones. One, found before vowels as in "lady" or "fly", is called "clear l", pronounced as the alveolar lateral approximant with a "neutral" position of the body of the tongue. The other variant, so-called "dark l", found before consonants or word-finally, as in "bold" or "tell", is pronounced as the velarized alveolar lateral approximant with the tongue assuming a spoon-like shape with its back part raised, which gives the sound a - or -like resonance. In some languages, like Albanian, those two sounds are different phonemes. East Slavic languages contrast and but do not have [l].
In many British accents (e.g. Cockney), dark may undergo vocalization through the reduction and loss of contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, becoming a rounded back vowel or glide. This process turns "tell" into something like , as must have happened with "talk" or "walk" at some stage. A similar process happened during the development of many other languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Old French, and Polish, in all three of these resulting in voiced velar approximant or voiced labio-velar approximant , whence Modern French "sauce" as compared with Spanish "salsa", or Polish "Wisła" (pronounced ) as compared with English "Vistula".
In central and Venice dialects of Venetian, intervocalic has turned into a semivocalic , so that the written word "ła bała" is pronounced . The orthography uses the letter ł to represent this phoneme (it specifically represents not the sound but the phoneme that is, in some dialects, and, in others, ).
Many aboriginal Australian languages have a series of three or four lateral approximants, as do various dialects of Irish. Rarer lateral consonants include the retroflex laterals that can be found in many languages of India and in some Swedish dialects, and the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative , found in many Native North American languages, Welsh and Zulu. In Adyghe and some Athabaskan languages like Hän, both voiceless and voiced alveolar lateral fricatives occur, but there is no approximant. Many of these languages also have lateral affricates. Some languages have palatal or velar voiceless lateral fricatives or affricates, such as Dahalo and Zulu, but the IPA has no symbols for such sounds. However, appropriate symbols are easy to make by adding a lateral-fricative belt to the symbol for the corresponding lateral approximant (see below). Also, a devoicing diacritic may be added to the approximant.
Nearly all languages with such lateral obstruents also have the approximant. However, there are a number of exceptions, many of them located in the Pacific Northwest area of the United States. For example, Tlingit has but no . Other examples from the same area include Nuu-chah-nulth and Kutenai, and elsewhere, Chukchi and Kabardian.
Standard Tibetan has a voiceless lateral approximant, usually romanized as "lh", as in the name Lhasa.
A uvular lateral approximant has been reported to occur in some speakers of American English.
Pashto has a retroflex lateral flap.
There are a large number of lateral click consonants; 17 occur in !Xóõ.
Lateral trills are also possible, but they do not occur in any known language. They may be pronounced by initiating or with an especially forceful airflow. There is no symbol for them in the IPA. They are sometimes used to imitate bird calls, and they are a component of Donald Duck talk.
Only the alveolar lateral fricatives have dedicated letters in the IPA. However, others appear in the extIPA.
The IPA requires sounds to be defined as to centrality, as either central or lateral. However, languages may be ambiguous as to some consonants' laterality. A well-known example is the liquid consonant in Japanese, represented in common transliteration systems as , which can be recognized as a (post)alveolar tap, alveolar lateral flap, (post)alveolar lateral approximant, (post)alveolar approximant, voiced retroflex stop, and various less common forms.
A superscript is defined as lateral release.
Consonants may also be pronounced with simultaneous lateral and central airflow. This is well-known from speech pathology with a lateral lisp. However, it also occurs in nondisordered speech in some southern Arabic dialects and possibly some Modern South Arabian languages, which have pharyngealized nonsibilant and (simultaneous and ) and possibly a sibilant (simultaneous ). Examples are 'pain' in the dialect of Al-Rubu'ah and 'back' and 'hyena' in Rijal Alma'.
(Here the indicates simultaneous laterality rather than lateral release.) Old Arabic has been analyzed as having the emphatic central–lateral fricatives , and .
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Liquid consonant
In phonetics, liquids are a class of consonants consisting of voiced lateral approximants like together with rhotics like .
The grammarian Dionysius Thrax used the Greek word ὑγρός ("hygrós", "moist") to describe the sonorant consonants () of classical Greek. Most commentators assume that this referred to their "slippery" effect on meter in classical Greek verse when they occur as the second member of a consonant cluster. This word was calqued into Latin as , whence it has been retained in the Western European phonetic tradition.
Liquids as a class often behave in a similar way in the phonotactics of a language: for example, they often have the greatest freedom in occurring in consonant clusters.
Liquids are the consonants most prone to metathesis:
Liquids are also prone to dissimilation when they occur in sequence.
This example of a relatively old case of phonetic dissimilation has been artificially undone in the spelling of English "colonel", whose standard pronunciation is (with the r sound) in North-American English, or in RP. It was formerly spelt "coronel" and is a borrowing from French "coronnel", which arose as a result of dissimilation from Italian "colonnello".
Liquids are also the consonants most prone to occupying the nucleus slot in a syllable (the slot usually assigned to vowels). Thus Czech allows its liquid consonants and to be the center of its syllables – as witnessed by the classic tonguetwister "push (your) finger through (your) throat".
Languages differ in the number and nature of their liquid consonants.
Many languages, such as Japanese, Korean, or Polynesian languages (see below), have a single liquid phoneme that has both lateral and rhotic allophones.
English has two liquid phonemes, one lateral, and one rhotic, , exemplified in the words led" and red".
Many other European languages have one lateral and one rhotic phoneme. Some, such as Greek, Italian and Serbo-Croatian, have more than two liquid phonemes. All three languages have the set , with two laterals and one rhotic. Similarly, the Iberian languages contrast four liquid phonemes. , , , and a fourth phoneme that is an alveolar trill in all but some varieties of Portuguese, where it is a uvular trill or fricative (also, the majority of Spanish speakers lack and use the central instead). Some European languages, for example Russian and Irish, contrast a palatalized lateral–rhotic pair with an unpalatalized (or velarized) set (e.g. in Russian).
Elsewhere in the world, two liquids of the types mentioned above remains the most common attribute of a language's consonant inventory except in North America and Australia. In North America, a majority of languages do not have rhotics at all and there is a wide variety of lateral sounds though most are obstruent laterals rather than liquids. Most indigenous Australian languages are very rich in liquids, with some having as many as seven distinct liquids. They typically include dental, alveolar, retroflex and palatal laterals, and as many as three rhotics.
On the other side, there are many indigenous languages in the Amazon Basin and eastern North America, as well as a few in Asia and Africa, with no liquids.
Polynesian languages typically have only one liquid, which may be either a lateral or a rhotic. Non-Polynesian Oceanic languages usually have both and , occasionally more (e.g. Araki has , , ) or less (e.g. Mwotlap has only ). Hiw is unusual in having a prestopped velar lateral as its only liquid.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18679
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Laura Bertram
Laura Maureen Bertram (born 5 September 1978) is a Canadian actress best known for her role as Trance Gemini in "Andromeda".
Bertram was born in Toronto, Ontario, and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She earned her degree in history from the University of Guelph. She has two younger sisters named Heather (born 1981) and Jennifer (born 1984), who are former actresses. In 1997, Bertram was a ceramics instructor at Kilcoo Camp. She also used to sing in the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus.
Her credits include the TV series "Ready or Not", "Are You Afraid of the Dark?", "Seasons of Love", "Andromeda" as Trance Gemini, Supernatural, and the movies "Night of the Twisters", and "Dear America: So Far From Home". She appeared in Season 2 of "Robson Arms".
Bertram is a high school teacher; in addition, she also taught young actors at Biz Studio in Vancouver.
Bertram has won two Gemini Awards for "Best Performance in a Children's or Youth Program or Series" for "Ready or Not" in 1995 and for "Best Performance in a Children's or Youth Program or Series" for "Ready or Not" in 1998.
She has also been nominated for two Gemini Awards for "Best Performance in a Children's or Youth Program or Series" for "Ready or Not" in 1996 and for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series for "Platinum" in 1998.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18684
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Lou Ferrigno
Louis Jude Ferrigno Sr. (; born November 9, 1951) is an American actor, fitness trainer, fitness consultant and retired professional bodybuilder. As a bodybuilder, Ferrigno won an IFBB Mr. America title and two consecutive IFBB Mr. Universe titles, and appeared in the bodybuilding documentary "Pumping Iron". As an actor, he is best known for his title role in the CBS television series "The Incredible Hulk" and vocally reprising the role in subsequent animated and computer-generated incarnations. He has also appeared in European-produced fantasy-adventures such as "Sinbad of the Seven Seas" and "Hercules", and as himself in the sitcom "The King of Queens" and the 2009 comedy "I Love You, Man".
Lou Ferrigno was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Victoria and Matt Ferrigno, a police lieutenant. He is of Italian descent. Soon after he was born, Ferrigno says he believes he suffered a series of ear infections and lost 75 to 80% of his hearing, though his condition was not diagnosed until he was three years old. Hearing loss caused Ferrigno to be bullied by peers during his childhood: "They used to call me 'deaf Louie, deaf mute', because of my hearing and because of the way I sounded."
Ferrigno started weight training at age 13, citing body builder and "Hercules" star Steve Reeves as one of his role models. Because he could not afford to buy weights, he made his own using a broomstick and pails which he partially filled with cement. He was also a fan of the "Hercules" films that starred Reeves. Ferrigno's other personal heroes as a child were Spider-Man and the Hulk. Ferrigno attended St. Athanasius Grammar School and Brooklyn Technical High School, where he learned metal working.
After graduating from high school in 1969, Ferrigno won his first major title, IFBB Mr. America. Four years later, he won the title IFBB Mr. Universe. Early in his career he lived in Columbus, Ohio and trained with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 1974, he came in second on his first attempt at the Mr. Olympia competition. He came in third the following year, and his attempt to beat Arnold Schwarzenegger was the subject of the 1977 documentary "Pumping Iron". The documentary made Ferrigno famous.
These victories, however, did not provide enough income for him to earn a living. His first paying job was as a $10-an-hour sheet metal worker in a Brooklyn factory, where he worked for three years. He did not enjoy the dangerous work, and left after a friend and co-worker accidentally cut off his own hand one day.
Following this, Ferrigno left the competition circuit for many years, a period that included a brief stint as a defensive lineman for the Toronto Argonauts in the Canadian Football League. He had never played football, and was cut after two games. Ferrigno left the world of Canadian football after he broke the legs of a fellow player during a scrimmage.
During competition, Ferrigno at almost weighed 268 lb (130 kg) in 1975, and 315 lb (142 kg) in 1992.
Ferrigno competed in the first annual World's Strongest Man competition in 1977, where he finished fourth in a field of eight competitors.
In the early 1990s, Ferrigno returned to bodybuilding, competing for the 1992 and 1993 Mr. Olympia titles. Finishing 12th and 10th, respectively, he then turned to the 1994 Masters Olympia, where his attempt to beat Robbie Robinson and Boyer Coe was the subject of the 1996 documentary "Stand Tall". After this, he retired from competition.
In 1977, Ferrigno was cast as the Hulk in "The Incredible Hulk". Despite the fact that they were rarely on camera together, Ferrigno and Bill Bixby – who played the Hulk's "normal" alter ego – became friends; Ferrigno has described Bixby as a "mentor" and "father figure" who took him under his wing. Ferrigno also singles out the instances in which Bixby directed Ferrigno in some episodes as particularly memorable. Ferrigno continued playing the Hulk role until 1981—although the last two episodes were not broadcast until May 1982. Later, he and Bixby co-starred in three "The Incredible Hulk" TV movies.
In November 1978 and again in May 1979 Ferrigno appeared in "Battle of the Network Stars".
In 1983, Ferrigno appeared as John Six on the short-lived medical drama "Trauma Center".
Ferrigno played himself during intermittent guest appearances on the CBS sitcom "The King of Queens", beginning in 2000 and continuing until the program's conclusion in 2007. He and his wife Carla were depicted as the main characters' next-door neighbors. Because of his role as the title character on "The Incredible Hulk", he is often the target of Hulk jokes by Doug and his friends.
He made cameo appearances as a security guard in both the 2003 film "Hulk" and the 2008 film "The Incredible Hulk", in which he also voiced the Hulk. In the latter film, Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) bribes him with a pizza in order to gain entry into a university building. He has continued to voice the Hulk in Marvel Cinematic Universe films, uncredited. He continued to be known as the voice of the Hulk until 2015's "". Ferrigno himself has been replaced by Mark Ruffalo since the 2017 film "" as the voice of the Hulk.
Ferrigno appeared as himself in the 2009 feature film comedy "I Love You, Man".
Ferrigno trained Michael Jackson on and off beginning in the early 1990s, and in 2009, he helped Jackson get into shape for a planned series of concerts in London, which were ultimately cancelled due to Jackson's untimely death.
Ferrigno took part in a Smosh video, titled "I love Lou Ferrigno", in which he is tracked down by one of Smosh's members, Anthony, in Hollywood. The skit ends with Ferrigno knocking Anthony unconscious, in response to Ian's claim that Anthony stole Ferrigno's Butterfinger.
Ferrigno has his own line of fitness equipment called Ferrigno Fitness. In January 2009, he provided equipment to "The Price Is Right" for use as a One Bid prize, and demonstrated the equipment himself.
In 2010, Ferrigno appeared as himself in an episode of "Sonny with a Chance" titled "My Two Chads" and as himself in an episode of the fictional series "MacKenzie Falls". He also voiced the character Billy the Hero in the animated series "Adventure Time".
Ferrigno's voice was used (in composite) for the Hulk in the 2012 film "The Avengers" and its 2015 sequel "".
In 2014, Ferrigno appeared as Zaminhon, the Orion slave trader, in the "Star Trek Continues" episode "Lolani".
In 2016, Ferrigno appeared as a playable Lego version of himself in "Lego Marvel's Avengers".
In February 2006, Ferrigno was sworn in as a Los Angeles County, California, reserve sheriff's deputy, Level II.
In November 2010, Ferrigno was sworn in as a member of a Maricopa County, Arizona, volunteer sheriff posse, which also includes actors Steven Seagal and Peter Lupus, in order to help control illegal immigration in the Phoenix Valley area.
Ferrigno was a contestant on season five of the NBC reality television series "The Celebrity Apprentice", which premiered in February 2012. He appeared on the program in order to raise money for his charity, the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Ferrigno was Team Unanimous' project manager for the task depicted in the fifth episode, "I'm Going to Mop the Floor With You," which was to create a viral video to promote O-Cedar's ProMist Spray Mop, placing him in competition with actress Tia Carrere, the project manager of the women's team, Forte. In addition to the usual $20,000 awarded to the charity of the project manager of the winning team, O-Cedar pledged an additional $30,000 for that task. Team Unanimous' video—in which Ferrigno appeared dancing while mopping—won the task, winning the $50,000 for Muscular Dystrophy Association. He was fired in episode nine, "Ad Hawk", which involved creating a 60-second commercial for Entertainment.com.
In June 2012, Ferrigno was sworn in as a reserve deputy to the San Luis Obispo County, California, Sheriff's Department. There he completed his level I law enforcement academy, bringing his training up to full peace officer status.
In September 2013, Ferrigno was sworn in as a special deputy to the Delaware County, Ohio, Sheriff's Department.
In May 2018, President Donald Trump appointed Ferrigno to be a member of his Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition.
Due to ear infections suffered soon after birth, Ferrigno lost 75 to 80% of his hearing and has been using hearing aids since the age of five. Ferrigno says his hearing loss helped shape his sense of determination in his youth, saying, "I think that if I wasn't hard of hearing I wouldn't be where I am now. Early on, as a youngster it was difficult, but I'm not ashamed to talk about it because many people have misconceptions about hearing loss; like who has hearing loss and what it's like not to hear, so I do talk about it. I think my hearing loss helped create a determination within me to be all that I can be, and gave me a certain strength of character too. Anytime I do a movie or a TV show, I make them aware of my hearing loss at the beginning, and that makes it much easier for all of us to communicate and get the job done."
Ferrigno married Susan Groff in 1978, divorcing a year later. On May 3, 1980, he married psychotherapist Carla Green, who then also began serving as his manager; she later became a personal trainer. They have three children, Shanna, born 1981; Louis, Jr., born 1984; and Brent, born 1990. Shanna has a recurring role as Nurse Janice in "Days of Our Lives", and appeared in the NBC series "Windfall", as well as the television movie "Within", and in 2005 she appeared in the E! reality television series, "". Louis, Jr. was a linebacker for the University of Southern California Trojans football team. He currently plays a recurring role in the TV series "S.W.A.T.", airing on CBS.
Lou has filed suit against his brother, Andy Ferrigno, on two occasions over the use of the name Ferrigno in business ventures.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18685
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Leninism
Leninism is a political theory developed by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a revolutionary vanguard party, as the political prelude to the establishment of Communism. The function of the Leninist vanguard party is to provide the working classes with the political consciousness (education and organisation) and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism in the Russian Empire (1721–1917). Leninist revolutionary leadership is based upon "The Communist Manifesto" (1848) identifying the communist party as "the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country; that section which pushes forward all others." As the vanguard party, the Bolsheviks viewed history through the theoretical framework of dialectical materialism, which sanctioned political commitment to the successful overthrow of capitalism, and then to instituting socialism; and, as the revolutionary national government, to realize the socio-economic transition by all means.
In the aftermath of the October Revolution (1917), Leninism was the dominant version of Marxism in Russia and the basis of soviet democracy, the rule of directly elected soviets. In establishing the socialist mode of production in Bolshevik Russia—with the Decree on Land (1917), War Communism (1918–1921), and the New Economic Plan (1921–1928)—the revolutionary régime suppressed most political opposition, including Marxists who opposed Lenin's actions, the anarchists and the Mensheviks, factions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Russian Civil War (1917–1922), which included the seventeen-army Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War (1917–1925), and left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks (1918–1924) were the external and internal wars which transformed Bolshevik Russia into the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), the core republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
As revolutionary praxis, Leninism originally was neither a proper philosophy nor a discrete political theory. Leninism comprises politico-economic developments of orthodox Marxism and Lenin’s interpretations of Marxism, which function as a pragmatic synthesis for practical application to the actual conditions (political, social, economic) of the feudal agrarian society of Imperial Russia in the early 20th century. As a political-science term, Lenin's theory of proletarian revolution entered common usage at the fifth congress of the Communist International (1924), when Grigory Zinoviev applied the term "Leninism" to denote "vanguard-party revolution."
In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (1848) in which they called for the political unification of the European working classes in order to achieve communist revolution; and proposed that, because the socio-economic organization of Communism was of a higher form than that of capitalism, a workers' revolution first would occur in the industrialised countries. In Germany, Marxist social democracy was the political perspective of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, inspiring Russian Marxists, such as Lenin.
In the early 20th century, the socio-economic backwardness of Imperial Russia (1721–1917) — combined and uneven economic development — facilitated rapid and intensive industrialisation, which produced a united, working-class proletariat in a predominantly agrarian society. Moreover, because the industrialisation was financed mostly with foreign capital, Imperial Russia did not possess a revolutionary bourgeoisie with political and economic influence upon the workers and the peasants, as had been the case in the French Revolution (1789–1799), in the 18th century. Although Russia's political economy was agrarian and semi-feudal, the task of democratic revolution fell to the urban, industrial working class as the only social class capable of effecting land reform and democratization, in view that the Russian bourgeoisie would suppress any revolution.
In the "April Theses" (1917), the political strategy of the October Revolution (7–8 November 1917), Lenin proposed that the Russian revolution was not an isolated national event, but a fundamentally international event — the first socialist revolution in the world. Lenin's practical application of Marxism and proletarian revolution to the social, political, and economic conditions of agrarian Russia motivated and impelled the "revolutionary nationalism of the poor" to depose the absolute monarchy of the three-hundred-year dynasty of the House of Romanov (1613–1917), as tsars of Russia.
In "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (1916) Lenin’s economic analyses indicated that capitalism would transform into a global financial system, by which industrialised countries exported financial capital to their colonies and so realise the exploitation of labour of the natives and the exploitation of the natural resources of their countries. That such superexploitation allows wealthy countries to maintain a domestic labour aristocracy with a slightly higher standard of living than the majority of workers, and so ensure peaceful labour–capital relations in the capitalist homeland. Therefore, a proletarian revolution of workers and peasants could not occur in capitalist countries whilst the imperialist global-finance system remained in place. The first proletarian revolution would have to occur in an under-developed country, such as Imperial Russia, which was the politically weakest country in the capitalist global-finance system in the early 20th century. In the "United States of Europe Slogan" (1915), Lenin said:
In "" (1920), Lenin said:
In Chapter II, "Proletarians and Communists", of "The Communist Manifesto" (1848), Marx and Engels present the communist party as the political vanguard solely qualified to lead the proletariat in revolution:
The revolutionary purpose of the Leninist vanguard party is to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat with the support of the working class. The Communist Party would lead the popular deposition of the Tsarist government and then transfer power of government to the working class; that change of ruling class—from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat—makes possible the establishment of socialism. In "What Is To Be Done?" (1902), Lenin said that a revolutionary vanguard party, recruited from the working class, should lead the political campaign, because only in that way would the proletariat successfully realise their revolution; unlike the economic campaign of trade-union-struggle advocated by other socialist political parties and the anarcho-syndicalists. Like Marx, Lenin distinguished between the aspects of a revolution, the "economic campaign" (labour strikes for increased wages and work concessions) that featured diffused plural leadership; and the "political campaign" (socialist changes to society), which required the decisive, revolutionary leadership of the Bolshevik vanguard party.
Based upon the First International (IWA, International Workingmen's Association, 1864–1876), Lenin organised the Bolsheviks as a democratically centralised vanguard party, wherein free political-speech was recognised legitimate until policy consensus; afterwards, every member of the Party was expected to abide the agreed policy. Democratic debate was Bolshevik practice, even after Lenin banned factions among the Party in 1921. Despite being a guiding political influence, Lenin did not exercise absolute power, and continually debated to have his points of view accepted as a course of revolutionary action. In "Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action" (1905), Lenin said:
Before the October Revolution, despite supporting moderate political reform—including Bolsheviks elected to the Duma, when opportune—Lenin said that capitalism could only be overthrown with proletarian revolution, not with gradual reforms—from within (Fabianism) and from without (social democracy)—which would fail because the bourgeoisie's control of the means of production determined the nature of political power in Russia. As epitomised in the slogan "For a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry," a proletarian revolution in underdeveloped Russia required a united proletariat (peasants and industrial workers) in order to successfully assume power of government in the cities. Moreover, owing to the middle-class aspirations of much of the peasantry, Leon Trotsky said that proletarian leadership of the revolution would ensure truly socialist and democratic socio-economic change.
In Bolshevik Russia, government by direct democracy was realised and effected by the soviets (elected councils of workers) which Lenin said was the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat" postulated in Orthodox Marxism. The soviets comprised representative committees from the factories and the trade unions, but excluded the capitalist social-class to ensure the establishment of a proletarian government, by and for the working class and the peasants. Concerning the political disenfranchisement of the capitalist social-class in Bolshevik Russia, Lenin said that "depriving the exploiters of the franchise is a purely Russian question, and not a question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in general.… In which countries…democracy for the exploiters will be, in one or another form, restricted…is a question of the specific national features of this or that capitalism." In chapter five of "The State and Revolution" (1917), Lenin describes the dictatorship of the proletariat as:
Concerning the disenfranchisement from democracy of the capitalist social class, Lenin said: "Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people—this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism." The dictatorship of the proletariat was effected with soviet constitutionalism, a form of government opposite to the dictatorship of capital (privately-owned means of production) practised in bourgeois democracies. Under soviet constitutionalism, the Leninist vanguard party would be one of many political parties competing for election to government power. Nevertheless, because of the Russian Civil War (1917–1924) and the anti-Bolshevik terrorism of opposing political parties aiding the White Armies' counter-revolution, the Bolshevik government banned all other political parties, which left the Leninist vanguard party as the sole, political party in Russia. Lenin said that such political suppression was not philosophically inherent to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Bolshevik government nationalised industry and established a foreign-trade monopoly to allow the productive co-ordination of the national economy, and so prevent Russian national industries from competing against each other. To feed the populaces of town and country, Lenin instituted War Communism (1918–1921) as a necessary condition — adequate supplies of food and weapons—for fighting the Russian Civil War. In March 1921, the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–1929) allowed limited, local capitalism (private commerce and internal free-trade) and replaced grain requisitions with an agricultural tax managed by state banks. The NEP meant to resolve food-shortage riots by the peasantry and allowed limited private enterprise; the profit motive that encouraged farmers to produce the crops required to feed town and country; and to economically re-establish the urban working class, who had lost many workers to fight the counter-revolutionary Civil War. The NEP nationalisation of the economy then would facilitate the industrialisation of Russia, politically strengthen the working class, and raise the standards of living for all Russians. Lenin said that the appearance of new socialist states was necessary to strengthening Russia's economy in the establishment of Russian socialism. Lenin's socio-economic perspective was supported by the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Italian insurrection and general strikes of 1920, and worker wage-riots in the UK, France, and the US.
In recognising and accepting nationalism among oppressed peoples, Lenin advocated their national right to self-determination, and so opposed Russian chauvinism, because such ethnocentrism was a cultural obstacle to establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat in every territory of the deposed Russian Empire (1721–1917). In "The Right of Nations to Self-determination" (1914), Lenin said:
The socialist internationalism of Marxism and Bolshevism is based upon class struggle and a peoples' transcending nationalism, ethnocentrism, and religion—the intellectual obstacles to progressive class consciousness—which are the cultural "status quo" that the capitalist ruling class manipulate in order to politically divide the working classes and the peasant classes. To overcome that barrier to establishing socialism, Lenin said that acknowledging nationalism, as a peoples' right of self-determination and right of secession, naturally would allow socialist states to transcend the political limitations of nationalism to form a federation. In "The Question of Nationalities, or 'Autonomisation"' (1923), Lenin said:
The role of the Leninist vanguard party was to politically educate the workers and peasants to dispel the societal false consciousness of religion and nationalism that constitute the cultural "status quo" taught by the bourgeoisie to the proletariat to facilitate their economic exploitation of peasant and worker. Influenced by Lenin, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party stated that the development of the socialist workers' culture should not be "hamstrung from above" and opposed the "Proletkult" (1917–1925) organisational control of the national culture.
In post-Revolutionary Russia, Stalinism (socialism in one country) and Trotskyism (permanent world revolution) were the principal philosophies of communism that claimed legitimate ideological descent from Leninism, thus within the Communist Party, each ideological faction denied the political legitimacy of the opposing faction. Until shortly before his death, Lenin countered Stalin's disproportionate political influence in the Communist Party and in the bureaucracy of the Soviet government, partly because of abuses he had committed against the populace of Georgia and partly because the autocratic Stalin had accumulated administrative power disproportionate to his office of General Secretary of the Communist Party.
The counter-action against Stalin aligned with Lenin's advocacy of the right of self-determination for the national and ethnic groups of the deposed Tsarist Empire. Lenin warned the Party that Stalin has "unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution", and formed a faction with Leon Trotsky to remove Stalin as the General Secretary of the Communist Party.
To that end followed proposals reducing the administrative powers of party posts in order to reduce bureaucratic influence upon the policies of the Communist Party. Lenin advised Trotsky to emphasise Stalin's recent bureaucratic alignment in such matters (e.g. undermining the anti-bureaucratic workers' and peasants' Inspection) and argued to depose Stalin as General Secretary. Despite advice to refuse "any rotten compromise," Trotsky did not heed Lenin's advice and General Secretary Stalin retained power over the Communist Party and the bureaucracy of the soviet government.
After Lenin's death (21 January 1924), Trotsky ideologically battled the influence of Stalin, who formed ruling blocs within the Russian Communist Party (with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, then with Nikolai Bukharin and then by himself) and so determined soviet government policy from 1924 onwards. The ruling blocs continually denied Stalin's opponents the right to organise as an opposition faction within the party—thus the reinstatement of democratic centralism and free speech within the Communist Party were key arguments of Trotsky's Left Opposition and the later Joint Opposition.
In the course of instituting government policy, Stalin promoted the doctrine of socialism in one country (adopted 1925), wherein the Soviet Union would establish socialism upon Russia's economic foundations (and support socialist revolutions elsewhere). Conversely, Trotsky held that socialism in one country would economically constrain the industrial development of the Soviet Union and thus required assistance from the new socialist countries in the developed world—which was essential for maintaining soviet democracy—in 1924 much undermined by the Russian Civil War of White Army counter-revolution. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution proposed that socialist revolutions in underdeveloped countries would go further towards dismantling feudal régimes and establish socialist democracies that would not pass through a capitalist stage of development and government. Hence, revolutionary workers should politically ally with peasant political organisations, but not with capitalist political parties. In contrast, Stalin and allies proposed that alliances with capitalist political parties were essential to realising a revolution where communists were too few. Said Stalinist practice failed, especially in the Northern Expedition portion of the Chinese Revolution (1926–1928), which resulted in the right-wing Kuomintang's massacre of the Communist Party of China. Despite the failure, Stalin's policy of mixed-ideology political alliances nonetheless became Comintern policy.
Until exiled from Russia in 1929, Trotsky developed and led the Left Opposition (and the later Joint Opposition) with members of the Workers' Opposition, the Decembrists and (later) the Zinovievists. Trotskyism predominated the politics of the Left Opposition, which demanded the restoration of soviet democracy, the expansion of democratic centralism in the Communist Party, national industrialisation, international permanent revolution and socialist internationalism. The Trotskyist demands countered Stalin's political dominance of the Communist Party, which was officially characterised by the "cult of Lenin", the rejection of permanent revolution, and advocated the doctrine of socialism in one country. The Stalinist economic policy vacillated between appeasing the capitalist interests of the kulak in the countryside and destroying them as a social class. Initially, the Stalinists also rejected the national industrialisation of Russia, but then pursued it in full, sometimes brutally. In both cases, the Left Opposition denounced the regressive nature of Stalin's policy towards the wealthy kulak social class, and the brutality of forced industrialisation. Trotsky described Stailinist vacillation as a symptom of the undemocratic nature of a ruling bureaucracy.
During the 1920s and the 1930s, Stalin fought and defeated the political influence of Trotsky and the Trotskyists in Russia, by means of slander, antisemitism, and censorship, expulsions, exile (internal and external), and imprisonment. The anti–Trotsky campaign culminated in the executions (official and unofficial) of the Moscow Trials (1936–1938), which were part of the Great Purge of Old Bolsheviks who had led the Revolution).
The vanguard-party revolution of Leninism became the ideological basis of the communist parties comprised by the socialist political spectrum. In the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party of China organised themselves with Maoism (the Thought of Mao Zedong), socialism with Chinese characteristics. In Singapore, the People's Action Party (PAP) featured internal democracy, and initiated single-party dominance in the government and politics of Singapore. In the event, the practical application of Maoism to the socio-economic conditions of Third World countries produced revolutionary vanguard parties, such as the Communist Party of Peru – Red Fatherland.
As a form of Marxism, revolutionary Leninism was much criticised as an undemocratic interpretation of socialism. In "The Nationalities Question in the Russian Revolution" (1918), Rosa Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks for the suppression of the All Russian Constituent Assembly (January 1918); the partitioning of the feudal estates to the peasant communes; and the right of self-determination of every national people of the Russias. That the strategic (geopolitical) mistakes of the Bolsheviks would create great dangers for the Russian Revolution, such as the bureaucratisation that would arise to administrate the oversized country that was Bolshevik Russia. In defence of expedient revolutionary practice, in "" (1920) Lenin dismissed the political and ideological complaints of the anti-Bolshevik critics, who claimed ideologically correct stances that were to the political left of Lenin.
In Marxist philosophy, left communism is a range of political perspectives that are left-wing among communists. Left communism criticizes the ideology that the Bolshevik Party practised as the revolutionary vanguard. Ideologically, left communists present their perspectives and approaches as authentic Marxism and thus more oriented to the proletariat than the Leninism of the Communist International at their first (1919) and second (1920) congresses. Proponents of left-wing Communism include Amadeo Bordiga, Herman Gorter, and Antonie Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Sylvia Pankhurst and Paul Mattick.
Historically, the Dutch–German communist left has been most critical of Lenin and Leninism; yet, the Italian communist left remained Leninist; Bordiga said: "All this work of demolishing opportunism and "deviationism" (Lenin: "What Is To Be Done?") is today the basis of party activity. The party follows revolutionary tradition and experiences in this work during these periods of revolutionary reflux and the proliferation of opportunist theories, which had as their violent and inflexible opponents Marx, Engels, Lenin and the Italian Left." In "The Lenin Legend" (1935), Paul Mattick said that the council communist tradition, begun by the Dutch–German leftists, also is critical of Leninism. Contemporary left-communist organisations, such as the Internationalist Communist Tendency and the International Communist Current, view Lenin as an important and influential theorist, but remain critical of Leninism as political praxis for proletarian revolution. Nonetheless, the Bordigist ideology of the International Communist Party abide Bordiga's strict Leninism.
Ideologically aligned with the Dutch–German left, among the ideologists of contemporary communisation, the theorist Gilles Dauvé criticised Leninism as a "by-product of Kautskyism." In "The Soviet Union Versus Socialism" (1986), Noam Chomsky said that totalitarian Stalinism was the logical development of Leninism, and not an ideological deviation from Lenin's policies, which resulted in collectivization enforced with a police state; and that in light of the tenets of socialism, Leninism was a right-wing deviation of Marxism.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18687
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Legion of Merit
The Legion of Merit (LOM) is a military award of the United States Armed Forces that is given for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements. The decoration is issued to members of the eight uniformed services of the United States as well as to military and political figures of foreign governments.
The Legion of Merit (Commander degree) is one of only two United States military decorations to be issued as a neck order (the other being the Medal of Honor), and the only United States military decoration that may be issued in degrees (much like an order of chivalry or certain Orders of Merit), although the degrees including a neck ribbon are only awarded to non-U.S. nationals.
The Legion of Merit is seventh in the order of precedence of all U.S. military awards and is worn after the Defense Superior Service Medal and before the Distinguished Flying Cross. In contemporary use in the U.S. Armed Forces, the Legion of Merit is typically awarded to Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force general officers and colonels, and Navy and Coast Guard flag officers and captains occupying senior command or very senior staff positions in their respective services. It may also be awarded to officers of lesser rank, senior warrant officers (typically in command positions at the rank of chief warrant officer 5), and to very senior enlisted personnel (typically in the rank of command sergeant major and sergeant major of the Army in the Army, fleet master chief petty officer and master chief petty officer of the Navy in the Navy, chief master sergeant of the Air Force in the Air Force, and sergeant major of the Marine Corps in the Marine Corps), but these instances are less frequent, typically by exception, and the circumstances vary by branch of service.
Authority to award the Legion of Merit is reserved for general officers and flag officers in pay grade O-9 (e.g. lieutenant general and vice admiral) and above, civilian Department of Defense personnel at assistant service secretary or Assistant Secretary of Defense level and above, or equivalent secretary-level civilian personnel with the Department of Homeland Security with direct oversight of the U.S. Coast Guard.
The degrees of Chief Commander, Commander, Officer, and Legionnaire are awarded only to members of armed forces of foreign nations under the criteria outlined in Army Regulation 672-7 and is based on the relative rank or position of the recipient as follows:
When the Legion of Merit is awarded to members of the uniformed services of the United States, it is awarded without reference to degree. The criteria are "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements" and is typically reserved for senior officers at O-6 level and above, typically in connection with senior leadership/command positions or other senior positions of significant responsibility.
The degrees and the design of the decoration were influenced by the French Legion of Honour ("Légion d'honneur").
Although recommendations for creation of a medal for meritorious service were initiated as early as September 1937, no formal action was taken toward approval.
In a letter to the Quartermaster General (QMG) dated December 24, 1941, the Adjutant General formally requested action be initiated to create a meritorious service medal, and provide designs in the event the decoration was established. Proposed designs prepared by Bailey, Banks, and Biddle, and the Office of the Quartermaster General were provided to the Assistant Chief of Staff for Personnel (Colonel Heard) by the QMG on January 5, 1942.
The Assistant Chief of Staff (G-1), Brigadier General John H. Hilldring, in a response to the QMG on April 3, 1942, indicated the Secretary of War had approved the design recommended by the QMG. The design of the Legion of Merit (change of name) would be ready for issue immediately after legislation authorizing it was enacted into law. (A separate medal called the Meritorious Service Medal was established in 1969.)
An act of Congress (Public Law 671, 77th Congress, Chapter 508, 2d Session) on July 20, 1942, established the Legion of Merit and provided that the medal "shall have suitable appurtenances and devices and not more than four degrees, and which the President, under such rules and regulations as he shall prescribe, may award to
The medal was announced in War Department Bulletin No. 40, dated August 5, 1942. Executive Order 9260, dated October 29, 1942, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, established the rules for the Legion of Merit, and required the President's approval for the award.
The Legion of Merit is similar to the French Legion of Honor in both its design, a five-armed cross, and in that it is awarded in multiple degrees. Unlike the Legion of Honor, however, the Legion of Merit is only awarded to military personnel. In addition, it is the only award in the world with multiple degrees of which the higher degrees cannot be awarded to citizens of the country of the award's origin.
In October 1942, Brazilian Army Brigadier General Amaro Soares Bittencourt became the first person awarded the Legion of Merit (Commander) and a week later, Lieutenant, junior grade Ann A. Bernatitus, a U.S. Navy Nurse Corps officer, became the first member of the United States Armed Forces and the first woman to receive the Legion of Merit. She received the award for her service during the defense of the Philippines. LTJG Bernatitus was also the first recipient of the Legion of Merit authorized to wear a Combat "V" with the medal.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower was presented the Legion of Merit by President Roosevelt while he was en route to the Tehran Conference, in Cairo, Egypt, on November 26, 1943.
In 1943, at the request of the Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, approval authority for U.S. personnel was delegated to the Department of War. Executive Order 10600, dated March 15, 1955, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, again revised approval authority. Current provisions are contained in Title 10, United States Code 1121. As a result, awarding authority for the Legion of Merit resides with general officers/flag officers at the Lieutenant General / Vice Admiral level or higher.
The U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, unlike the Army and later the Air Force, provided for the Legion of Merit to be awarded with a "V" device indicating awards for participation in combat operations.
From 1942 to 1944, the Legion of Merit was awarded for a fairly wide range of achievements. This was because it was, until the establishment of the Bronze Star Medal in 1944, the only decoration below the Silver Star which could be awarded for combat valor, and the only decoration below the Distinguished Service Medal which could be awarded for meritorious noncombat service.
After the establishment of the Bronze Star Medal in February 1944, the Legion of Merit was awarded almost exclusively to senior officers in the rank of lieutenant colonel (Army, Marine Corps and Air Force) or commander (Navy and Coast Guard) (O-5), and above. Beginning in the 1980s, the Legion of Merit began to be awarded more frequently to senior-ranking warrant officers (W-4 and W-5), as well as to senior enlisted service members (E-8 and E-9), usually as a retirement award.
The Meritorious Service Medal (MSM) was established in 1969 as a "junior" version of the Legion of Merit. The MSM is awarded more frequently, and to more lower-ranking military personnel, than the Legion of Merit, so that today the award of the Legion of Merit to officers in pay grade O-5, or to senior chief warrant officers, or to E-9s other than those in the most senior enlisted leadership positions in their respective services, is exceedingly rare and by exception.
The ribbon for all of the decorations is wide and consists of the following stripes: white; center crimson; and white. The reverse of all of the medals has the motto taken from the Great Seal of the United States, "ANNUIT COEPTIS" ("He [God] has favored our undertakings") and the date "MDCCLXXXII" (1782), which is the date of America's first decoration, the Badge of Military Merit, now known as the Purple Heart. The ribbon design also follows the pattern of the Purple Heart ribbon.
The U.S. Air Force limits the Legion of Merit to four awards per career.
Additional awards of the Legion of Merit are denoted by oak leaf clusters (in the Army and Air Force), and by gold stars (in the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard). Until 2017, the sea services (i.e., the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard) awarded the Combat "V" for wear on the LOM. The Army and Air Force do not authorize the "V" device.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18691
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Lint (software)
lint, or a linter, is a tool that analyzes source code to flag programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors, and suspicious constructs. The term originates from a Unix utility that examined C language source code.
Stephen C. Johnson, a computer scientist at Bell Labs, came up with lint in 1978 while debugging the yacc grammar he was writing for C and dealing with portability issues stemming from porting Unix to a 32-bit machine. The term "lint" was derived from the name of the tiny bits of fiber and fluff shed by clothing. In 1979, lint was used outside of Bell Labs for the first time in the seventh version (V7) of the Unix operating system.
Over the years, different versions of lint were developed for many C and C++ compilers and while modern-day compilers have lint-like functions, lint-like tools have also advanced their capabilities. For example, Gimpel's PC-Lint, used to analyze C++ source code, is still being sold even though it was introduced in 1985.
The analysis performed by lint-like tools can also be performed by an optimizing compiler, which aims to generate faster code. In his original 1978 paper, Johnson addressed this issue, concluding that "the general notion of having two programs is a good one" because they concentrated on different things, thereby allowing the programmer to "concentrate at one stage of the programming process solely on the algorithms, data structures, and correctness of the program, and then later retrofit, with the aid of lint, the desirable properties of universality and portability".
Even though modern compilers have evolved to include many of lint's historical functions, lint-like tools have also evolved to detect an even wider variety of suspicious constructs. These include "warnings about syntax errors, uses of undeclared variables, calls to deprecated functions, spacing and formatting conventions, misuse of scope, implicit fallthrough in switch statements, missing license headers, [and]...dangerous language features".
Lint-like tools are especially useful for interpreted languages like JavaScript and Python. Because such languages lack a compiling phase that displays a list of errors prior to execution, the tools can also be used as simple debuggers for common errors (e.g. syntactic discrepancies) as well as hard-to-find errors such as heisenbugs (drawing attention to suspicious code as "possible errors"). Lint-like tools generally perform static analysis of source code.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18692
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Limp Bizkit
Limp Bizkit is an American rap rock band from Jacksonville, Florida. Their lineup consists of Fred Durst (lead vocals), Sam Rivers (bass, backing vocals), John Otto (drums, percussion), DJ Lethal (turntables), and Wes Borland (guitars, vocals). Their music is marked by Durst's angry vocal delivery and Borland's sonic experimentation. Borland's elaborate visual appearance, which includes face and body paint, masks and uniforms, also plays a large role in the band's live shows. The band has been nominated for three Grammy Awards, sold 40 million records worldwide, and won several other awards.
Formed in 1994, Limp Bizkit became popular playing in the Jacksonville underground music scene in the late 1990s, and signed with Flip Records, a subsidiary of Interscope, which released their debut album, "Three Dollar Bill, Y'all" (1997). The band achieved mainstream success with their second and third studio albums, "Significant Other" (1999) and "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water" (2000), although this success was marred by a series of controversies surrounding their performances at Woodstock '99 and the 2001 Big Day Out festival.
Borland left the group in 2001, but Durst, Rivers, Otto and Lethal continued to record and tour with guitarist Mike Smith. Following the release of their album, "Results May Vary" (2003), Borland rejoined the band and recorded "The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)" (2005) with Durst, Rivers, Lethal and drummer Sammy Siegler before entering a hiatus. In 2009, the band reunited with Borland playing guitar and began touring, culminating with the recording of the album "Gold Cobra" (2011), after which they left Interscope and later signed with Cash Money Records, but DJ Lethal quit the band soon after before returning in 2018. The band is currently recording their sixth studio album, "Stampede of the Disco Elephants".
While growing up in Gastonia, North Carolina, Fred Durst took an interest in breakdancing, hip hop, punk rock and heavy metal. He began to rap, skate, beatbox and dj. While mowing lawns and working as a tattoo artist, he developed an idea for a band that combined elements of rock and hip hop. Durst played with three other bands, Split 26, Malachi Sage, which were unsuccessful, and 10 Foot Shindig, which Durst left to form a new band. Durst told Sam Rivers, the bassist for Malachi Sage, "You need to quit this band and start a band with me that's like this: rappin' and rockin'." Rivers suggested that his cousin, John Otto, who was studying jazz drumming at the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and playing in local avant garde bands, become their drummer. Durst, Rivers and Otto jammed and wrote three songs together, and Wes Borland later joined as a guitarist.
Durst named the band Limp Bizkit because he wanted a name that would repel listeners. According to Durst, "The name is there to turn people's heads away. A lot of people pick up the disc and go, 'Limp Bizkit. Oh, they must suck.' Those are the people that we don't even want listening to our music." Other names that were considered by Durst included Gimp Disco, Split Dickslit, Bitch Piglet, and Blood Fart. Every record label that showed an interest in the band pressured its members to change its name. Limp Bizkit developed a cult following in the underground music scene, particularly at the Milk Bar, an underground punk club in Jacksonville. The band's local popularity was such that Sugar Ray, who had a major label contract, opened for a then-unsigned Limp Bizkit at Velocity with hip hop group Funkdoobiest. Milkbar owner, Danny Wimmer, stated that Limp Bizkit "had the biggest draw for a local band. They went from playing [for] ten people to eight hundred within months. Fred ... was always marketing the band. He would go to record stores and get people involved, he was in touch with high schools." However, the band knew that to achieve national success, they would have to distinguish themselves in their live performances. Attracting crowds by word of mouth, the band gave energetic live performances, covering George Michael's "Faith" and Paula Abdul's "Straight Up", and featuring Borland in bizarre costumes. Borland's theatrical rock style was the primary attraction for many concert attendees.
Durst unsuccessfully tried to attract attention from A&R representatives at various labels by pretending to be the band's manager. Later, when Korn performed in town as the opening act for Sick of It All, Durst invited Korn to drink beer and tattoo them. Although Durst's tattoos were unimpressive, he was able to persuade Reginald "Fieldy" Arvizu to listen to a demo, consisting of the songs "Pollution", "Counterfeit" and "Stalemate". Korn added a then-unsigned Limp Bizkit to two tours, which exposed the band to a new audience. The band attempted to expand their sound by auditioning an additional guitarist, but Borland soon determined that another guitarist was not the answer, and DJ Lethal, formerly of the hip hop group House of Pain, joined the band as a turntablist after a successful practice performance. Joining the band gave Lethal an opportunity to experiment with his turntable technique in ways that hip hop had not allowed him to do, helping shape the band's style. Due to creative differences, Borland left the band at this point.
After their performance opening for Korn at the Dragonfly in Hollywood was well received, Limp Bizkit signed with Mojo, a subsidiary of MCA Records. While heading to California to record their first album, the band wrecked their van. As a result of the near death experience, Durst made amends with Borland, who rejoined the band. After a dispute with Mojo, Limp Bizkit signed with Flip, a subsidiary of Interscope Records. Arvizu persuaded Ross Robinson to listen to the demo. Robinson neglected to listen to it until it was appraised by his girlfriend. Impressed by the band's motivation and sound, Robinson produced Limp Bizkit's debut, which was recorded at Indigo Ranch. Durst's problems with his girlfriend inspired him to write the song "Sour". The mood and tone set by Robinson in the studio allowed the band to improvise; a recording of the band improvising appeared as the last track on the album, "Everything".
Despite the success of live performances of the band's cover of the song "Faith", Robinson was opposed to recording it, and tried to persuade the band not to play it on the album. However, the final recording, which incorporated heavier guitar playing and drumming, as well as DJ scratching, impressed him. Robinson also bonded with Borland, who he perceived as not taking the band seriously. The progressive metal band Tool provided a strong influence in shaping the album's sound, particularly in the song "Nobody Loves Me", which contains a breakdown in which Durst imitated the singing style of Maynard James Keenan.
Continuing the band's policy of using names that would repulse potential listeners, the band named the album by using part of the phrase "queer as a three dollar bill" and adding the word "Y'all" for Florida flavor, naming the album, "Three Dollar Bill, Y'all". The completed album featured an abrasive, angry sound which Limp Bizkit used to attract listeners to their music. After the band completed recording, they toured with Korn and Helmet in 1997. Critics reacted unfavorably to performances of Korn and Limp Bizkit; "Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel" music critic Jon M. Gilbertson criticized Durst's performance, stating "The one attention-grabbing moment of Limp Bizkit's rap/thrash show was when the lead singer expressed a desire for gay men to be 'stomped'. Which isn't remotely rebellious. It's just puerile." That same year, they also notably served as an opening act for Faith No More, a band often credited as paving the way for Limp Bizkit and the nu metal genre. The group's keyboardist Roddy Bottum later recalled "That guy Fred Durst had a really bad attitude. He was kind of a jerk. I remembered he called the audience faggots at one show when they booed him. Not a good scene."
Interscope proposed to the band that the label pay $5,000 to guarantee that a Portland, Oregon radio station play the song "Counterfeit" fifty times, preceded and concluded with an announcement that the air time was paid for by Interscope. The paid air time was criticized by the media, who saw it as "payola". The band's manager Jeff Kwatinetz later termed the plan as a "brilliant marketing move". Durst stated, "It worked, but it's not that cool of a thing." Following the release of "Counterfeit" as a single, "Three Dollar Bill, Yall" was released on July 1, 1997, and was met with minimal response. AllMusic writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote, "They might not have many original ideas ... but they do the sound well. They have a powerful rhythm section and memorable hooks, most of which make up for the uneven songwriting." However, Robert Christgau panned the album. Despite the minimal response to his band's album, Durst was appointed Senior Vice President of A&R at Interscope.
Limp Bizkit joined the Warped Tour, performing alongside the bands Pennywise, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Sick of It All, Lagwagon and Blink-182. Preceding their first tour with DJ Lethal, Otto became familiar with Lethal's contributions to collaborate with him better on stage. In addition to touring with Primus and Deftones, Limp Bizkit headlined the Ladies Night in Cambodia club tour, which was intended to diversify the band's fanbase, which was largely male, by offering free tickets to female attendees. This plan successfully increased the band's female fanbase.
In 1998, Limp Bizkit toured with Soulfly and Cold on Soulfly's first European tour. Touring consistently increased Limp Bizkit's success, and the second single from "Three Dollar Bill, Yall", a cover of George Michael's "Faith", became a successful radio hit, leading to a slot on Ozzfest, a tour organized by Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. In July, Snot singer Lynn Strait was arrested after he emerged nude from Limp Bizkit's prop toilet, and was charged with indecent exposure. Because Limp Bizkit's fans would often break through the barricades, the band was almost kicked off the tour after two days. In August, John Otto spent the night in jail in Auburn Hills, Michigan, on a misdemeanor charge of carrying a concealed weapon, after allegedly firing a BB gun and being arrested for carrying a switchblade.
After completing Ozzfest, Limp Bizkit took a break from performing, and later performed on Korn's Family Values Tour. Durst also directed a music video for the band's single "Faith" in promotion for its appearance in the film "Very Bad Things", but was unsatisfied with it, and directed a second video which paid tribute to tourmates like Primus, Deftones and Korn, who appeared in the video. Borland stated in an interview that George Michael, the writer of the song, hated the cover and "hates us for doing it".
Following the radio success of "Faith", the band was determined to record the follow-up to their first album in order to show that they weren't a Korn soundalike or a cover band; the band began writing an album which dealt with issues deriving from their newfound fame. Terry Date, who had produced albums for Pantera, White Zombie and Deftones, was chosen to produce the album. The band allowed Durst and Lethal to explore their hip hop origins by recording a song with Method Man. The song was originally titled "Shut the Fuck Up", but was retitled "N 2 Gether Now" for marketing purposes. Durst also recorded with Eminem, but the collaboration, "Turn Me Loose", was left off the album. The album also featured guest appearances by Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland, Korn's Jonathan Davis and Staind singer Aaron Lewis, and interludes by Les Claypool and Matt Pinfield.
"Significant Other" saw Limp Bizkit reaching a new level of commercial success; the band was featured on the covers of popular music magazines, including "Spin", and now found themselves repeatedly mobbed for autographs; the band was allowed to interact directly with their fans on a website established by Dike 99. Durst also moved from Jacksonville to Los Angeles. "Significant Other" was seen as an improvement over their debut, and was generally well received by critics with mixed to positive reviews. However, the band also continued to be criticized by the media; an article profiling the band in "Spin" and discussing "Significant Other" claimed that "Limp Bizkit had yet to write a good song", and musicians Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor criticized the band.
The band promoted the album by playing unannounced concerts in Detroit and Chicago, as radio stations received a strong number of requests for the album's first single, "Nookie". "Significant Other" climbed to No. 1 on the "Billboard" 200, selling 643,874 copies in its first week of release. In its second week of release, the album sold an additional 335,000 copies. On the opening night of the band's Limptropolis tour with Kid Rock, Sam Rivers smashed his bass in frustration over the venue's poor sound, cutting his hand. After his hand was stitched up at a hospital, Rivers returned to finish the set. On July 12, Durst allegedly kicked a security guard in the head during a performance in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was later arrested on assault charges. Further criticisms of the band appeared in "Rolling Stone" and "The New York Times". "New York Times" writer Ann Powers wrote, "DJ Lethal used his turntables as a metal guitar, riffing expansively and going for effects instead of rhythm. John Otto on drums and Sam Rivers on bass never even tried to get funky, instead steering hip-hop's break-beat-based structure into a backbone for power chords. This makes for a hybrid that would be more interesting if the band did not constantly mire itself in boring tempos, and if Mr. Durst had any talent as a singer".
In the summer of 1999, Limp Bizkit played at the highly anticipated Woodstock '99 show in front of approximately 200,000 people. Violent action sprang up during and after their performance, including fans tearing plywood from the walls during a performance of the song "Break Stuff". Several sexual assaults were reported in the aftermath of the concert. Durst stated during the concert, "People are getting hurt. Don't let anybody get hurt. But I don't think you should mellow out. That's what Alanis Morissette had you motherfuckers do. If someone falls, pick 'em up. We already let the negative energy out. Now we wanna let out the positive energy". Durst later stated in an interview, "I didn't see anybody getting hurt. You don't see that. When you're looking out on a sea of people and the stage is twenty feet in the air and you're performing, and you're feeling your music, how do they expect us to see something bad going on?" Les Claypool told "The San Francisco Examiner", "Woodstock was just Durst being Durst. His attitude is 'no press is bad press', so he brings it on himself. He wallows in it. Still, he's a great guy."
Durst saw the band as being scapegoated for the event's controversy, and reflected on the criticisms surrounding the band in his music video for the single "Re-Arranged", which depicted the band members receiving death sentences for their participation in the concerts. The video ended with angry witnesses watching as the band drowned in milk while performing the song. Durst later stated that the promoters of Woodstock '99 were at fault for booking his band, due to their reputation for raucous performances. Despite this controversy, "Significant Other" remained at No. 1 on the "Billboard" charts, and the band headlined the year's Family Values Tour. Durst directed a music video for "N 2 Gether Now" which featured Method Man and Pauly Shore, and was inspired by Inspector Clouseau's fights with his butler, Cato Fong, in the "Pink Panther" film series.
In 2000, Durst announced that the band's third studio album would be titled "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water". The press thought he was joking about this title. The album title is intended to sound like a fictional band; the phrase "Chocolate Starfish" refers to the human anus, and Durst himself, who has frequently been called an "asshole". Borland contributed the other half of the album's title when the band was standing around at a truck stop, looking at bottles of flavored water, and Borland joked that the truck stop didn't have hot dog or meat-flavored water.
In June 2000, Limp Bizkit performed at the WXRK Dysfunctional Family Picnic, but showed up an hour late for their set. An Interscope spokesman stated that there was confusion over the band's set time. During the band's performance, Durst criticized Creed singer Scott Stapp, calling him "an egomaniac". Creed's representatives later presented Durst with an autographed anger management manual. In the summer, Limp Bizkit's tour was sponsored by the controversial file sharing service Napster, doing free shows with a metal cage as the only thing separating them from the audience. Durst was an outspoken advocate of file sharing. They also did a "Guerrilla Tour" which involved the band setting up illegal and impromptu public gigs on rooftops and alleyways, some being shut down by the police.
During the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, Durst performed "Livin' It Up", a song from the upcoming album, as a duet with Christina Aguilera. In response to the performance, Filter frontman Richard Patrick was quoted as saying "Fred getting onstage with Christina Aguilera embarrassed us all." In response to the negative reactions to the performance, Durst remarked, "I already told you guys before, I did it all for the nookie, man." In response to Durst's remark, Aguilera commented, "He got no nookie."
Released on October 17, "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water" set a record for highest first-week sales for a rock album with over one million copies sold in the US in its first week of release. 400,000 of those sales happened during the first day, making it the fastest-selling rock album ever, breaking the record held for 7 years by Pearl Jam's "Vs." "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water" was certified Gold, Platinum and six times Multi-Platinum. The album received mixed reviews, with Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine writing, "Durst's self-pitying and the monotonous music give away that the band bashed Chocolate Starfish out very quickly – it's the sound of a band determined to deliver a sequel in a finite amount of time." "Entertainment Weekly" writer David Browne named it as the worst album title of 2000.
During a 2001 tour of Australia at the Big Day Out festival in Sydney, fans rushed the stage in the mosh pit, and teenager Jessica Michalik died of asphyxiation. In court, Durst, represented by long-time attorney, Ed McPherson, testified he had warned the concert's organizers Aaron Jackson, Will Pearce and Amar Tailor, and also the promoter Vivian Lees, of the potential dangers of such minimal security. After viewing videotapes and hearing witness testimony, however, the coroner said it was evident that the density of the crowd was dangerous at the time Limp Bizkit took the stage, stating that Fred Durst should have acted more responsibly when the problem became apparent. Durst stated that he was "emotionally scarred" because of the teenager's death.
Later in 2001, numerous hip-hop artists including P. Diddy, Timbaland, Bubba Sparxxx and Everlast remixed famous songs from the band into hip-hop versions adding their own styles and modifications. The album was called "New Old Songs".
In October 2001, Durst released a statement on their website stating that "Limp Bizkit and Wes Borland have amicably decided to part ways. Both Limp Bizkit and Borland will continue to pursue their respective musical careers. Both wish each other the best of luck in all future endeavors." Durst also stated that the band would "comb the world for the illest guitar player known to man" to replace Borland. When asked why Borland quit the band, Ross Robinson stated that he quit because "He doesn't sell out for money anymore".
After holding a nationwide audition for a new guitarist, called "Put Your Guitar Where Your Mouth Is", the band recorded with Snot guitarist Mike Smith, but later scrapped their recording sessions with Smith. Durst told a fan site that he had a falling out with Smith, saying "We are the type of people that stay true to our family and our instincts and at any moment will act on intuition as a whole. Mike wasn't the guy. We had fun playing with him but always knew, in the back of our minds, that he wasn't where we needed him to be mentally." In May 2002, Durst posted Wes Borland's personal e-mail address online and told fans to ask him to rejoin the group. Borland stated that 75% or more of all the e-mails pleaded for him not to return to the band.
After recording another album without Smith, the band scrapped the new sessions and assembled a new album combining songs from different sessions. During the album's production, the working title changed from "Bipolar" to "Panty Sniffer", and was completed under the title "Results May Vary". Under Durst's sole leadership, the album encompassed a variety of styles, and featured a cover of The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes", which differed from the original's arrangement in its inclusion of a Speak & Spell during the song's bridge.
In the summer of 2003, Limp Bizkit participated on the Summer Sanitarium Tour, headlined by Metallica. At the tour's stop in Chicago, attendees of the concert threw items and heckled Durst from the moment he walked on stage. With the crowd chanting "Fuck Fred Durst" and continuing their assault on him, Durst threw the mic down after six songs and walked off stage, but not before heckling the crowd back. He repeatedly said, "Limp Bizkit are the best band in the world!" until a roadie took his microphone away. An article in the "Sun-Times" stated that the hostility was started by radio personality Mancow.
"Results May Vary" was released on September 23, 2003, and received largely unfavorable reviews. Allmusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine panned the album, writing, "the music has no melody, hooks, or energy, [and] all attention is focused on the clown jumping up and down and screaming in front, and long before the record is over, you're left wondering, how the hell did he ever get to put this mess out?" "The Guardian" reviewer Caroline Sullivan wrote, "At least Limp Bizkit can't be accused of festering in the rap-rock ghetto ... But Durst's problems are ever-present – and does anybody still care?" Despite criticisms of the album, it was a commercial success, peaking at No. 3 on the "Billboard" 200.
In August 2004, Borland rejoined Limp Bizkit, which began recording an EP, "The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)".
In May, "The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)" was released. Sammy Siegler took over drumming duties for the band for much of the EP, which featured a more experimental sound, described by Allmusic writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine as "neo-prog alt-metal". At Durst's insistence, the album was released as an underground album, without any advertising or promotion. Borland disagreed with the decision, suggesting that it was "self-sabotage": "Maybe he was already unhappy with the music, and he didn't really want to put it out there."
The EP received mixed reviews. Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised the music, calling it "a step in the right direction – it's more ambitious, dramatic, and aggressive, built on pummeling verses and stop-start choruses." However, he felt that the band was being "held back" by Durst, whom he called "the most singularly unpleasant, absurd frontman in rock." IGN writer Spence D. similarly gave it a mixed review, as he felt that the album lacked direction, but that showed potential for the band's musical growth.
"The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)" sold over 37,000 copies worldwide, peaking at No. 24 on the "Billboard" 200. Following the release of the band's "Greatest Hitz" album, the band went on hiatus. Borland stated that it was unlikely that a sequel to "The Unquestionable Truth" would be produced and that "As of right now, none of my future plans include Limp Bizkit."
In 2009, Limp Bizkit reunited with Borland playing guitar and launched the Unicorns N' Rainbows Tour. Durst announced that they had begun to record a new album, which Borland titled "Gold Cobra". Borland said that the title does not have any meaning, and that it was chosen because it fit the style of music the band was writing for the album. The band recorded a spoken intro written by Durst and performed by Kiss member Gene Simmons for the album, but it was left off the completed album. The band also recorded additional "non-album" tracks, including "Combat Jazz", which featured rapper Raekwon and "Middle Finger", featuring Paul Wall. "Shotgun" was released as a single on May 17, 2011. The song is noted for featuring a guitar solo by Borland, something that the band is not known for. "Shotgun" received favorable reviews, with Artistdirect writing, "['Shotgun'] feels like Bizkit approached the signature style on "Three Dollar Bill Y'All" and "Significant Other" with another decade-plus of instrumental experience and virtuosity, carving out a banger that could get asses moving in the club or fists flying in the mosh pit."
"Gold Cobra" was released on June 28 and received mixed to positive reviews. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it "a return to the full-throttled attack of "Three Dollar Bill Y'All". IGN writer Chad Grischow wrote, "Though far from their best work, Limp Bizkit's latest at least proves that their 2005 "Greatest Hitz" album may have been premature." "Metal Hammer" writer Terry Bezer appraised the album, writing "Aside from the odd duff moment, Gold Cobra throws out the hot shit that'll make you bounce in the mosh pit over and over again." The band launched the Gold Cobra Tour in support of the album. A music video for the title track was released. Gold Cobra has sold nearly 80,000 copies in the United States alone and peaked at No. 16 on the "Billboard" 200; however, the band left Interscope after the album's release.
In February 2012, the band returned to Australia for the first time in 11 years, to perform at the Soundwave festival. Durst dedicated the shows to Jessica Michalik, who died during the Limp Bizkit performance at Big Day Out 2001. Limp Bizkit signed with Cash Money Records. Following a dispute between Durst, Lethal and Otto about the latter two's alleged chronic drug and alcohol use, DJ Lethal angrily left the band. DJ Lethal later posted an apology to the band on Twitter, but was ultimately not allowed back into the band.
Fred Durst was featured in the song "Champions" by Kevin Rudolf, used as theme for WWE's Night of Champions. The song debuted on "WWE Raw" on September 3, 2012. This was the first time Limp Bizkit has worked with WWE since 2003.
The band recorded their seventh studio album, "Stampede of the Disco Elephants" with producer Ross Robinson, who also produced the band's debut album, "Three Dollar Bill, Yall," and their 2005 album "The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)".
On March 24, 2013, the first single from the album, "Ready to Go" (featuring Lil Wayne) was released on limpbizkit.com. In November a cover of the Ministry song "Thieves" was released by the band via their official Facebook and Twitter accounts. In December, the band released the previously leaked song, "Lightz" along with an accompanying music video. The next single off the album, "Endless Slaughter" was set to be released only on cassette and during concerts, but can be downloaded at the band's official website.
In October 2014, Fred Durst revealed that the band had left Cash Money, and became independent again. The split was carried out amicably, and Fred says that "We really love the jam we did with Lil Wayne, though. We love that song."
Limp Bizkit performed as headliners of the ShipRocked 2015 cruise from February 2 to 6. Other bands present were Chevelle, Black Label Society, P.O.D., Sevendust among others. The band announced their major 2015 tour called "Money Sucks", a Russian 20-date tour to take place during October and November, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Limp Bizkit. The tour name was a nod to the difficult economic situation that Russia was facing at the time. Before the band traveled to Europe to attend the "Money Sucks" Tour, Sam Rivers was diagnosed with a degenerative disease of the discs of the spine and that was complicated due to a pinched nerve, causing a lot of pain in such area, which prevented him from being with the band. 23-year-old German bassist Samuel Gerhard Mpungu replaced Rivers for the tour.
Limp Bizkit offered several concerts in the United Kingdom during winter 2016 alongside Korn. Regarding this tour Fred says: "You may have experienced a lot of cool concerts in your life, but I can guarantee you that an evening with Korn and Limp Bizkit will always and forever be your favorite. No one brings the party harder, heavier, and more exciting than us. No one. And ... make sure you get plenty of rest the night before. It's time to bring it back!"
Because of little information and constant delays for the release of "Stampede", in an interview/talk with the podcast "Someone Who Isn't Me", Wes said that Fred "isn't happy" with what he was working on. The guitarist said that Durst will "just keep working on something until he's happy with it, even if it takes years and years".
DJ Lethal resumed performing with the band on March 17, 2018 at the Storm the Gates festival in Auckland, New Zealand. On July 8, 2019 the band played a new song from their forthcoming album called "Wasteoid" live in Paris.
Durst wanted Limp Bizkit to be a "megaband" which could cross over into as many different styles of music as possible. Limp Bizkit's music has predominately been described as , and rap rock. Limp Bizkit have also been described as alternative metal, alternative rock and . In 2000, the "New York Daily News" labelled the band as "frat-metal".
Limp Bizkit's music is noted for its "kinetic, frenzied energy". Otto is adept in drumming in a variety of styles ranging from Brazilian and Afro-Cuban music to bebop and funk. DJ Lethal functions as a sound designer for the band, shaping their sound. According to Lethal, "I try and bring new sounds, not just the regular chirping scratching sounds. ... It's all different stuff that you haven't heard before. I'm trying to be like another guitar player." Borland's guitar playing is experimental and nontraditional, and he is noted for his creative use of six and seven-string guitars. "Three Dollar Bill, Yall" features him playing without a guitar pick, performing with two hands, one playing melodic notes, and the other playing chord progressions. His guitar playing has made use of octave shapes, and choppy, eighth-note rhythms, sometimes accompanied by muting his strings with his left hand, creating a percussive sound. Borland has also made use of unevenly accented syncopated sixteenth notes to create a disorienting effect, and hypnotic, droning licks. The song "Stuck" uses a sustain pedal in the first bar, and muted riffs in the second bar.
AllMusic writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine said that their album, "Significant Other", contains "flourishes of neo-psychedelia on pummeling metal numbers" and "swirls of strings, even crooning, at the most unexpected background". The band did not employ solos until "Gold Cobra" (except for the song "Underneath The Gun" out of "Results May Vary"), however, during the recording of "Significant Other", drummer John Otto performed an extended solo in the middle of the song "Nobody Like You". Also, drum solo can be heard on "9 Teen 90 Nine" from same album. Durst's lyrics are often profane, scatological or angry. Much of Durst's lyrical inspiration came from growing up and his personal life. The song "Sour", from the album "Three Dollar Bill, Yall", was inspired by Durst's problems with his girlfriend. His breakup with her inspired the "Significant Other" songs "Nookie" and . When describing Limp Bizkit's lyrics, "The Michigan Daily" said "In a less-serious vein, Limp Bizkit used the nu-metal sound as a way to spin testosterone fueled fantasies into snarky white-boy rap. Oddly, audiences took frontman Fred Durst more seriously than he wanted, failing to see the intentional silliness in many of his songs." Furthermore, Limp Bizkit's lyrics were described as "misogynistic". "The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)" focuses on more serious and darker lyrical subject matter, including Catholic sex abuse cases, terrorism and fame.
Limp Bizkit's influences include The Jesus Lizard, Tomahawk, Dave Matthews Band, Portishead, Mr. Bungle, Sepultura, Ministry, Prong, Tool, Primus, Pantera, Minor Threat, Angry Samoans, Black Flag, the Fat Boys, the Treacherous Three, the Cold Crush Brothers, Urban Dance Squad, Rage Against the Machine, and Korn.
Limp Bizkit has been nominated for and won several awards. Limp Bizkit has been nominated for three Grammy Awards including Best Hard Rock Performance ("Nookie"), Best Rock Album (Significant Other), and Best Hard Rock Performance ("Take A Look Around"). Limp Bizkit has been nominated for 3 American Music Awards for Favorite Alternative Artist winning one of them in 2002.
In 1999, the band won the Maximum Vision Award at the Billboard Music Video Awards for their music video "Nookie". At the 2000 and 2001 Blockbuster Awards, the band won the Favorite Group (Rock) award. That year also saw the band winning a MuchMusic Award for Best International Video, honoring their video for the song "Break Stuff". At the 2001 ECHO Awards, the band won the Best International Metal Band award. At the 2009 Kerrang! Awards, the band won the Hall of Fame award. Further expanding upon the group's achievements and popularity, they were also the first group inducted into MTV's "Total Request Live" "Hall of Fame" on May 26, 2001.
Richard Cheese performed a lounge rendition of the songs "Nookie" and "Break Stuff" on his debut album, "Lounge Against the Machine". "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Angry White Boy Polka" medley included Limp Bizkit's song "My Way". The Vitamin String Quartet recorded a tribute album called "The String Quartet Tribute to Limp Bizkit: Break Stuff", which contains reinterpretations of the band's songs performed by a violinist backed by cellos, synthesizers, and keyboard percussion. Girl Talk sampled "Nookie" and "Break Stuff" in the song "Friends-4-Ever", which appears on his album "Secret Diary". The Blackout covered "My Generation" for the compilation "". Bands citing Limp Bizkit as an influence on their music include the progressive metal band Proyecto Eskhata.
While Limp Bizkit's popularity has declined in the United States since the mid-2000s, it has been noted in the media that the band still remains highly popular in Russia.
! scope="col" | Award
! scope="col" | Year
! scope="col" | Category
! scope="col" | Nominee(s)
! scope="col" | Result
! scope="col" class="unsortable"|
! scope="row"|BMI Pop Awards
! scope="row" rowspan=5|"Billboard" Music Award
! scope="row" rowspan=3|Blockbuster Entertainment Awards
! scope="row" rowspan=2|ECHO Awards
! scope="row"|Emma-gaala
! scope="row" rowspan=2| Hungarian Music Awards
! scope="row"|International Dance Music Awards
! scope="row" rowspan=5|MTV Europe Music Awards
! scope="row"|MTV Video Music Awards Japan
! scope="row"|MVPA Awards
! scope="row" rowspan=2|NME Awards
! scope="row"|Online Music Awards
! scope="row"|Pollstar Concert Industry Awards
! scope="row"|Q Awards
! scope="row"|Radio Music Awards
! scope="row"|Top of the Pops Awards
Borland is known for performing in costumes and body paint during concerts, appearing in bunny and kung fu suits, and painted as a skeleton and what he describes as a "burnt match". Describing the character, he stated, "I go onstage wearing almost nothing. I have underwear and my boots on, and I paint my whole head black—from the neck up—and I have the black contacts. All you can see is these glowing teeth." Borland's black contacts were customized for him by a company noted for making contacts for the science fiction TV series "Babylon 5".
In addition to Borland's visual appearance, the band has also used elaborate stage setups in their performances. Their Ladies Night in Cambodia club tour visually paid tribute to the film "Apocalypse Now", with an elaborate stage setup which featured an empty Jeep, camouflage mesh and palm trees. During the band's tour with Primus, Limp Bizkit took inspiration from Primus' trademark self-deprecatory slogan "Primus sucks": Durst, Borland, Rivers, Otto and Lethal took the stage with middle fingers raised. According to Borland, "they finger us back—and you know what that means to us—that they love us. It's kind of like saying something is bad when you really mean good. Les Claypool came out the first night of the tour and got a big kick out of it. We figured it was the right idea. It makes hecklers go 'huh.'"
During the band's sets at Ozzfest, audience members at the tour heckled Limp Bizkit, leading the band to use a 30-foot toilet as a stage prop, which they would emerge from during each performance; the band punctuated their sets by "flushing" cardboard cutouts of pop stars like Hanson and the Spice Girls. During their appearance at the first Family Values Tour, Limp Bizkit performed on a set which the "Los Angeles Times" described as "a mix of "The War of the Worlds" and "Mars Attacks"". The band emerged from a spaceship during the tour, and Borland continued to experiment with visual appearances. During the band's Halloween performance on the tour, each of the band's members dressed as Elvis Presley at various stages in his career.
Current
Former
Former touring & session musicians
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Lazio
Lazio (, , ; ) is one of the 20 administrative regions of Italy. Situated in the central peninsular section of the country, it has 5,864,321 inhabitants – making it the second most populated region of Italy (after Lombardy and just ahead of Campania) – and its GDP of more than €170 billion per year means that it has the nation's second largest regional economy. The capital of Lazio is Rome, which is also the capital and largest city of Italy.
Lazio comprises a land area of and it has borders with Tuscany, Umbria, and Marche to the north, Abruzzo and Molise to the east, Campania to the south, and the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west. The region is mainly flat, with small mountainous areas in the most eastern and southern districts.
The coast of Lazio is mainly composed of sandy beaches, punctuated by the headlands of Circeo (541 m) and Gaeta (171 m). The Pontine Islands, which are part of Lazio, are off Lazio's southern coast. Behind the coastal strip, to the north, lies the Maremma Laziale (the continuation of the Tuscan Maremma), a coastal plain interrupted at Civitavecchia by the Tolfa Mountains (616 m). The central section of the region is occupied by the Roman Campagna, a vast alluvial plain surrounding the city of Rome, with an area of approximately . The southern districts are characterized by the flatlands of Agro Pontino, a once swampy and malarial area, that was reclaimed over the centuries.
The Preapennines of Latium, marked by the Tiber valley and the Liri with the Sacco tributary, include on the right of the Tiber, three groups of mountains of volcanic origin: the Volsini, Cimini and Sabatini, whose largest former craters are occupied by the Bolsena, Vico and Bracciano lakes. To the south of the Tiber, other mountain groups form part of the Preapennines: the Alban Hills, also of volcanic origin, and the calcareous Lepini, Ausoni and Aurunci Mountains. The Apennines of Latium are a continuation of the Apennines of Abruzzo: the Reatini Mountains with Terminillo (2,213 m), Mounts Sabini, Prenestini, Simbruini and Ernici which continue east of the Liri into the Mainarde Mountains. The highest peak is Mount Gorzano (2,458 m) on the border with Abruzzo.
"See also: List of museums in Lazio"
The Italian word Lazio descends from the Latin word Latium. The name of the region also survives in the tribal designation of the ancient population of Latins, Latini in the Latin language spoken by them and passed on to the city-state of Ancient Rome. Although the demography of ancient Rome was multi-ethnic, including, for example, Etruscans and other Italics besides the Latini, the latter were the dominant constituent. In Roman mythology, the tribe of the Latini took their name from king Latinus. Apart from the mythical derivation of Lazio given by the ancients as the place where Saturn, ruler of the golden age in Latium, hid (latuisset) from Jupiter there, a major modern etymology is that Lazio comes from the Latin word "latus", meaning "wide", expressing the idea of "flat land" meaning the Roman Campagna. Much of Lazio is in fact flat or rolling. The lands originally inhabited by the Latini were extended into the territories of the Samnites, the Marsi, the Hernici, the Aequi, the Aurunci and the Volsci, all surrounding Italic tribes. This larger territory was still called Latium, but it was divided into Latium adiectum or Latium Novum, the added lands or New Latium, and Latium Vetus, or Old Latium, the older, smaller region.
The northern border of Lazio was the Tiber river, which divided it from Etruria.
The emperor Augustus officially united almost all of present-day Italy into a single geo-political entity, Italia, dividing it into eleven regions. The part of today's Lazio south of the Tiber river – together with the present region of Campania immediately to the southeast of Lazio and the seat of Neapolis – became Region I ("Latium et Campania"), while modern Upper Lazio became part of "Regio VII - Etruria", and today's Province of Rieti joined "Regio IV - Samnium".
After the Gothic conquest of Italy at the end of the fifth century, modern Lazio became part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, but after the Gothic War between 535 and 554 and the Byzantine conquest, this region regained its freedom, because the "Roman Duchy" became the property of the Eastern Emperor. However, the long wars against the Longobards weakened the region. With the Donation of Sutri in 728, the Bishop of Rome acquired the first territory in the region beyond the Duchy of Rome.
The strengthening of the religious and ecclesiastical aristocracy led to continuous power struggles between secular lords ("Baroni") and the Pope until the middle of the 16th century. Innocent III tried to strengthen his own territorial power, wishing to assert his authority in the provincial administrations of Tuscia, Campagna and Marittima through the Church's representatives, in order to reduce the power of the Colonna family. Other popes tried to do the same.
During the period when the papacy resided in Avignon, France (1309–1377), the feudal lords' power increased due to the absence of the Pope from Rome. Small communes, and Rome above all, opposed the lords' increasing power, and with Cola di Rienzo, they tried to present themselves as antagonists of the ecclesiastical power. However, between 1353 and 1367, the papacy regained control of Lazio and the rest of the Papal States.
From the middle of the 16th century, the papacy politically unified Lazio with the Papal States, so that these territories became provincial administrations of St. Peter's estate; governors in Viterbo, in Marittima and Campagna, and in Frosinone administered them for the papacy.
Lazio comprised the short-lived Roman Republic, in which it became a puppet state of the First French Republic under the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Republic existed from 15 February 1798 until Lazio was returned to the Papal States in October 1799. In 1809, Lazio was annexed to the French Empire under the name of Department of Tibre, but returned under the Pope in 1815.
On 20 September 1870 the capture of Rome, during the reign of Pope Pius IX, and France's defeat at Sedan, completed Italian unification, and Lazio was incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy.
In 1927 the territory of the Province of Rieti, belonging to Umbria and Abruzzo, joined Lazio.
Towns in Lazio were devastated by the 2016 Central Italy earthquake which occurred on 24 August 2016.
Agriculture, crafts, animal husbandry and fishery are the main traditional sources of income. Agriculture is characterized by the cultivation of wine grapes, fruit, vegetables and olives.
Industrial development in Lazio is limited to the areas south of Rome. Communications and - above all - the setting of the border of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno some kilometers south of Rome, have influenced the position of industry, favouring the areas with the best links to Rome and those near the Autostrada del Sole (motorway), especially around Frosinone. Firms are often small to medium in size and operate in the building and building materials (Rome, Civitavecchia), paper (Sora, Italy, Isola del Liri), petrochemical (Gaeta, Rome), textile (Frosinone), engineering (Rieti, Anagni), automobile (Cassino), electronic and electrotechnical (Viterbo) sectors.
Approximately 73% of the working population are employed in the services sector; this is a considerable proportion, but is justified by the presence of Rome, which is the core of public administration, banking, tourism, insurance and other sectors. Many national and multinational corporations, public and private, have their headquarters in Rome (ENI, Enel, Leonardo, Alitalia, RAI).
Lazio's limited industrial sector and highly developed service industries allowed the region to well outperform the Italian economy in 2009 in the heart of the global financial crisis.
The unemployment rate stood at 11.1% in 2018.
With a population of 5,864,321 million, Lazio is the second most populated region of Italy. The overall population density in the region is 341 inhabitants per km2. However, the population density widely ranges from almost 800 inhabitants per km2 in the highly urbanized Province of Rome to less than 60 inhabitants per km2 in the mountainous and rural Province of Rieti. As of January 2010, the Italian national institute of statistics ISTAT estimated that 497,940 foreign-born immigrants live in Lazio, equal to 8.8% of the total regional population.
Rome is center-left politically oriented by tradition, while the rest of Lazio is center-right oriented. In the 2008 general election, Lazio gave 44.2% of its vote to the centre-right coalition, while the centre-left block took 41.4% of vote. In the 2013 general election, Lazio gave 40.7% of its vote to the center-left block coalition, 29.3% to the center-right coalition and 20.2 to the Five Star Movement.
Lazio is divided into four provinces and one metropolitan (province-level) city:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18701
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Lee Van Cleef
Clarence Leroy "Lee" Van Cleef Jr. (January 9, 1925 – December 16, 1989) was an American actor best known for his roles in Spaghetti Westerns such as "For A Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". He declined to have his nose altered to play a sympathetic character in his film debut, "High Noon", and was relegated to a non-speaking outlaw as a result. For a decade he was typecast as a minor villain, his "sinister" features overshadowing his acting skills. After suffering serious injuries in a car crash, Van Cleef had begun to lose interest in his declining career by the time Sergio Leone gave him a major role in "For a Few Dollars More". The film made him a box-office draw, especially in Europe.
Van Cleef, born of partial Dutch, English and German ancestry on January 9, 1925, in Somerville, New Jersey, was the son of Marion Lavinia Van Fleet and Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef. At age 17, he obtained his high school diploma early in his senior year at Somerville High School in order to enlist in the United States Navy in September 1942.
After basic training and further training at the Naval Fleet Sound School, Van Cleef was assigned to a submarine chaser and then to a minesweeper, , on which he worked as a sonarman.
The ship initially patrolled the Caribbean, then moved to the Mediterranean, participating in the landings in southern France. In January 1945, "Incredible" moved to the Black Sea, and performed sweeping duties out of the Soviet Navy base at Sevastopol, Crimea. Afterwards the ship performed air-sea rescue patrols in the Black Sea before returning to Palermo, Sicily. By the time of his discharge in March 1946, he had achieved the rank of Sonarman First Class (SO1) and had earned his mine sweeper patch. He also had been awarded the Bronze Star and the Good Conduct Medal. By virtue of his deployments, Van Cleef also qualified for the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.
After leaving the Navy, Van Cleef read for a part in "Our Town" at the Little Theater Group in Clinton, New Jersey and received his first stage role. From there, he continued to meet with the group and audition for parts. The next biggest part was that of the boxer, Joe Pendleton, in the play "Heaven Can Wait". During this time, he was observed by visiting talent scouts, who were impressed by Van Cleef's stage presence and delivery. One of these scouts later took him to New York City talent agent Maynard Morris of the MCA agency, who then sent him to the Alvin Theater for an audition. The play was "Mister Roberts".
Van Cleef's screen debut came in "High Noon". During a performance of "Mister Roberts" in Los Angeles, he was noticed by film director Stanley Kramer, who offered Van Cleef a role in his upcoming film. Kramer originally wanted Van Cleef for the role of the deputy Harvey Pell, but as he wanted Van Cleef to have his "distinctive nose" fixed, Van Cleef declined the role in favor of the part of the silent gunslinger Jack Colby. He was then cast mostly in villainous roles, due to his sharp cheeks and chin, piercing eyes, and hawk-like nose, from the part of Tony Romano in "Kansas City Confidential" (1952), culminating 14 years later in Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966).
Aside from Westerns and the science fiction films, three of his early major roles were in noir films, "Kansas City Confidential" (1952), "Vice Squad" (1953) and "The Big Combo" (1955). Van Cleef appeared six times between 1951 and 1955 on the children's syndicated Western series "The Adventures of Kit Carson", starring Bill Williams. He was cast three times, including the role of Rocky Hatch in the episode "Greed Rides the Range" (1952), of another syndicated Western series, "The Range Rider". In 1952, he was cast in the episode "Formula for Fear" of the Western aviation series "Sky King". He appeared in episode 82 of the TV series "The Lone Ranger" in 1952. In 1954, Van Cleef appeared as Jesse James in the syndicated series "Stories of the Century".
In 1955, he was cast twice on another syndicated Western series, "Annie Oakley". That same year, he guest-starred on the CBS Western series, "Brave Eagle". In 1955, he played one of the two villains in an episode of "The Adventures of Champion" the Wonder Horse. In 1958, he was cast as Ed Murdock, a rodeo performer trying to reclaim the title in the event at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on "Richard Diamond, Private Detective".
Van Cleef played different characters on four episodes of ABC's "The Rifleman", with Chuck Connors, between 1959 and 1962, and twice on ABC's "Tombstone Territory". In 1958, he was cast as Deputy Sid Carver in the episode "The Great Stagecoach Robbery" of another syndicated Western series, "Frontier Doctor", starring Rex Allen. Van Cleef appeared in 1959 as Luke Clagg in the episode "Strange Request" of the NBC Western series "Riverboat" starring Darren McGavin and in an episode of "Maverick" titled "Red Dog" in 1960 starring Roger Moore and John Carradine.
Van Cleef played a sentry on an episode of the ABC sitcom "The Real McCoys", with Walter Brennan. Van Cleef was cast with Pippa Scott and again with Chuck Connors in the 1960 episode "Trial by Fear" of the CBS anthology series "The DuPont Show with June Allyson". A young Van Cleef also made an appearance on "The Andy Griffith Show" and as Frank Diamond in "The Untouchables", in an episode entitled "The Unhired Assassin". He also appeared in an episode of the ABC/Warner Brothers Western series "The Alaskans".
Van Cleef guest-starred on the CBS Western series "Have Gun – Will Travel", on the ABC/Warner Bros. series "Colt .45", on the NBC Western series "Cimarron City" and "Laramie", and on Rod Cameron's syndicated crime dramas "City Detective" and "State Trooper". He guest-starred in an episode of John Bromfield's syndicated crime drama "Sheriff of Cochise". Van Cleef starred as minor villains and henchmen in various Westerns, including "The Tin Star" and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral". His film characters died in many of his Westerns and gangster portrayals.
In 1960, he appeared as a villainous swindler in the "Bonanza" episode, "The Bloodline" (December 31, 1960) and also made an appearance on "Gunsmoke". In 1961, he played a role on episode 7 ("The Grave") of the third season of "The Twilight Zone". He played a villainous henchman of Lee Marvin's title character in the 1962 John Ford movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance". In 1963, he appeared on "Perry Mason" (episode: "The Case of the Golden Oranges"). That same year, he appeared in "The Day of the Misfits" on "The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters".
In 1965, Sergio Leone cast Van Cleef, whose career had yet to take off, as a main protagonist alongside Clint Eastwood in "For a Few Dollars More". Leone then chose Van Cleef to appear again with Eastwood, this time as the primary antagonist, Angel Eyes, in the now seminal Western "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966). With his roles in Leone's films, Van Cleef became a major star of Spaghetti Westerns, playing central, and often surprisingly heroic, roles in films such as "The Big Gundown" (1966), "Death Rides a Horse" (1967), "Day of Anger" (1967), and "The Grand Duel" (1972). He played the title role in "Sabata" (1969) and "Return of Sabata" (1971), and co-starred with Jim Brown in an Italian-American co-production, "Take a Hard Ride" (1975). In his final two westerns he co-starred with Leif Garrett in "God's Gun" (1976) and "Kid Vengeance" (1977), both of which were filmed mainly in Israel.
Van Cleef later had a supporting role in John Carpenter's cult film "Escape from New York" (1981). In 1984, he was cast as a ninja master in the NBC adventure series "The Master", but it was canceled after thirteen episodes. In all, Van Cleef is credited with 90 movie roles and 109 television appearances over a 38-year span.
Van Cleef was married three times. His first marriage was to Patsy Ruth Kahle, in 1943. They had three children, Alan, Deborah and David, and divorced in 1958. His second marriage was to Joan Marjorie Drane, from 1960 to 1974. His final marriage was to Barbara Havelone in 1976, who survived him.
He lost the last joint of the middle finger of his right hand while building a playhouse for his daughter.
In 1958, a severe car crash nearly cost Van Cleef his life and career. A resulting knee injury made his physicians think that he would never ride a horse again. This injury plagued Van Cleef for the rest of his life and caused him great pain. His recovery was long and difficult and halted his acting for a time. He then began a business in interior decoration with second wife Joan, as well as pursuing his talent for painting, primarily of sea and landscapes.
Despite suffering from heart disease from the late 1970s and having a pacemaker installed in the early 1980s, Van Cleef continued to work in films until his death on December 16, 1989, at age 64. He collapsed in his home in Oxnard, California, from a heart attack. Throat cancer was listed as a secondary cause of death. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Hollywood Hills, California, with an inscription on his grave marker referring to his many acting performances as a villain: "BEST OF THE BAD".
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Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello (; 28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre."
Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in the village of u Càvusu (lit. "Trouser", from the shape of a nearby ravine), a poor suburb of Girgenti (Agrigento, a town in southern Sicily). His father, Stefano, belonged to a wealthy family involved in the sulphur industry, and his mother, Caterina Ricci Gramitto, was also of a well-to-do background, descending from a family of the bourgeois professional class of Agrigento. Both families, the Pirandellos and the Ricci Gramittos, were ferociously anti-Bourbon and actively participated in the struggle for unification and democracy ("Il Risorgimento"). Stefano participated in the famous Expedition of the Thousand, later following Garibaldi all the way to the battle of Aspromonte, and Caterina, who had hardly reached the age of thirteen, was forced to accompany her father to Malta, where he had been sent into exile by the Bourbon monarchy. But the open participation in the Garibaldian cause and the strong sense of idealism of those early years were quickly transformed, above all in Caterina, into an angry and bitter disappointment with the new reality created by the unification. Pirandello would eventually assimilate this sense of betrayal and resentment and express it in several of his poems and in his novel "The Old and the Young". It is also probable that this climate of disillusion inculcated in the young Luigi the sense of disproportion between ideals and reality which is recognizable in his essay on humorism ("L'Umorismo").
Pirandello received his elementary education at home, but was much more fascinated by the fables and legends, somewhere between popular and magic, that his elderly servant Maria Stella used to recount to him than by anything scholastic or academic. By the age of twelve, he had already written his first tragedy. At the insistence of his father, he was registered at a technical school, but eventually switched to the study of the humanities at the "ginnasio", something which had always attracted him.
In 1880, the Pirandello family moved to Palermo. It was here, in the capital of Sicily, that Luigi completed his high school education. He also began reading omnivorously, focusing, above all, on 19th-century Italian poets such as Giosuè Carducci and Arturo Graf. He then started writing his first poems and fell in love with his cousin Lina.
During this period, the first signs of serious contrast between Luigi and his father began to develop; Luigi had discovered some notes revealing the existence of Stefano's extramarital relations. As a reaction to the ever-increasing distrust and disharmony that Luigi was developing toward his father, a man of a robust physique and crude manners, his attachment to his mother would continue growing to the point of profound veneration. This later expressed itself, after her death, in the moving pages of the novella "Colloqui con i personaggi" in 1915.
His romantic feelings for his cousin, initially looked upon with disfavour, were suddenly taken very seriously by Lina's family. They demanded that Luigi abandon his studies and dedicate himself to the sulphur business so that he could immediately marry her. In 1886, during a vacation from school, Luigi went to visit the sulphur mines of Porto Empedocle and started working with his father. This experience was essential to him and would provide the basis for such stories as "Il Fumo", "Ciàula scopre la Luna" as well as some of the descriptions and background in the novel "The Old and the Young". The marriage, which seemed imminent, was postponed.
Pirandello then registered at the University of Palermo in the departments of Law and of Letters. The campus at Palermo, and above all the Department of Law, was the centre in those years of the vast movement which would eventually evolve into the Fasci Siciliani. Although Pirandello was not an active member of this movement, he had close ties of friendship with its leading ideologists: Rosario Garibaldi Bosco, Enrico La Loggia, Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida and Francesco De Luca.
In 1887, having definitively chosen the Department of Letters, he moved to Rome in order to continue his studies. But the encounter with the city, centre of the struggle for unification to which the families of his parents had participated with generous enthusiasm, was disappointing and nothing close to what he had expected. "When I arrived in Rome it was raining hard, it was night time and I felt like my heart was being crushed, but then I laughed like a man in the throes of desperation."
Pirandello, who was an extremely sensitive moralist, finally had a chance to see for himself the irreducible decadence of the so-called heroes of the Risorgimento in the person of his uncle Rocco, now a greying and exhausted functionary of the prefecture who provided him with temporary lodgings in Rome. The "desperate laugh", the only manifestation of revenge for the disappointment undergone, inspired the bitter verses of his first collection of poems, "Mal Giocondo" (1889). But not all was negative; this first visit to Rome provided him with the opportunity to assiduously visit the many theatres of the capital: Il Nazionale, Il Valle, il Manzoni. "Oh the dramatic theatre! I will conquer it. I cannot enter into one without experiencing a strange sensation, an excitement of the blood through all my veins..."
Because of a conflict with a Latin professor, he was forced to leave the University of Rome and went to Bonn with a letter of presentation from one of his other professors. The stay in Bonn, which lasted two years, was fervid with cultural life. He read the German romantics, Jean Paul, Tieck, Chamisso, Heinrich Heine and Goethe. He began translating the "Roman Elegies" of Goethe, composed the "Elegie Boreali" in imitation of the style of the "Roman Elegies", and he began to meditate on the topic of humorism by way of the works of Cecco Angiolieri.
In March 1891 he received his doctorate in Romance Philology with a dissertation on the dialect of Agrigento: "Sounds and Developments of Sounds in the Speech of Craperallis".
After a brief sojourn in Sicily, during which the planned marriage with his cousin was finally called off, he returned to Rome, where he became friends with a group of writer-journalists including Ugo Fleres, Tomaso Gnoli, Giustino Ferri and Luigi Capuana. Capuana encouraged Pirandello to dedicate himself to narrative writing. In 1893 he wrote his first important work, "Marta Ajala", which was published in 1901 as "l'Esclusa". In 1894 he published his first collection of short stories, "Amori senza Amore". He married in 1894 as well. Following his father's suggestion he married a shy, withdrawn girl of a good family of Agrigentine origin educated by the nuns of San Vincenzo: Maria Antonietta Portulano.
The first years of matrimony brought on in him a new fervour for his studies and writings: his encounters with his friends and the discussions on art continued, more vivacious and stimulating than ever, while his family life, despite the complete incomprehension of his wife with respect to the artistic vocation of her husband, proceeded relatively tranquilly with the birth of two sons (Stefano and Fausto) and a daughter (Rosalia "Lietta"). In the meantime, Pirandello intensified his collaborations with newspaper editors and other journalists in magazines such as "La Critica" and "La Tavola Rotonda" in which he published, in 1895, the first part of the "Dialoghi tra Il Gran Me e Il Piccolo Me".
In 1897 he accepted an offer to teach Italian at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero di Roma, and in the magazine "Marzocco" he published several more pages of the "Dialoghi". In 1898, with Italo Falbo and Ugo Fleres, he founded the weekly "Ariel", in which he published the one-act play "L'Epilogo" (later changed to "La Morsa") and some novellas (La Scelta, Se...). The end of the 19th century and the beginnings of the 20th were a period of extreme productivity for Pirandello. In 1900, he published in "Marzocco" some of the most celebrated of his novellas ("Lumie di Sicilia", "La Paura del Sonno"...) and, in 1901, the collection of poems "Zampogna". In 1902 he published the first series of "Beffe della Morte e della Vita" and his second novel, "Il Turno".
The year 1903 was fundamental to the life of Pirandello. The flooding of the sulphur mines of Aragona, in which his father Stefano had invested not only an enormous amount of his own capital but also Antonietta's dowry, precipitated the collapse of the family. Antonietta, after opening and reading the letter announcing the catastrophe, entered into a state of semi-catatonia and underwent such a psychological shock that her mental balance remained profoundly and irremediably shaken.
Pirandello, who had initially harboured thoughts of suicide, attempted to remedy the situation as best he could by increasing the number of his lessons in both Italian and German and asking for compensation from the magazines to which he had freely given away his writings and collaborations. In the magazine "New Anthology", directed by G. Cena, meanwhile, the novel which Pirandello had been writing while in this horrible situation (watching over his mentally ill wife at night after an entire day spent at work) began appearing in episodes. The title was "Il Fu Mattia Pascal" ("The Late Mattia Pascal"). This novel contains many autobiographical elements that have been fantastically re-elaborated. It was an immediate and resounding success. Translated into German in 1905, this novel paved the way to the notoriety and fame which allowed Pirandello to publish with the more important firms such as Treves, with whom he published, in 1906, another collection of novellas "Erma Bifronte". In 1908 he published a volume of essays entitled "Arte e Scienza" and the important essay "L'Umorismo", in which he initiated the legendary debate with Benedetto Croce that would continue with increasing bitterness and venom on both sides for many years.
In 1909 the first part of "I Vecchi e I Giovani" was published in episodes. This novel retraces the history of the failure and repression of the Fasci Siciliani in the period from 1893 to 1894. When the novel came out in 1913 Pirandello sent a copy of it to his parents for their fiftieth wedding anniversary along with a dedication which said that "their names, Stefano and Caterina, live heroically." However, while the mother is transfigured in the novel into the otherworldly figure of Caterina Laurentano, the father, represented by the husband of Caterina, Stefano Auriti, appears only in memories and flashbacks, since, as was acutely observed by Leonardo Sciascia, "he died censured in a Freudian sense by his son who, in the bottom of his soul, is his enemy." Also in 1909, Pirandello began his collaboration with the prestigious journal "Corriere della Sera" in which he published the novellas "Mondo di Carta" ("World of Paper"), "La Giara", and, in 1910, "Non è una cosa seria" and "Pensaci, Giacomino!" ("Think it over, Giacomino!") At this point Pirandello's fame as a writer was continually increasing. His private life, however, was poisoned by the suspicion and obsessive jealousy of Antonietta who began turning physically violent.
In 1911, while the publication of novellas and short stories continued, Pirandello finished his fourth novel, "Suo Marito", republished posthumously (1941), and completely revised in the first four chapters, with the title "Giustino Roncella nato Boggiòlo". During his life the author never republished this novel for reasons of discretion; within are implicit references to the writer Grazia Deledda. But the work which absorbed most of his energies at this time was the collection of stories "La Vendetta del Cane", "Quando s'è capito il giuoco", "Il treno ha fischiato", "Filo d'aria" and "Berecche e la guerra". They were all published from 1913 to 1914 and are all now considered classics of Italian literature.
As Italy entered the First World War, Pirandello's son Stefano volunteered for service and was taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarians. In 1916 the actor Angelo Musco successfully recited the three-act comedy that the writer had extracted from the novella "Pensaci, Giacomino!" and the "pastoral" comedy "Liolà".
In 1917 the collection of novellas "E domani Lunedì" ("And Tomorrow, Monday...") was published, but the year was mostly marked by important theatrical representations: "Così è (se vi pare)" ("Right you are (if you think so)"), "A birrita cu' i ciancianeddi" and "Il Piacere dell'onestà" ("The Pleasure Of Honesty"). A year later, "Ma non è una cosa seria" ("But It's Nothing Serious") and "Il Gioco delle parti" ("The Game of Roles") were all produced on stage. Pirandello's son Stefano returned home when the war ended.
In 1919 Pirandello had his wife placed in an asylum. The separation from his wife, despite her morbid jealousies and hallucinations, caused great suffering for Pirandello who, even as late as 1924, believed he could still properly care for her at home. She never left the asylum.
1920 was the year of comedies such as "Tutto per bene", "Come prima meglio di prima", and "La Signora Morli". In 1921, the "Compagnia di Dario Niccomedi" staged, at the Valle di Roma, the play, "Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore", "Six Characters in Search of an Author". It was a clamorous failure. The public divided into supporters and adversaries, the latter of whom shouted, "Asylum, Asylum!" The author, who was present at the performance with his daughter Lietta, left through a side exit to avoid the crowd of enemies. The same drama, however, was a great success when presented in Milan. In 1922 in Milan, "Enrico IV" was performed for the first time and was acclaimed universally as a success. Pirandello's international reputation was developing as well. The "Sei personaggi" was performed in London and New York.
In 1925, Pirandello, with the help of Mussolini, assumed the artistic direction and ownership of the Teatro d'Arte di Roma, founded by the Gruppo degli Undici. He described himself as "a Fascist because I am Italian." For his devotion to Mussolini, the satirical magazine "Il Becco Giallo" used to call him "P. Randello" ("randello" in Italian means club).
He expressed publicly apolitical belief, saying "I'm apolitical, I'm only a man in the world..." He had continuous conflicts with famous fascist leaders. In 1927 he tore his fascist membership card to pieces in front of the startled secretary-general of the Fascist Party. For the remainder of his life, Pirandello was always under close surveillance by the secret fascist police OVRA.
His play, "The Giants of the Mountain", has been interpreted as evidence of his realization that the fascists were hostile to culture; yet, during a later appearance in New York, Pirandello distributed a statement announcing his support of Italy's annexation of Abyssinia. He gave his Nobel Prize medal to the Fascist government to be melted down for the Abyssinia Campaign. Mussolini's support brought him international fame and a worldwide tour, introducing his work to London, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Germany, Argentina, and Brazil.
Pirandello's conception of the theatre underwent a significant change at this point. The idea of the actor as an inevitable betrayer of the text, as in the "Sei personaggi," gave way to the identification of the actor with the character that they play. The company took their act throughout the major cities of Europe, and the Pirandellian repertoire became increasingly well known. Between 1925 and 1926 Pirandello's last and perhaps greatest novel, "Uno, Nessuno e Centomila" ("One, No one and One Hundred Thousand"), was published serially in the magazine "Fiera Letteraria".
Pirandello was nominated Academic of Italy in 1929, and in 1934 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after he had been nominated by Guglielmo Marconi, member of the Royal Academy of Italy. He was the last Italian playwright to be chosen for the award until 9 October 1997.
Pirandello died alone in his home at Via Bosio, Rome, on 10 December 1936.
Nearly all of Pirandello's plays were translated into English by the actor Robert Rietti. Pirandello's poetry was translated for the first time in 2016 by George Hochfield. William Weaver is a noted translator of Luigi Pirandello.
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Luke the Evangelist
Luke the Evangelist (Latin: "Lūcās", , "Loukâs", , "Lūqās", , "Lūqā'") is one of the Four Evangelists—the four traditionally ascribed authors of the canonical Gospels. The Early Church Fathers ascribed to him authorship of both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, which would mean Luke contributed over a quarter of the text of the New Testament, more than any other author. Prominent figures in early Christianity such as Jerome and Eusebius later reaffirmed his authorship, although a lack of conclusive evidence as to the identity of the author of the works has led to discussion in scholarly circles, both secular and religious.
The New Testament mentions Luke briefly a few times, and the Pauline Epistle to the Colossians () refers to him as a physician (from Greek for 'one who heals'); thus he is thought to have been both a physician and a disciple of Paul. Since the early years of the faith, Christians have regarded him as a saint. He is believed to have been a martyr, reportedly having been hanged from an olive tree, though some believe otherwise.
The Roman Catholic Church and other major denominations venerate him as Saint Luke the Evangelist and as a patron saint of artists, physicians, bachelors, surgeons, students and butchers; his feast day is 18 October.
Many scholars believe that Luke was a Greek physician who lived in the Greek city of Antioch in Ancient Syria, although some other scholars and theologians think Luke was a Hellenic Jew. Bart Koet, a researcher and professor of theology, has stated that it was widely accepted that the theology of Luke–Acts points to a gentile Christian writing for a gentile audience, although he concludes that it is more plausible that Luke–Acts is directed to a community made up of both Jewish and gentile Christians because there is stress on the scriptural roots of the gentile mission (see the use of Isaiah 49:6 in Luke–Acts). Gregory Sterling, Dean of the Yale Divinity School, claims that he was either a Hellenistic Jew or a god-fearer.
His earliest notice is in Paul's Epistle to Philemon—. He is also mentioned in and , two works commonly ascribed to Paul. The next earliest account of Luke is in the "Anti-Marcionite Prologue to the Gospel of Luke", a document once thought to date to the 2nd century, but which has more recently been dated to the later 4th century. Helmut Koester, however, claims that the following part, the only part preserved in the original Greek, may have been composed in the late 2nd century:
Epiphanius states that Luke was one of the Seventy Apostles ("Panarion" 51.11), and John Chrysostom indicates at one point that the "brother" Paul mentions in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians 8:18 is either Luke or Barnabas. ("Homily 18 on Second Corinthians" on 2 Corinthians 8:18)
If one accepts that Luke was indeed the author of the Gospel bearing his name and also the "Acts of the Apostles", certain details of his personal life can be reasonably assumed. While he does exclude himself from those who were eyewitnesses to Jesus' ministry, he repeatedly uses the word "we" in describing the Pauline missions in "Acts of the Apostles", indicating that he was personally there at those times.
There is similar evidence that Luke resided in Troas, the province which included the ruins of ancient Troy, in that he writes in "Acts" in the third person about Paul and his travels until they get to Troas, where he switches to the first person plural. The "we" section of "Acts" continues until the group leaves Philippi, when his writing goes back to the third person. This change happens again when the group returns to Philippi. There are three "we sections" in "Acts", all following this rule. Luke never stated, however, that he lived in Troas, and this is the only evidence that he did.
The composition of the writings, as well as the range of vocabulary used, indicate that the author was an educated man. A quote in the Epistle to the Colossians differentiates between Luke and other colleagues "of the circumcision."
This comment has traditionally caused commentators to conclude that Luke was a gentile. If this were true, it would make Luke the only writer of the New Testament who can clearly be identified as not being Jewish. However, that is not the only possibility. Although Luke is considered likely to have been a gentile Christian, some scholars believe him to have been a Hellenized Jew. The phrase could just as easily be used to differentiate between those Christians who strictly observed the rituals of Judaism and those who did not.
Luke's presence in Rome with the Apostle Paul near the end of Paul's life was attested by 2 Timothy 4:11: "Only Luke is with me". In the last chapter of the Book of Acts, widely attributed to Luke, there are several accounts in the first person also affirming Luke's presence in Rome, including : "And when we came to Rome..." According to some accounts, Luke also contributed to the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Luke died at age 84 in Boeotia, according to a "fairly early and widespread tradition". According to Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, Greek historian of the 14th century (and others), Luke's tomb was located in Thebes, whence his relics were transferred to Constantinople in the year 357.
The Gospel of Luke does not name its author. The Gospel was not nor does it claim to be written by direct witnesses to the reported events, unlike Acts beginning in the sixteenth chapter. However, in most translations the author suggests that they have investigated the book’s events and notes the name (Theophilus) of that to whom they are writing.
The earliest manuscript of the Gospel (Papyrus 75 = Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV), dated circa AD 200, ascribes the work to Luke; as did Irenaeus, writing circa AD 180, and the Muratorian fragment from AD 170.
The gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles make up a two-volume work which scholars call Luke–Acts. Together they account for 27.5% of the New Testament, the largest contribution by a single author.
Most scholars understand Luke's works (Luke–Acts) in the tradition of Greek historiography. The preface of "The Gospel of Luke" drawing on historical investigation identified the work to the readers as belonging to the genre of history. There is disagreement about how best to treat Luke's writings, with some historians regarding Luke as highly accurate, and others taking a more critical approach.
Based on his accurate description of towns, cities and islands, as well as correctly naming various official titles, archaeologist Sir William Ramsay wrote that "Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy... [he] should be placed along with the very greatest of historians." Professor of Classics at Auckland University, E.M. Blaiklock, wrote: "For accuracy of detail, and for evocation of atmosphere, Luke stands, in fact, with Thucydides. The Acts of the Apostles is not shoddy product of pious imagining, but a trustworthy record... it was the spadework of archaeology which first revealed the truth." New Testament scholar Colin Hemer has made a number of advancements in understanding the historical nature and accuracy of Luke's writings.
On the purpose of Acts, New Testament Scholar Luke Timothy Johnson has noted that "Luke's account is selected and shaped to suit his apologetic interests, not in defiance of but in conformity to ancient standards of historiography." Such a position is shared by most commentators such as Richard Heard who sees historical deficiencies as arising from "special objects in writing and to the limitations of his sources of information."
During modern times, Luke's competence as a historian is questioned, depending upon one's "a priori" view of the supernatural. Since post-Enlightenment historians work with methodological naturalism, such historians would see a narrative that relates supernatural, fantastic things like angels, demons etc., as problematic as a historical source. Mark Powell claims that "it is doubtful whether the writing of history was ever Luke's intent. Luke wrote to proclaim, to persuade, and to interpret; he did not write to preserve records for posterity. An awareness of this, has been, for many, the final nail in Luke the historian's coffin."
Robert M. Grant has noted that although Luke saw himself within the historical tradition, his work contains a number of statistical improbabilities, such as the sizable crowd addressed by Peter in Acts 4:4. He has also noted chronological difficulties whereby Luke "has Gamaliel refer to Theudas and Judas in the wrong order, and Theudas actually rebelled about a decade after Gamaliel spoke (5:36–7)".
Christian tradition, starting from the 8th century, states that Luke was the first icon painter. He is said to have painted pictures of the Virgin Mary and Child, in particular the Hodegetria image in Constantinople (now lost). Starting from the 11th century, a number of painted images were venerated as his autograph works, including the Black Madonna of Częstochowa and Our Lady of Vladimir. He was also said to have painted Saints Peter and Paul, and to have illustrated a gospel book with a full cycle of miniatures.
Late medieval Guilds of Saint Luke in the cities of Late Medieval Europe, especially Flanders, or the "Accademia di San Luca" (Academy of Saint Luke) in Rome—imitated in many other European cities during the 16th century—gathered together and protected painters. The tradition that Luke painted icons of Mary and Jesus has been common, particularly in Eastern Orthodoxy. The tradition also has support from the Saint Thomas Christians of India who claim to still have one of the Theotokos icons that Saint Luke painted and which St. Thomas brought to India.
In traditional depictions, such as paintings, evangelist portraits, and church mosaics, Saint Luke is often accompanied by an ox or bull, usually having wings. Sometimes only the symbol is shown, especially when in a combination of those of all Four Evangelists.
Despot George of Serbia purportedly bought the relics from the Ottoman sultan Murad II for 30,000 gold coins. After the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia, the kingdom's last queen, George's granddaughter Mary, who had brought the relics with her from Serbia as her dowry, sold them to the Venetian Republic.
In 1992, the then Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Ieronymos of Thebes and Levathia (who subsequently became Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens and All Greece) requested from Bishop Antonio Mattiazzo of Padua the return of "a significant fragment of the relics of St. Luke to be placed on the site where the holy tomb of the Evangelist is located and venerated today". This prompted a scientific investigation of the relics in Padua, and by numerous lines of empirical evidence (archeological analyses of the Tomb in Thebes and the Reliquary of Padua, anatomical analyses of the remains, carbon-14 dating, comparison with the purported skull of the Evangelist located in Prague) confirmed that these were the remains of an individual of Syrian descent who died between 416 BC and AD 72. The Bishop of Padua then delivered to Metropolitan Ieronymos the rib of Saint Luke that was closest to his heart to be kept at his tomb in Thebes.
Thus, the relics of Saint Luke are divided as follows:
References
Sources
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Lynyrd Skynyrd
Lynyrd Skynyrd ( ) is an American rock band formed in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1964. The group was originally named My Backyard and comprised Ronnie Van Zant (lead vocalist), Gary Rossington (guitar), Allen Collins (guitar), Larry Junstrom (bass guitar) and Bob Burns (drums). The band spent five years touring small venues under a variety of different names and with several lineup changes before finally deciding on "Lynyrd Skynyrd" in 1969. The band released their first album in 1973, having settled on a lineup that included bassist Leon Wilkeson, keyboardist Billy Powell and guitarist Ed King. Burns would later be replaced by Artimus Pyle, and King by Steve Gaines. At the height of their fame during the 1970s, the band popularized the Southern rock genre with songs such as "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird".
The band abruptly ceased when Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, and backup singer Cassie Gaines were killed in an airplane crash on October 20, 1977, but reformed in 1987 for a reunion tour with Ronnie's brother, Johnny Van Zant, as its lead vocalist. Lynyrd Skynyrd continues to tour and record with co-founder Rossington (being the band's sole continuous member), Johnny Van Zant, and Rickey Medlocke, who first wrote and recorded with the band from 1971 to 1972 before his return in 1996. In January 2018, Lynyrd Skynyrd announced its farewell tour, and continue touring as of October 2019. Members are also working on their fifteenth album.
In 2004, "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked Lynyrd Skynyrd No. 95 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". Lynyrd Skynyrd was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 13, 2006. To date, the band has sold 28 million records in the United States.
In Jacksonville, Florida, during the summer of 1964, Ronnie Van Zant, Bob Burns, and Gary Rossington became acquainted while playing on rival baseball teams. The trio decided to jam together one afternoon after Burns was injured by a ball hit by Van Zant. They set up their equipment in the carport of Burns' parents' house and played The Rolling Stones' then-current hit "Time Is on My Side". Liking what they heard, they immediately decided to form a band. They soon approached guitarist Allen Collins to join the band, though Collins initially fled on his bicycle and hid in a tree at the sight of Van Zant pulling into his driveway. Collins was soon convinced that Van Zant meant him no harm and he agreed to join the fledgling band. Bassist Larry Junstrom soon rounded out the lineup and the band settled on the name My Backyard, later changed to The Noble Five before becoming The One Percent by 1968.
Still known as The One Percent in 1969, Van Zant sought a new name after growing tired of taunts from audiences that the band had "1% talent". At Burns' suggestion, the group settled on "Leonard Skinnerd", a mocking tribute to P.E. teacher Leonard Skinner at Robert E. Lee High School. Skinner was notorious for strictly enforcing the school's policy against boys having long hair. Rossington dropped out of school, tired of being hassled about his hair. The more distinctive spelling "Lynyrd Skynyrd" was being used at least as early as 1970. Despite their high school acrimony, the band developed a friendlier relationship with Skinner in later years, and invited him to introduce them at a concert in the Jacksonville Memorial Coliseum. Skinner also allowed the band to use a photo of his Leonard Skinner Realty sign for the inside of their third album.
By 1970, Lynyrd Skynyrd had become a top band in Jacksonville, headlining at some local concerts, and opening for several national acts. Pat Armstrong, a Jacksonville native and partner in Macon, Georgia-based Hustlers Inc. with Phil Walden's younger brother, Alan Walden, became the band's managers. Armstrong left Hustlers shortly thereafter to start his own agency. Walden stayed with the band until 1974, when management was turned over to Peter Rudge. The band continued to perform throughout the South in the early 1970s, further developing their hard-driving blues rock sound and image, and experimenting with recording their sound in a studio. Skynyrd crafted this distinctively "southern" sound through a creative blend of country, blues, and a slight British rock influence.
During this time, the band experienced some lineup changes for the first time. Junstrom left and was briefly replaced by Greg T. Walker on bass. At that time, Rickey Medlocke joined as a second drummer and occasional second vocalist to help fortify Burns' sound on the drums. Medlocke grew up with the founding members of Lynyrd Skynyrd and his grandfather Shorty Medlocke was an influence in the writing of "The Ballad of Curtis Loew". Some versions of the band's history state Burns briefly left the band during this time, although other versions state that Burns played with the band continuously through 1974. The band played some shows with both Burns and Medlocke, using a dual-drummer approach. In 1971, they made some recordings at the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Studio with Walker and Medlocke serving as the rhythm section, but without the participation of Burns. Medlocke and Walker left the band to play with another southern rock band, Blackfoot. When Lynyrd Skynyrd made a second round of Muscle Shoals recordings in 1972, Burns was once again featured on drums along with new bassist Leon Wilkeson. Medlocke and Walker did not appear on any album until 1977's "Street Survivors", which used the track "One More Time" from the early Muscle Shoals sessions with guitar overdubs done in 1975 by Ed King. Also in 1972, roadie Billy Powell became the band's keyboardist after Ronnie Van Zant heard him playing his rendition of "Free Bird".
In 1972, the band (then comprising Van Zant, Collins, Rossington, Burns, Wilkeson, and Powell) was discovered by musician, songwriter, and producer Al Kooper of Blood, Sweat & Tears, who had attended one of their shows at Funocchio's in Atlanta. Kooper signed them to his Sounds of the South label that was to be distributed and supported by MCA Records, and produced their first album. Wilkeson, citing nervousness about fame, temporarily left the band during the early recording sessions for the album, only playing on two tracks. He rejoined the band shortly after the album's release at Van Zant's invitation and is pictured on the album cover. To replace him, Strawberry Alarm Clock guitarist Ed King joined the band and played bass on the album (the only part which Wilkeson had not already written being the solo section in "Simple Man"), and also contributed to the songwriting and did some guitar work on the album. After Wilkeson rejoined, King stayed in the band and switched solely to guitar, allowing the band to replicate its three-guitar studio mix in live performances. The band released their debut album "(Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)" on August 13, 1973. It sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc by the RIAA. The album featured the hit song "Free Bird", which received national airplay, eventually reaching No. 19 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart.
Lynyrd Skynyrd's fan base continued to grow rapidly throughout 1973, largely due to their opening slot on the Who's "Quadrophenia" tour in the United States. Their 1974 follow-up, "Second Helping", featuring King, Collins and Rossington all collaborating with Van Zant on the songwriting, cemented the band's breakthrough. Its single, "Sweet Home Alabama", a response to Neil Young's "Southern Man", reached #8 on the charts that August. (Young and Van Zant were not rivals, but fans of each other's music and good friends; Young wrote the song "Powderfinger" for the band, but they never recorded it.) During their peak years, most of their records sold over one million copies, but "Sweet Home Alabama" was the only single to crack the top ten. The "Second Helping" album reached No. 12 in 1974, eventually going multi-platinum. In July of that year, Lynyrd Skynyrd was one of the headline acts at The Ozark Music Festival held at the Missouri State Fairgrounds in Sedalia, Missouri.
By 1975, personal issues began to take their toll on the band. In January, drummer Burns left the band after suffering a mental breakdown during a European tour and was replaced by Kentucky native and former US Marine Artimus Pyle. The band's third album, "Nuthin' Fancy", was recorded in 17 days. Unhappy with the band's lack of preparation for the album's recording, Kooper and the band parted ways by mutual agreement before its release, with Kooper left with the tapes to complete the mix. Though the album fared well, it ultimately had lower sales than its predecessors. Midway through the "Nuthin' Fancy" tour, guitarist Ed King abruptly left the band after a falling out with Van Zant. Van Zant and King's guitar roadie were arrested the night prior and spent the night in jail. With his guitar roadie unavailable, King played that night's show with old strings which broke and caused his performance to be substandard, and Van Zant subsequently belittled him in front of his bandmates. King quit and returned home to Los Angeles, believing Van Zant had been responsible for his guitar roadie being in jail in the first place. The band continued for the next several months with two guitarists rather than their usual "three guitar army". In January 1976, backup singers Leslie Hawkins, Cassie Gaines and JoJo Billingsley (collectively known as The Honkettes) were added, although they were not considered official members. Lynyrd Skynyrd's fourth album "Gimme Back My Bullets" was released, but did not achieve the same success as the previous two albums. Van Zant and Collins both felt that the band was seriously missing the three-guitar attack that had been one of its early hallmarks. Although Skynyrd auditioned several guitarists, including such high-profile names as Leslie West, its search continued until Cassie Gaines began touting the guitar and songwriting prowess of her younger brother, Steve.
Then Steve Gaines, who led his own band, Crawdad (which occasionally would perform Skynyrd's "Saturday Night Special" in their set), was invited to audition onstage with Skynyrd at a concert in Kansas City on May 11, 1976. Liking what they heard, the group also jammed informally with the Oklahoma native several times, then invited him into the group in June. With Gaines on board, the newly reconstituted band recorded the double-live album "One More from the Road" at the Fox Theatre (Atlanta, Georgia) in Atlanta, and performed at the Knebworth festival in Great Britain, headlined by the Rolling Stones.
Both Collins and Rossington had serious car accidents over Labor Day weekend in 1976, which slowed the recording of the follow-up album and forced the band to cancel some concert dates. Rossington's accident inspired the ominous Van Zant/Collins composition "That Smell" – a cautionary tale about drug abuse that was clearly aimed towards him and at least one other band member. Rossington has admitted repeatedly that he was the "Prince Charming" of the song who crashed his car into an oak tree while drunk and stoned on Quaaludes. With the birth of his daughter Melody in 1976, Van Zant was making a serious attempt to clean up his act and curtail the cycle of boozed-up brawling that was part of Skynyrd's reputation.
1977's "Street Survivors" turned out to be a showcase for guitarist/vocalist Steve Gaines, who had joined the band just a year earlier and was making his studio debut with them. Publicly and privately, Ronnie Van Zant marveled at the multiple talents of Skynyrd's newest member, claiming that the band would "all be in his shadow one day". Gaines' contributions included his co-lead vocal with Van Zant on the co-written "You Got That Right" and the rousing guitar boogie "I Know a Little", which he had written before he joined Skynyrd. So confident was Skynyrd's leader of Gaines' abilities that the album (and some concerts) featured Gaines delivering his self-penned bluesy "Ain't No Good Life" – the only song in the pre-crash Skynyrd catalog to feature a lead vocalist other than Ronnie Van Zant. The album also included the hit singles "What's Your Name" and "That Smell". The band was poised for their biggest tour yet, with shows always highlighted by the iconic rock anthem "Free Bird". In November, the band was scheduled to fulfill Van Zant's lifelong dream of headlining New York's Madison Square Garden.
Following a performance at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina, on October 20, 1977, the band boarded a chartered Convair CV-240 bound for Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where they were scheduled to appear at LSU the following night. After running out of fuel the pilots attempted an emergency landing before crashing in a heavily forested area five miles northeast of Gillsburg, Mississippi. Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines, along with backup singer Cassie Gaines (Steve's older sister), assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary, and co-pilot William Gray were killed on impact. Other band members (Collins, Rossington, Wilkeson, Powell, Pyle, and Hawkins), tour manager Ron Eckerman, and several road crew members suffered serious injuries.
The accident came just three days after the release of "Street Survivors". Following the crash and the ensuing press, "Street Survivors" became the band's second platinum album and reached No. 5 on the U.S. album chart. The single "What's Your Name" reached No. 13 on the single charts in 1978. The original cover sleeve for "Street Survivors" had featured a photograph of the band amid flames, with Steve Gaines nearly obscured by fire. Out of respect for the deceased (and at the request of Teresa Gaines, Steve's widow), MCA Records withdrew the original cover and replaced it with the album's back photo, a similar image of the band against a simple black background. Thirty years later, for the deluxe CD version of "Street Survivors", the original "flames" cover was restored.
Lynyrd Skynyrd disbanded after the tragedy, reuniting only on one occasion to perform an instrumental version of "Free Bird" at Charlie Daniels' Volunteer Jam V in January 1979. Collins, Rossington, Powell, and Pyle were joined by Daniels and members of his band. Leon Wilkeson, who was still undergoing physical therapy for his badly broken left arm, was in attendance, along with Judy Van Zant, Teresa Gaines, JoJo Billingsley, and Leslie Hawkins.
Rossington, Collins, Wilkeson and Powell formed the Rossington-Collins Band, which released two MCA albums, "Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere" in 1980 and "This Is The Way" in 1981. Deliberately avoiding comparisons with Ronnie Van Zant as well as suggestions that this band was Lynyrd Skynyrd reborn, Rossington and Collins chose a woman, Dale Krantz, as the lead vocalist. However, as an acknowledgement of their past, the band's concert encore would always be an instrumental version of "Free Bird". Rossington and Collins eventually had a falling out over the affections of Dale Krantz, whom Rossington married and with whom he formed the Rossington Band, which released two albums in the late 1980s, "Returned to the Scene of the Crime" in 1986 and "Love Your Man" in 1988 and also opened for the Lynyrd Skynyrd Tribute Tour in 1987–1988.
The other former members of Lynyrd Skynyrd continued to make music during the hiatus era. Billy Powell played keyboards in a Christian rock band named Vision, touring with established Christian rocker Mylon LeFevre. During Vision concerts, Powell's trademark keyboard talent was often spotlighted and he spoke about his conversion to Christianity after the near-fatal plane crash. Pyle formed the Artimus Pyle Band in 1982, which occasionally featured former Honkettes JoJo Billingsley and Leslie Hawkins and released one MCA album titled "A.P.B.".
In 1980, Allen Collins's wife Kathy died of a massive hemorrhage while miscarrying their third child. He formed the Allen Collins Band in 1983 from the remnants of the Rossington-Collins Band and released one MCA studio album titled "Here, There & Back". He was visibly suffering from Kathy's death; he excessively drank and consumed drugs. On January 29, 1986, Collins, then 33, crashed his Ford Thunderbird into a ditch near his home in Jacksonville, killing his girlfriend Debra Jean Watts and leaving himself permanently paralyzed from the chest down.
In 1987, Lynyrd Skynyrd reunited for a full-scale tour with five major members of the pre-crash band: crash survivors Gary Rossington, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson and Artimus Pyle, along with guitarist Ed King, who had left the band two years before the crash. Ronnie Van Zant's younger brother, Johnny, took over as the new lead singer and primary songwriter. Due to founding member Allen Collins' paralysis from his 1986 car accident, he was only able to participate as the musical director, choosing Randall Hall, his former bandmate in the Allen Collins Band, as his stand-in. In return for avoiding prison following his guilty plea to DUI manslaughter Collins would be wheeled out onstage each night to explain to the audience why he could no longer perform (usually before the performance of "That Smell", the lyrics of which had been partially directed at him). Collins was stricken with pneumonia in 1989 and died on January 23, 1990, leaving Rossington and Junstrom as the only remaining founding members.
The reunited band was intended to be a one-time tribute to the original lineup, captured on the double-live album "Southern by the Grace of God: Lynyrd Skynyrd Tribute Tour 1987". That the band chose to continue after the 1987 tribute tour caused legal problems for the survivors, as Judy Van Zant Jenness and Teresa Gaines Rapp (widows of Ronnie and Steve, respectively) sued the others for violating an agreement made shortly after the plane crash, stating that they would not "exploit" the Skynyrd name for profit. As part of the settlement, Jenness and Rapp collect nearly 30% of the band's touring revenues (representing the shares their husbands would have earned had they lived), and hold a proviso requiring any band touring as Lynyrd Skynyrd to include Rossington and at least two of the other four surviving members from the pre-crash era, namely Wilkeson, Powell, King and Pyle. However, continued lineup changes and natural attrition has led to a relaxation in recent years.
The band released its first post-reunion album in 1991, entitled "Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991". By that time, the band had added a second drummer, Kurt Custer. Artimus Pyle left the band during the same year, with Custer becoming the band's sole drummer. That lineup released a second post-reunion album, entitled "The Last Rebel" in 1993. Later that year, Randall Hall was replaced by Mike Estes. The band's third post-reunion album, "Endangered Species", featured mostly acoustic instrumentation and remakes of many of the band's classic 1970s songs. On the album, Kurt Custer was replaced by Owen Hale on drums.
Ed King had to take a break from touring in 1996 due to heart complications that required a transplant. In his absence, he was replaced by Hughie Thomasson. The band did not let King rejoin after he recovered. At the same time, Mike Estes was replaced by Rickey Medlocke, who had previously played and recorded with the band for a short time in the early 1970s. The result was a major retooling of the band's 'guitar army'. Medlocke and Thomasson would also become major contributors to the band's songwriting along with Rossington and Van Zant.
The first album with this new lineup, released in 1997, was entitled "Twenty". The band released another album, "Edge of Forever" in 1999. By that time, Hale had left the band, and the drums on the album were played by session drummer Kenny Aronoff. Michael Cartellone became the band's permanent drummer on the subsequent tour. Despite the growing number of post-reunion albums that band had released up to this time, setlists showed that the band was playing mostly 1970s-era material in concert.
The band released a Christmas album, entitled "Christmas Time Again" in 2000. Leon Wilkeson, Skynyrd's bassist since 1972, was found dead in his hotel room on July 27, 2001. His death was found to be due to emphysema and chronic liver disease. He was replaced in 2001 by Ean Evans. Wilkeson's death resulted in the band with two remaining members from the classic pre-crash lineups.
The first album to feature Evans was "Vicious Cycle", released in 2003. This album had improved sales over the other post-reunion albums, and had a minor hit single in the song "Red, White and Blue". The band also released a double collection album called "", which had songs from the original lineup to the present, and also a live DVD of their Vicious Cycle Tour and on June 22, 2004, the album "".
On December 10, 2004, the band did a show for CMT, "Crossroads", a concert featuring country duo Montgomery Gentry and other genres of music. In the beginning of 2005 Hughie Thomasson left the band to reform his Southern Rock band Outlaws. Thomasson died in his sleep on September 9, 2007 of an apparent heart attack in his home in Brooksville, Florida; he was 55 years old.
On February 5, 2005, Lynyrd Skynyrd did a Super Bowl party in Jacksonville with special guests 3 Doors Down, Jo Dee Messina, Charlie Daniels and Ronnie and Johnny Van Zant's brother Donnie Van Zant of 38 Special. On February 13 of that year Lynyrd Skynyrd did a tribute to Southern Rock on the Grammy Awards with Gretchen Wilson, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban and Dickey Betts. In the summer of 2005, lead singer Johnny Van Zant had to have surgery on his vocal cord to have a polyp removed. He was told not to sing for three months. On September 10, 2005, Lynyrd Skynyrd performed without Johnny Van Zant at the Music Relief Concert for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, with Kid Rock standing in for Johnny. In December 2005, Johnny Van Zant returned to sing for Lynyrd Skynyrd. The band performed live at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, as a part of their 2007 tour. The concert was recorded in high definition for HDNet and premiered on December 1, 2007.
Mark "Sparky" Matejka, formerly of the country music band Hot Apple Pie, joined Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2006 as Thomasson's replacement. On November 2, 2007, the band performed for a crowd of 50,000 people at the University of Florida's Gator Growl student-run pep rally in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium ("The Swamp" football stadium). This was the largest crowd that Lynyrd Skynyrd had played to in the U.S., until the July 2008 Bama Jam in Enterprise, Alabama where more than 111,000 people attended.
On January 28, 2009, keyboardist Billy Powell died of a suspected heart attack at age 56 at his home near Jacksonville, Florida. No autopsy was carried out. He was replaced by Peter Keys. Powell's death left co-founding member Gary Rossington as the only remaining current member tied to the popular 1970s era lineup of the band, though current guitarist Ricky Medlocke did briefly drum for the band in the early 1970s, before the band signed with MCA Records and released their debut album.
On March 17, 2009, it was announced that Skynyrd had signed a worldwide deal with Roadrunner Records, in association with their label, Loud & Proud Records, and released their new album "God & Guns" on September 29 of that year. They toured Europe and the U.S. in 2009 with Keys on keyboards and Robert Kearns of the Bottle Rockets on bass; bassist Ean Evans died of cancer at age 48 on May 6, 2009. Scottish rock band Gun performed as special guests for the UK leg of Skynyrd's tour in 2010.
In addition to the tour, Skynyrd appeared at the Sean Hannity Freedom Concert series in late 2010. Hannity had been actively promoting the "God & Guns" album, frequently playing portions of the track "That Ain't My America" on his radio show. The tour is titled "Rebels and Bandoleros". The band continued to tour throughout 2011, playing alongside ZZ Top and the Doobie Brothers.
On May 2, 2012, the band announced the impending release of a new studio album, "Last of a Dyin' Breed", along with a North American and European tour. On August 21, 2012, "Last of a Dyin' Breed" was released. In celebration, the band did four autograph signings throughout the southeast. Lynyrd Skynyrd have used a Confederate flag since the 1970s and several criticisms have been raised against them because of this. While promoting the album on CNN on September 9, 2012, members of the band talked about its discontinued use of Confederate imagery. In September 2012, the band briefly did not display the Confederate flag, which had for years been a part of their stage show, because they did not want to be associated with racists that adopted the flag. However, after protests from fans, they reversed this decision, citing it as part of their Southern American heritage and states' rights symbolism.
Original drummer Bob Burns died aged 64 on April 3, 2015; his car crashed into a tree while he was driving alone near his home in Cartersville, Georgia. From 2015 through 2017, the band had periods of being sidelined or having to cancel shows due to health problems suffered by founding member Gary Rossington.
Former member Ed King, who had been battling cancer, died in his Nashville, Tennessee home on August 22, 2018 at 68 years of age. Original bass guitarist Larry Junstrom died October 6, 2019.
On January 25, 2018, Lynyrd Skynyrd announced their Last of the Street Survivors Farewell Tour, which started on May 4, 2018. Supporting acts include Kid Rock, Hank Williams Jr., Bad Company, the Charlie Daniels Band, The Marshall Tucker Band, .38 Special, Cheap Trick, Blackberry Smoke, the Randy Bachman Band, Blackfoot, Massive Wagons and Status Quo. Concerts are usually on Fridays and Saturdays. On January 8, 2020, Rossington stated in an interview that while they would no longer be touring, they will continue to play occasional live shows.
On March 19, 2019, Johnny Van Zant announced that the band intended to go into the studio to record one last album after completing the tour with several songs ready or "in the can". They appeared at the Kaaboo Texas festival on May 11, 2019.
On June 25, 2019, "The New York Times Magazine" listed Lynyrd Skynyrd among hundreds of recording artists whose original master recordings were believed to have been destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire. Though it is not known with certainty which, if any, of the band's master recordings were lost in the blaze, Lynyrd Skynyrd were among the artists listed in an internal Universal Music Group document listing the artists whose master recordings the company believed had been lost and subsequently spent tens of millions of dollars trying to replace.
In 2004, "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked the group No. 95 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time".
On November 28, 2005, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced that Lynyrd Skynyrd would be inducted alongside Black Sabbath, Blondie, Miles Davis, and the Sex Pistols. They were inducted in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan on March 13, 2006 during the Hall's 21st annual induction ceremony. The inductees included Ronnie Van Zant, Allen Collins, Gary Rossington, Ed King, Steve Gaines, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson, Bob Burns, and Artimus Pyle. The Honkettes, pre-crash members Rickey Medlocke, Larry Junstrom, and Greg T. Walker, and all post-crash members were not inducted. The current version of Skynyrd, augmented by King, Pyle, Burns, and former Honkettes JoJo Billingsley and Leslie Hawkins, performed "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird" at the ceremony, which was also attended by Judy Van Zant Jenness and Ronnie's two daughters, Teresa Gaines Rapp and her daughter Corinna, Allen Collins' daughters, and Leon Wilkeson's mother and son.
On April 4, 2017, a biopic, "Street Survivors," has cast the leads and begins shooting at month's end.
On March 13, 2018, filmmaker Stephen Kijak premiered his documentary called, "If I Leave Here Tomorrow" at the Stateside Theater during the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. Kijak was joined on stage by Johnnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington at the world premiere to speak to fans about the film.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18713
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Lodovico Ferrari
Lodovico de Ferrari (2 February 1522 – 5 October 1565) was an Italian mathematician.
Born in Bologna, Italy, Lodovico's grandfather, Bartolomeo de Ferrari, was forced out of Milan to Bologna. Lodovico settled in Bologna, Italy, and he began his career as the servant of Gerolamo Cardano. He was extremely bright, so Cardano started teaching him mathematics. Ferrari aided Cardano on his solutions for quadratic equations and cubic equations, and was mainly responsible for the solution of quartic equations that Cardano published. While still in his teens, Ferrari was able to obtain a prestigious teaching post in Rome after Cardano resigned from it and recommended him. Ferrari retired when young at 42 years old, and wealthy. He then moved back to his home town of Bologna where he lived with his widowed sister Maddalena to take up a professorship of mathematics at the University of Bologna in 1565. Shortly thereafter, he died of white arsenic poisoning, according to a legend because of his sisters.
In 1535 a famous dispute erupted between Ferrari and his contemporary Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia, involving the solution to cubic equations. Widespread stories that Tartaglia devoted the rest of his life to ruining Ferrari's teacher and erstwhile master Cardano, however, appear to be fabricated. Mathematical historians now credit both Cardano and Tartaglia with the formula to solve cubic equations, referring to it as the "Cardano–Tartaglia formula".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18720
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Lymphedema
Lymphedema, also known as lymphoedema and lymphatic edema, is a condition of localized swelling caused by a compromised lymphatic system. The lymphatic system functions as a critical portion of the body's immune system and returns interstitial fluid to the bloodstream. Lymphedema is most frequently a complication of cancer treatment or parasitic infections, but it can also be seen in a number of genetic disorders. Though incurable and progressive, a number of treatments can improve symptoms. Tissues with lymphedema are at high risk of infection because the lymphatic system has been compromised.
While there is no cure, treatment may improve outcomes. This commonly include compression therapy, good skin care, exercise, and manual lymphatic drainage (MLD), which together is known as combined decongestive therapy. Diuretics are not useful. Surgery is generally only used in those who are not improved with other measures.
The most common manifestation of lymphedema is soft tissue swelling, edema. As the disorder progresses, worsening edema and skin changes including discoloration, verrucous (wart-like) hyperplasia, hyperkeratosis, papillomatosis, dermal thickening and ulcers may be seen. Additionally, there is increased risk of infection of the skin, known as cellulitis.
When the lymphatic impairment becomes so great that the lymph fluid exceeds the lymphatic system's ability to transport it, an abnormal amount of protein-rich fluid collects in the tissues. Left untreated, this stagnant, protein-rich fluid causes tissue channels to increase in size and number, reducing oxygen availability. This interferes with wound healing and provides a rich culture medium for bacterial growth that can result in infections, cellulitis, lymphangitis, lymphadenitis and, in severe cases, skin ulcers. It is vital for lymphedema patients to be aware of the symptoms of infection and to seek immediate treatment, since recurrent infections or cellulitis, in addition to their inherent danger, further damage the lymphatic system and set up a vicious circle.
In rare cases, lymphedema can lead to a form of cancer called lymphangiosarcoma, although the mechanism of carcinogenesis is not understood. Lymphedema-associated lymphangiosarcoma is called Stewart-Treves syndrome. Lymphangiosarcoma most frequently occurs in cases of long-standing lymphedema. The incidence of angiosarcoma is estimated to be 0.45% in patients living 5 years after radical mastectomy. Lymphedema is also associated with a low grade form of cancer called retiform hemangioendothelioma (a low grade angiosarcoma).
Lymphedema can be disfiguring, and may result in a poor body image, which can cause psychological distress. Complications of lymphedema can cause difficulties in activities of daily living.
Lymphedema may be inherited (primary) or caused by injury to the lymphatic vessels (secondary).
It is most frequently seen after lymph node dissection, surgery and/or radiation therapy, in which damage to the lymphatic system is caused during the treatment of cancer, most notably breast cancer. In many patients with cancer, this condition does not develop until months or even years after therapy has concluded. Lymphedema may also be associated with accidents or certain diseases or problems that may inhibit the lymphatic system from functioning properly. In tropical areas of the world, a common cause of secondary lymphedema is filariasis, a parasitic infection. It can also be caused by damage to the lymphatic system from infections such as cellulitis.
Primary lymphedema may be congenital or arise sporadically. Multiple syndromes are associated with primary lymphedema, including Turner syndrome, Milroy's disease, and Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome. It is generally thought to occur as a result of absent or malformed lymph nodes and/or lymphatic channels. Lymphedema may be present at birth, develop at the onset of puberty (praecox), or not become apparent for many years into adulthood (tarda). In men, lower-limb primary lymphedema is most common, occurring in one or both legs. Some cases of lymphedema may be associated with other vascular abnormalities.
Secondary lymphedema affects both men and women. In women, it is most prevalent in the upper limbs after breast cancer surgery, in particular after axillary lymph node dissection, occurring in the arm on the side of the body in which the surgery is performed. Breast and trunk lymphedema can also occur but go unrecognised as there is swelling in the area after surgery, and its symptoms (peau d'orange and/or an inverted nipple) can be confused with post surgery fat necrosis. In Western countries, secondary lymphedema is most commonly due to cancer treatment. Between 38 and 89% of breast cancer patients suffer from lymphedema due to axillary lymph node dissection and/or radiation. Unilateral lymphedema occurs in up to 41% of patients after gynecologic cancer. For men, a 5-66% incidence of lymphedema has been reported in patients treated with incidence depending on whether staging or radical removal of lymph glands was done in addition to radiotherapy.
Head and neck lymphedema can be caused by surgery or radiation therapy for tongue or throat cancer. It may also occur in the lower limbs or groin after surgery for colon, ovarian or uterine cancer, in which removal of lymph nodes or radiation therapy is required. Surgery or treatment for prostate, colon and testicular cancers may result in secondary lymphedema, particularly when lymph nodes have been removed or damaged.
The onset of secondary lymphedema in patients who have had cancer surgery has also been linked to aircraft flight (likely due to decreased cabin pressure or relative immobility). For cancer survivors, therefore, wearing a prescribed and properly fitted compression garment may help decrease swelling during air travel.
Some cases of lower-limb lymphedema have been associated with the use of tamoxifen, due to the blood clots and deep vein thrombosis (DVT) that can be associated with this medication. Resolution of the blood clots or DVT is needed before lymphedema treatment can be initiated.
Infectious causes include lymphatic filariasis.
Congenital lymphedema is swelling that results from abnormalities in the lymphatic system that are present from birth. Swelling may be present in a single affected limb, several limbs, genitalia, or the face. It is sometimes diagnosed prenatally by a nuchal scan or post-natally by lymphoscintigraphy. One hereditary form of congenital lymphedema is called Milroy's disease and is caused by mutations in the VEGFR3 gene. Congenital lymphedema is frequently syndromic and is associated with Turner syndrome, lymphedema–distichiasis syndrome, yellow nail syndrome, and Klippel–Trénaunay–Weber syndrome.
One defined genetic cause for congenital lymphedema is GATA2 deficiency. This deficiency is a grouping of several disorders caused by common defect, viz., familial or sporadic inactivating mutations in one of the two parental "GATA2" genes. These autosomal dominant mutations cause a reduction, i.e. a haploinsufficiency, in the cellular levels of the gene's product, GATA2. The GATA2 protein is a transcription factor critical for the embryonic development, maintenance, and functionality of blood-forming, lympathic-forming, and other tissue-forming stem cells. In consequence of these mutations, cellular levels of GATA2 are deficient and individuals develop over time hematological, immunological, lymphatic, and/or other disorders. GATA2 deficiency-induced defects in the lymphatic vessels and valves underlies the development of lymphedema which is primarily located in the lower extremities but may also occur in other places such as the face or testes (i.e. hydrocele). This form of the deficiency, when coupled with sensorineural hearing loss which may also be due to faulty development of the lymphatic system, is sometimes termed the Emberger syndrome.
Primary lymphedema has a quoted incidence of approximately 1-3 births out of every 10,000 births, with a particular female preponderance to male ratio of 3.5:1 In North America, the incidence of primary lymphedema is approximately 1.15 births out of every 100,000 births Compared to secondary lymphedema, primary lymphedema is relatively rare.
Lymph is formed from the fluid that filters out of the blood circulation and contains proteins, cellular debris, bacteria, etc. The collection of this fluid is carried out by the initial lymph collectors that are blind-ended epithelial-lined vessels with fenestrated openings that allow fluids and particles as large as cells to enter. Once inside the lumen of the lymphatic vessels, the fluid is guided along increasingly larger vessels, first with rudimentary valves to prevent backflow, which later develop into complete valves similar to the venous valve. Once the lymph enters the fully valved lymphatic vessels, it is pumped by a rhythmic peristaltic-like action by smooth muscle cells within the lymphatic vessel walls. This peristaltic action is the primary driving force, moving lymph within its vessel walls. The regulation of the frequency and power of contraction is regulated by the sympathetic nervous system. Lymph movement can be influenced by the pressure of nearby muscle contraction, arterial pulse pressure and the vacuum created in the chest cavity during respiration, but these passive forces contribute only a minor percentage of lymph transport. The fluids collected are pumped into continually larger vessels and through lymph nodes, which remove debris and police the fluid for dangerous microbes. The lymph ends its journey in the thoracic duct or right lymphatic duct, which drain into the blood circulation.
Diagnosis is generally based on signs and symptoms, with testing used to rule out other potential causes. An accurate diagnosis and staging may help with management. A swollen limb can result from different conditions that require different treatments. Diagnosis of lymphedema is currently based on history, physical exam, and limb measurements. Imaging studies such as lymphoscintigraphy and indocyanine green lymphography are only required when surgery is being considered. However, the ideal method for lymphedema staging to guide the most appropriate treatment is controversial because of several different proposed protocols. Lymphedema can occur in both the upper and lower extremities, and in some cases, the head and neck. Assessment of the extremities first begins with a visual inspection. Color, presence of hair, visible veins, size and any sores or ulcerations are noted. Lack of hair may indicate an arterial circulation problem. Given swelling, the extremities' circumference is measured for reference as time continues. In early stages of lymphedema, elevating the limb may reduce or eliminate the swelling. Palpation of the wrist or ankle can determine the degree of swelling; assessment includes a check of the pulses. The axillary or inguinal nodes may be enlarged due to the swelling. Enlargement of the nodes lasting more than three weeks may indicate infection or other illnesses such as sequela from breast cancer surgery requiring further medical attention.
Diagnosis or early detection of lymphedema is difficult. The first signs may be subjective observations such as a feeling of heaviness in the affected extremity. These may be symptomatic of early stage of lymphedema where accumulation of lymph is mild and not detectable by changes in volume or circumference. As lymphedema progresses, definitive diagnosis is commonly based upon an objective measurement of differences between the affected or at-risk limb at the opposite unaffected limb, e.g. in volume or circumference. No generally accepted criterion is definitively diagnostic, although a volume difference of 200 ml between limbs or a 4-cm difference (at a single measurement site or set intervals along the limb) is often used. Bioimpedance measurement (which measures the amount of fluid in a limb) offers greater sensitivity than existing methods.
Chronic venous stasis changes can mimic early lymphedema, but the changes in venous stasis are more often bilateral and symmetric. Lipedema can also mimic lymphedema, however lipedema characteristically spares the feet beginning abruptly at the medial malleoli (ankle level). As a part of the initial work-up before diagnosing lymphedema, it may be necessary to exclude other potential causes of lower extremity swelling such as kidney failure, hypoalbuminemia, congestive heart-failure, protein-losing nephropathy, pulmonary hypertension, obesity, pregnancy and drug-induced edema.
According to the Fifth WHO Expert Committee on Filariasis the most common method of classification of lymphedema is as follows: (The same classification method can be used for both primary and secondary lymphedema)
The International Society of Lymphology (ISL) Staging System is based solely on subjective symptoms, making it prone to substantial observer bias. Imaging modalities have been suggested as useful adjuncts to the ISL staging to clarify the diagnosis. The lymphedema expert Dr. Ming-Huei Cheng developed a Cheng's Lymphedema Grading tool to assess the severity of extremity lymphedema based on objective limb measurements and providing appropriate options for management.
As described by the Fifth WHO Expert Committee on Filariasis, and endorsed by the American Society of Lymphology., the staging system helps to identify the severity of lymphedema. With the assistance of medical imaging apparatus, such as MRI or CT, staging can be established by the physician, and therapeutic or medical interventions may be applied:
Lymphedema can also be categorized by its severity (usually referenced to a healthy extremity):
Lymphedema should not be confused with edema arising from venous insufficiency, which is caused by compromise of the venous drainage rather than lymphatic drainage. However, untreated venous insufficiency can progress into a combined venous/lymphatic disorder.
While there is no cure, treatment may improve outcomes. This commonly include compression therapy, good skin care, exercise, and manual lymphatic drainage (MLD), which together is known as combined decongestive therapy. MLD is most effective in mild to moderate disease. In breast cancer-related lymphedema, MLD is safe and may offer added benefit to compression bandages for reducing swelling. Most people with lymphedema can be medically managed with conservative treatment. Diuretics are not useful. Surgery is generally only used in those who are not improved with other measures.
Once a person is diagnosed with lymphedema, compression becomes imperative in the management of the condition. Garments are often intended to be worn all day, but may be taken off for sleeping unless otherwise prescribed. Elastic compression garments are worn on the affected limb following complete decongestive therapy to maintain edema reduction. Inelastic garments provide containment and reduction. Available styles, options, and prices vary widely. A professional garment fitter or certified lymphedema therapist can help determine the best option for the patient.
Compression bandaging, also called wrapping, is the application of layers of padding and short-stretch bandages to the involved areas. Short-stretch bandages are preferred over long-stretch bandages (such as those normally used to treat sprains), as the long-stretch bandages cannot produce the proper therapeutic tension necessary to safely reduce lymphedema and may in fact end up producing a tourniquet effect. During activity, whether exercise or daily activities, the short-stretch bandages enhance the pumping action of the lymph vessels by providing increased resistance. This encourages lymphatic flow and helps to soften fluid-swollen areas.
Intermittent pneumatic compression therapy (IPC) utilizes a multi-chambered pneumatic sleeve with overlapping cells to promote movement of lymph fluid. Pump therapy should be used in addition to other treatments such as compression bandaging and manual lymph drainage. Pump therapy has been used a lot in the past to help with controlling lymphedema. In some cases, pump therapy helps soften fibrotic tissue and therefore potentially enable more efficient lymphatic drainage. However, reports link pump therapy to increased incidence of edema proximal to the affected limb, such as genital edema arising after pump therapy in the lower limb. IPC should be used in combination with complete decongestive therapy.
In those with lymphedema or at risk of developing lymphedema, following breast cancer treatment, resistance training did not increase swelling and decreases in some, in addition to other potential beneficial effects on cardiovascular health. Moreover, resistance training and other forms of exercise were not associated with an increased risk of developing lymphedema in people who previously received breast cancer-related treatment. Compression garments should be worn during exercise (with the possible exception of swimming).
While a number of surgical methods have been tried, many have been shown not to be effective. In very severe disease two methods may be tried: removal of excess tissue and reconstruction of the lymphatic tissue.
Suction assisted lipectomy (SAL), also known as liposuction for lymphedema, may help improve chronic non pitting edema if present. The procedure removes fat and protein and is done along with continued compression therapy.
Vascularized lymph node transfers (VLNT) and lymphovenous bypass are supported by tentative evidence as of 2017 but is associated with a number of complications.
Low-level laser therapy (LLLT) was cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of lymphedema in November 2006.
According to the US National Cancer Institute, LLLT may be effective in reducing lymphedema in some women. Two cycles of laser treatment were found to be reduce the volume of the affected arm in approximately one-third of people with postmastectomy lymphedema at 3 months post-treatment.
Lymphedema affects approximately 200 million people worldwide.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18722
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Land Rover
Land Rover is a British brand of four-wheel drive cars that exclusively offers premium and luxury sport utility vehicles. Owned by multinational car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which has been owned by India's Tata Motors since 2008, JLR currently build Land Rovers in Brazil, China, India, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom.
The Land Rover name was originally used by the Rover Company for a boxy four-wheel drive, off-road model, launched in 1948—now known as the Land Rover Series, it is today regarded as a British icon. It was granted a Royal Warrant by King George VI in 1951, and 50 years later, in 2001, it received a Queen's Award for Enterprise for outstanding contribution to international trade.
Over time, Land Rover grew into its own brand (and for a while also a company), encompassing a consistently growing range of four-wheel drive, off-road capable models. Starting with the much more upmarket 1970 Range Rover, and subsequent introductions of the mid-range Discovery and entry-level Freelander line (in 1989 and 1997), as well as the 1990 Land Rover Defender refresh, the marque today includes two models of Discovery, four distinct models of Range Rover, and after a three-year hiatus, a second genaration of Defenders have gone into production for the 2020 model year—in short or long wheelbase, as before.
Originally, the vehicles was simply called the Land Rover – an off-road capable car model of the Rover Company. The "Series" indication later became a retronym model name, once 'Land Rover' had started becoming a brand, with the introduction of the Range Rover in 1970, and eventually even a British Leyland subsidiary in 1978. In 1983 and 1984, the long and the short wheelbase Land Rovers were finally given official names – the One Ten, and the Ninety respectively, and together they were badged the Defender models in 1990, after the 1989 introduction of the new Discovery model.
The design for the original vehicle was started in 1947 by Maurice Wilks. Wilks, chief designer at the Rover Company, on his farm in Newborough, Anglesey, working in conjunction with his brother Spencer who was the managing director of Rover. The design may have been influenced by the Jeep and the prototype, later nicknamed Centre Steer, was built on a Jeep chassis and axles. The early choice of colour was dictated by military surplus supplies of aircraft cockpit paint, so early vehicles only came in various shades of light green; all models until recently feature sturdy box section ladder-frame chassis. Early vehicles like the Series I were field-tested at Long Bennington and designed to be field-serviced.
After the formation of Land Rover Limited in 1978 the hyphen in Land-Rover —as shown in the logo— began to be dropped.
Land Rover as a company has existed since 1978. Prior to this, it was a product line of the Rover Company which was subsequently absorbed into the Rover-Triumph division of the British Leyland Motor Corporation (BL) following Leyland Motor Corporation's takeover of Rover in 1967. The ongoing commercial success of the original Land Rover series models, and latterly the Range Rover in the 1970s in the midst of BL's well-documented business troubles prompted the establishment of a separate Land Rover company but still under the BL umbrella, remaining part of the subsequent Rover Group in 1988, under the ownership of British Aerospace after the remains of British Leyland were broken up and privatised.
In 1994 Rover Group plc, including Land Rover, was acquired by BMW. In 2000, Rover Group was broken up by BMW and Land Rover was sold to Ford Motor Company, becoming part of its Premier Automotive Group.
In 2006 Ford also purchased the Rover brand from BMW for around £6 million. BMW had retained ownership of the brand to protect the integrity of the Land Rover brand, with which 'Rover' might be confused in the US 4x4 market and allowed it to be used under licence by MG Rover until it collapsed in 2005, at which point it was offered to the Ford Motor Company, who by then owned Land Rover. On 11 June 2007, Ford announced that it planned to sell Land Rover along with Jaguar Cars. Private equity firms such as Alchemy Partners of the UK, TPG Capital, Ripplewood Holdings, Cerberus Capital Management and One Equity Partners of the US, Tata Motors of India and a consortium comprising Mahindra & Mahindra of India and Apollo Management all initially expressed interest in purchasing the marques from the Ford Motor Company. On 1 January 2008, Ford formally declared that Tata was the preferred bidder. In 2008, On 26 March 2008, Ford announced that it had agreed to sell its Jaguar and Land Rover operations to Tata Motors, and that it expected to complete the sale by the end of the second quarter of 2008.
On 18 January 2008, Tata Motors, a part of the Tata Group, established Jaguar Land Rover Limited as a British-registered and wholly owned subsidiary. The new company was to be used as a holding company for the acquisition of the two businesses from Ford - Jaguar Cars Limited and Land Rover. That acquisition was completed on 2 June 2008 at a cost of £1.7 billion. Included in the deal to buy Land Rover and Jaguar Cars were the rights to three other British brands: the Daimler marque, as well as two dormant brands Lanchester and Rover.
On 1 January 2013, the group, which had been operating as two separate companies (Jaguar Cars Limited and Land Rover), although on an integrated basis, underwent a fundamental restructuring. The parent company was renamed to Jaguar Land Rover Automotive PLC, Jaguar Cars Limited was renamed to Jaguar Land Rover Limited and the assets (excluding certain Chinese interests) of Land Rover were transferred to it. The consequence was that Jaguar Land Rover Limited became responsible in the UK for the design, manufacture and marketing of both Jaguar and Land Rover branded products, and Land Rover and Jaguar Cars ceased to be separate vehicle producing entities.
Jaguar Land Rover manufactures Land Rover cars in plants in five countries. In the United Kingdom the Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and Range Rover Velar are built at their Solihull plant near Birmingham and the Discovery Sport and Evoque are built at their Halewood plant near Liverpool. In October 2018 JLR openend a new plant in Nitra, Slovakia to build the Discovery, and are now also building the 2020 Defender there. In Brazil the company builds both the Discovery Sport and Evoque in their plant in Itatiaia which was opened in June 2016. JLR has been building cars since 2011 in Pune, India and currently builds the Discovery Sport and Evoque there. Under a 50/50 joint venture with Chery at Changshu in China Discovery Sports and Evoques are also built.
Historically Land Rovers were manufactured primarily at the Solihull plant until production of the Freelander was moved to the Halewood plant. The Freelander was also assembled in CKD form at Land Rover's facility in Pune, India. As of 2015, the company continued to expand by building locally in India as well as increasing the number of models made at JLR’s Chikhali facility near Pune to include the Discovery Sport and Evoque.
Defender models were assembled under licence in several locations worldwide, including Spain (Santana Motors), Iran (Pazhan Morattab), Brazil (Karmann), and Turkey (Otokar).
Range Stormer – Land Rover's first concept vehicle, unveiled at the 2004 North American International Auto Show, later became the Range Rover Sport.(Gritzinger, 2004).
Land Rover LRX – Land Rover's second concept vehicle, first unveiled at the 2008 Detroit Auto Show. Originally a vehicle with ERAD technology, the production version did not include this. The car was then launched in 2011 as the Range Rover Evoque, and was the first Range Rover branded product to be offered with front wheel drive, and no low ratio transfer box.
Land Rover DC100 – Land Rover's third concept vehicle, first unveiled at the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show, designed to be a replacement for the Land Rover Defender, though it is unlikely that the Defender's replacement will be exactly the same as the DC100 concept.
Land Rover Discovery Vision Concept – Land Rover's fourth concept vehicle, first unveiled at the 2014, was designed to be a replacement for the Land Rover Discovery, This concept features Transparent Bonnet, Suicide doors, and Laser assisted lamps (there is a very little chance this will be included in any future production vehicles).
Models developed for the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) include:
Models developed for the Australian Army
During the history of the Land Rover many different engines have been fitted:
, most Land Rovers in production are powered by Ford engines. Under the terms of the acquisition, Tata has the right to buy engines from Ford until 2019.
Integrated Electric Rear Axle Drive (ERAD) technology, dubbed e-terrain technology, will allow the vehicle to move off without starting the engine as well as supplying extra power over tough terrain. Land Rover's Diesel ERAD Hybrid was developed as part of a multimillion-pound project supported by the UK Government's Energy Saving Trust, under the low carbon research and development programme. ERAD programme is one of a broad range of sustainability-focused engineering programmes that Land Rover is pursuing, brought together by the company under the collective name "e TERRAIN Technologies".
Land Rover presented at the 2008 London Motor Show its new ERAD diesel-electric hybrid in a pair of Freelander 2 (LR2) prototypes. The new hybrid system is being designed as a scalable and modular system that could be applied across a variety of Land Rover models and powertrains.
Land Rover unveiled the LRX hybrid concept at the 2008 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, for it to be going into production. An ERAD will enable the car to run on electric power at speeds below .
In September 2011, the Range Rover Evoque was launched, though it was based on the LRX hybrid concept presented at the 2008 North American International Auto Show, it did not include the ERAD system, included in the original concept.
In February 2013, Land Rover unveiled at the 83rd Geneva Motor Show an All-Terrain Electric Defender that produces zero emissions. The electric vehicle was developed for research purposes following successful trials of the Defender-based electric vehicle, Leopard 1. The vehicle is capable of producing 70kW and 330Nm of torque and has a range of 80 kilometres or in low speed off-road use it can last for up to eight hours before recharging.
Power take-off (PTO) was integral to the Land Rover concept from 1948, enabling farm machinery and many other items to be run with the vehicle stationary. Maurice Wilks' original instruction was "...to have power take-offs everywhere!" The 1949 report by British National Institute of Agricultural Engineering and Scottish Machinery Testing Station contained this description: "the power take-off is driven through a Hardy Spicer propeller shaft from the main gearbox output and two interchangeable pinions giving two ratios. The PTO gearbox casing is bolted to the rear chassis cross-member and an belt pulley driven from the PTO shaft through two bevel gears can be bolted to the PTO gearbox casing." PTOs remained regular options on Series I, II and III Land Rovers up to the demise of the Series Land Rover in 1985. An agricultural PTO on a Defender is possible as a special order.
Land Rovers (the Series/Defender models) are available in a variety of body styles, from a simple canvas-topped pick-up truck to a twelve-seat fully trimmed station wagon. Both Land Rover and out-of-house contractors have offered conversions and adaptations to the basic vehicle, such as fire engines, excavators, 'cherry picker' hydraulic platforms, ambulances, snowploughs, and six-wheel-drive versions, as well as one-off special builds including amphibious Land Rovers and vehicles fitted with tracks instead of wheels.
Various Land Rover models have been used in a military capacity, most notably by the British Army and Australian Army. Modifications may include military "blackout" lights, heavy-duty suspension, uprated brakes, 24 volt electrics, convoy lights, electronic suppression of the ignition system, blackout curtains and mounts for special equipment and small arms. Dedicated military models have been produced such as the 101 Forward Control and the air-portable 1/2 ton Lightweight. Military uses include light utility vehicle; communications platform; weapon platform for recoilless rifles, Anti-tank (e.g. TOW or M40 recoilless rifle) / Surface-to-Air Guided Weapons or machine guns; ambulances and workshops. The Discovery has also been used in small numbers, mostly as liaison vehicles.
Two models that have been designed for military use from the ground up are the 101 Forward Control from the early 1970s and the Lightweight or Airportable from the late 1960s. The latter was intended to be transported under a helicopter. The Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue Service (RAFMRS) teams were early users in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their convoys of Land Rovers and larger military trucks are a sight often seen in the mountain areas of the United Kingdom. Originally RAFMRS Land Rovers had blue bodies and bright yellow tops, to be better seen from above. In 1981, the colour scheme was changed to green with yellow stripes. More recently, vehicles have been painted white, and are issued with fittings similar to civilian UK Mountain Rescue teams.
An adaptation of Land Rovers to military purposes is the "Pink Panther" models. Approximately 100 Series IIA models were adapted to reconnaissance use by British special operations forces the SAS. For desert use they were often painted pink, hence the name. The vehicles were fitted with among other gear a sun compass, machine guns, larger fuel tanks and smoke dischargers. Similar adaptations were later made to Series IIIs and 90/110/Defenders.
The Australian Army adapted the Land Rover Series 2 into the Long Range Patrol Vehicle for use by the Special Air Service Regiment and as an anti-tank "gunbuggy" fitted with an M40 recoilless rifle.
The 75th Ranger Regiment of the United States Army also adapted twelve versions of the Land Rover that were officially designated the Ranger Special Operations Vehicle.
Series and Defender models have also been armoured. The most widespread of these is the Shorts Shorland, built by Shorts Brothers of Belfast. The first of these were delivered in 1965 to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Northern Ireland police force. They were originally wheelbase models with an armoured body and a turret from the Ferret armoured car. By 1990, there had been more than 1,000 produced.
In the 1970s, a more conventional armoured Land Rover was built for the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Wales called the Hotspur. The Land Rover Tangi was built by the Royal Ulster Constabulary's own vehicle engineering team during the 1990s. The British Army has used various armoured Land Rovers, first in Northern Ireland but also in more recent campaigns. They first added protective panels to Series General Service vehicles (the Vehicle Protection Kit (VPK)). Later they procured the Glover Webb APV and finally the Courtaulds (later NP Aerospace) Composite Armoured Vehicle, commonly known as Snatch. These were originally based on heavy-duty V8 110 chassis but some have recently been re-mounted on new chassis from Otokar of Turkey and fitted with diesel engines and air-conditioning for Iraq. Although these now have more in common with the 'Wolf' (Defender XD) Land Rovers that many mistakenly confuse them with, the Snatch and the Wolf are different vehicles.
The most radical conversion of a Land Rover for military purposes was the Centaur half-track. It was based on a Series III with a V8 engine and a shortened belt drive from the Alvis Scorpion light tank. A small number was manufactured, and they were used by Ghana, among others.
The Land Rover is used by military forces throughout the world. The current generation of Land Rover used by British Army, the Snatch 2, have upgraded and strengthened chassis and suspension compared to civilian-specification vehicles. There is also the Land Rover WMIK (weapon mounted installation kit) used by British Army. The WMIK consists of a driver, a raised gun, usually a Browning heavy machine gun or a grenade machine gun, this used for ground support, and a GPMG (general-purpose machine gunner) located next to the driver, this used for vehicle protection.
Highly modified Land Rovers have competed in the Dakar Rally and won the Macmillan 4x4 UK Challenge almost every year, as well as having been the vehicle used for the Camel Trophy. Now, Land Rover has its own G4 challenge.
Land Rover Experience was established in 1990, and consists of a network of centres throughout the world, set up to help customers get the most out of their vehicles' on and off-road capability. The flagship centres are Land Rover's bases at Solihull, Eastnor, Gaydon and Halewood. Courses offered include off-road driving, winching and trailer handling, along with a variety of corporate and individual 'Adventure Days'. The factory centres at Solihull and Halewood have manufacturing tours, while Gaydon has an engineering tour.
Model-by-model road accident statistics from the UK Department for Transport show that the Land Rover Defender is one of the safest cars on British roads as measured by chance of death in two-car injury accidents.
The figures, which were based on data collected by police forces following accidents between 2000 and 2004 in Great Britain, showed that Defender drivers had a 1% chance of being killed or seriously injured and a 33% chance of sustaining any kind of injury. Other four-wheel-drive vehicles scored equally highly, and collectively these vehicles were much safer for their passengers than those in other classes such as passenger cars and MPVs. These figures reflect the fact that drivers of large mass vehicles are likely to be safer, often at the expense of other drivers if they collide with smaller cars.
The original Land Rover Owners Club was set up by the Rover Company in 1954. The company published the Land Rover Owners Club Review magazine for members from 1957 to 1968 when the club became the Rover Owners Association. This original association fell away when the company merged with British Leyland.
There are many Land Rover clubs throughout the UK and internationally. Land Rover clubs break down into a number of groups of varying interests.
Single Marque Clubs – Bring together owners of a specific model or series of vehicle such as the Land Rover Series One Club, or the Discovery Owners Club. Single marque clubs have a global membership.
Special Vehicle Clubs – At various times Land Rover have produced vehicles for specific events or on a specific theme, most notable are the Camel Trophy and G4 Challenge vehicles which have been sold on to the general public, and a range of Defenders that were loosely based on the custom vehicles produced for the Tomb Raider motion picture.
Regional Clubs in the UK break down into two groups, competitive and non-competitive. The non-competitive clubs activities generally relate to social events, off-road driving or green laning on un-surfaced public highways or 'pay and play' days at off-road centres. Competitive clubs are a phenomenon almost exclusively found within the UK, who as well as the non-competitive activities detailed above run competitive events such as Tyro, Road Taxed Vehicle (RTV) and Cross Country Vehicle (CCV) trials, winch and recovery challenges or speed events such as Competitive Safaries. All UK competitive events are run within the framework of rules created by the Motor Sports Association (MSA) with further vehicle specific rules applied by the host club or association. Outside of the UK regional clubs are independent and mostly non-competitive.
A number of clubs are affiliated to the Association of Land Rover Clubs (ALRC), formerly known as the Association of Rover Clubs (ARC) the association applies its own vehicle regulations to all of its member clubs who have the opportunity to compete together at regional events and an annual national event with vehicles approved to the same standard. In recent years some non-competitive clubs have dropped their affiliation fifth ALRC. Few clubs outside of the UK are affiliated with ALRC. Other than ALRC and the short lived Association of North American Rover Clubs (ANARC), which was created 1998 to celebrate Land Rover's 50th anniversary and disbanded in 2001, other groups of Land Rover clubs have affiliated with each other.
Land Rover owners were also early adopters of virtual clubs that are entirely based online. Bill Caloccia created the original Land Rover Owner email list (LRO) as single marque offshoot of the British Cars email list in May 1990. Bill later created email lists in the mid 1990s for Range Rovers (RRO) and various regions (e.g., UK-LRO, AU-LRO, ZA-LRO, EU-LRO, IT-LRO, NL-LRO). In California members of the LRO list created mendo_recce in 1995.
In 2005, under Ford ownership, Land Rover became more interested in the club environment. An internal club was formed, The Land Rover Club, exclusive to employees of Ford's Premier Automotive Group (Now exclusive to the new 'Jaguar – Land Rover' group since the brand moved away from the Ford stable). Also, an agreement was generated to allow other clubs to use the Land Rover green oval logo under licence. In 2006, the Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire club were the pilot licensees for the new agreement, who now benefit from a reciprocal arrangement where their own logo is trade marked and owned by Land Rover and they can refer to themselves as a 'Land Rover Approved Club'.
In 1995, Land Rover endorsed the production of a hand-made bicycle using its logo. The bicycle, called the Land Rover APB and manufactured by Pashley Cycles of Stratford-upon-Avon, was the collapsible version of Pashley Cycles' Moulton APB (All Purpose Bicycle) model, with leading link front suspension and adjustable damping and stroke. Two more models immediately followed: the Land Rover XCB V-20, aimed primarily at younger riders (children); and the Land Rover XCB D-26, also available as the M26 with hydraulic rim brakes, front suspension and suspension seat pillar.
In June 2004, Land Rover released a comprehensive 25 model range of bicycles. The three main ranges are the "Defender", the "Discovery", and the "Freelander", each with different attributes. The "Discovery" is an all-rounder bicycle suited to a variety of terrains, "Defender" is most suited to rugged terrain and off-road pursuits, whereas the "Freelander" is designed for an urban lifestyle. All bikes are made from lightweight aluminium.
In 2010 the range was relaunched in conjunction with British manufacturer 2x2.
Land Rover has had its name associated with coffee since 2005, when the Land Rover Coffee company was established.
Land Rover gave UK pram company Pegasus a licence to produce a three-wheeler range of Land Rover ATP pushchairs. The design reflected the heritage of the marque, with a light metal frame with canvas seating, held together with push-studs and tough simple parts like brakes and hinges. They could be collapsed completely flat, with wheels removed in seconds. The basic frame could be adapted with modules to allow a baby to lie flat or a bubble windscreen to completely enclose the child. The frame also came in long or short-handled versions, and could be repaired with home tools. The design was simple, light, and rugged and able to travel in all terrains (hence the ATP for all-terrain pushchair.) It came in three military looking colours: a light blue, a sand colour and olive drab. Production was discontinued in 2002.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18724
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International Numbering System for Food Additives
The International Numbering System for Food Additives (INS) is a European-based naming system for food additives, aimed at providing a short designation of what may be a lengthy actual name. It is defined by Codex Alimentarius, the international food standards organisation of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). The information is published in the document "Class Names and the International Numbering System for Food Additives", first published in 1989, with revisions in 2008 and 2011. The INS is an open list, "subject to the inclusion of additional additives or removal of existing ones on an ongoing basis".
INS numbers consist of three or four digits, optionally followed by an alphabetical suffix to further characterize individual additives. On packaging in the European Union (EU), approved food additives are written with a prefix of "E". Australia and New Zealand do not use a prefix letter when listing additives in the ingredients. An additive that appears in the INS does not automatically have a corresponding E number.
INS numbers are assigned by the committee to identify each food additive. INS numbers generally correspond to E numbers for the same compound, e.g. INS 102, Tartrazine, is also E102. INS numbers are not unique and, in fact, one number may be assigned to a group of like compounds.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18727
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Law of dilution
Wilhelm Ostwald’s dilution law is a relationship proposed in 1888 between the dissociation constant ' and the degree of dissociation ' of a weak electrolyte. The law takes the form
Where the square brackets denote concentration, and is the total concentration of electrolyte.
Using formula_2, where formula_3 is the molar conductivity at concentration c and formula_4 is the limiting value of molar conductivity extrapolated to zero concentration or infinite dilution, this results in the following relation:
Consider a binary electrolyte AB which dissociates reversibly into A+ and B− ions. Ostwald noted that the law of mass action can be applied to such systems as dissociating electrolytes. The equilibrium state is represented by the equation:
If ' is the fraction of dissociated electrolyte, then ' is the concentration of each ionic species. must, therefore be the fraction of "undissociated" electrolyte, and the concentration of same. The dissociation constant may therefore be given as
For very weak electrolytes (however, neglecting 'α' for most weak electrolytes yields counterproductive result) , implying that .
This gives the following results;
Thus, the degree of dissociation of a weak electrolyte is proportional to the inverse square root of the concentration, or the square root of the dilution. The concentration of any one ionic species is given by the root of the product of the dissociation constant and the concentration of the electrolyte.
The Ostwald law of dilution provides a satisfactory description of the concentration dependence of the conductivity of weak electrolytes like CH3COOH and NH4OH. The variation of molar conductivity is essentially due to the incomplete dissociation of weak electrolytes into ions.
For strong electrolytes, however, Lewis and Randall recognized that the law fails badly since the supposed equilibrium constant is actually far from constant. This is because the dissociation of strong electrolytes into ions is essentially complete below a concentration threshold value. The decrease in molar conductivity as a function of concentration is actually due to attraction between ions of opposite charge as expressed in the Debye-Hückel-Onsager equation and later revisions.
Even for weak electrolytes the equation is not exact. Chemical thermodynamics shows that the true equilibrium constant is a ratio of thermodynamic activities, and that each concentration must be multiplied by an activity coefficient. This correction is important for ionic solutions due to the strong forces between ionic charges. An estimate of their values is given by the Debye–Hückel theory at low concentrations.
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Lleida
Lleida ( , ; ) is a city in the west of Catalonia, Spain. It is the capital city of the province of Lleida.
Geographically, it is located in the Catalan Central Depression. It is also the capital city of the Segrià comarca, as well as the largest city in the province. It had 137,387 inhabitants , including the contiguous municipalities of Raimat and Sucs.
Lleida is one of the oldest towns in Catalonia, with recorded settlements dating back to the Bronze Age period. Until the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the area served as a settlement for an Iberian people, the Ilergetes. The town became a municipality, named Ilerda, under the reign of Augustus. It was reconquered in 1149, after being ruled by the Moors since the 8th century. In 1297, the University of Lleida was founded, becoming the third oldest in the whole of Spain. During the following centuries, the town was damaged by several wars such as the Reapers' War in the 17th century and the Spanish Civil War in the 20th century. Since then, the city has been in a constant urban, commercial and demographic growth.
In ancient times the city, named Iltrida and Ilerda, was the chief city of the Ilergetes, an Iberian tribe. Indíbil, king of the Ilergetes, and Mandoni, king of the Ausetanes, defended it against the Carthaginian and Roman invasions.
Under the Romans, the city was incorporated into the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis, and was a place of considerable importance, historically as well as geographically. It stood upon an eminence, on the right (west) bank of the river Sicoris (the modern Segre), the principal tributary of the Ebre, and some distance above its confluence with the Cinga (modern Cinca); thus commanding the country between those rivers, as well as the great road from Tarraco (modern Tarragona), the provincial capital, to the northwest of Spain, which here crossed the Sicoris.
Its situation induced the legates of Pompey in Spain to make it the key of their defense against Caesar, in the first year of the Civil War (49 BC). Afranius and Marcus Petreius threw themselves into the place with five legions; and their siege by Caesar himself (Battle of Ilerda), as narrated in his own words, forms one of the most interesting passages of military history. The resources exhibited by the great general, in a contest where the formation of the district and the very elements of nature seemed in league with his enemies, have been frequently extolled; but no epitome can do justice to the campaign. It ended by the capitulation of Afranius and Petreius, who were conquered as much by Caesar's generosity as by his strategy. In consequence of the battle, the Latin phrase "Ilerdam videas" is said to have been used by people who wanted to cast bad luck on someone else.
Under the Roman empire, Ilerda was a very flourishing city, and a "municipium". It minted its own coins. It had a fine stone bridge over the Sicoris, (the bridge was so sturdy that its foundations support a bridge to this day). In the time of Ausonius the city had fallen into decay; but it rose again into importance in the Middle Ages.
It was part of Visigothic and Muslim Hispania until it was conquered from the Moors by Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona in 1149.
It used to be the seat of a major university, the oldest in the Crown of Aragon, until 1717, when it was moved by Philip V to the nearby town of Cervera. The University of Lleida is nowadays active again since 1991.
During the Reapers' War, Lleida was occupied by the French and rebel forces. In 1644 the city was conquered by the Spanish under D. Felipe da Silva.
Lleida served as a key defense point for Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and fell to the Insurgents, whose air forces bombed it extensively, in 1937 and 1938. The November 2, 1937 Legion Condor attacks against Lleida became especially infamous since they were aimed to the school known as "Liceu Escolar de Lleida". 48 children and several teachers died in it that day, 300 people were killed on the November 2 bombings altogether, and the town would be bombed and sieged again in 1938, when it was conquered by Franco's forces.
After some decades without any kind of population growth, it met a massive migration of Andalusians who helped the town undergo a relative demographic growth. Nowadays it is home to immigrants of 146 different nationalities.
During 2007 Lleida was the year's Capital of Catalan Culture.
Lleida has a temperate semi-arid climate (Köppen "BSk"). Winters are mild and foggy though cooler than places on the coast while summers are hot and dry. Frosts are common during winter although snowfall can occasionally fall, averaging 1 or 2 days. Precipitation is low, with an annual average of with a peak in April and May and another peak in September and October.
Lleida is divided in the following districts by the "Observatori Socioeconòmic de Lleida":
Lleida is served by the RENFE, Spanish state railway's Madrid-Barcelona high-speed rail line, serving Barcelona, Zaragoza, Calatayud, Guadalajara, and Madrid. Lleida has a new airport opened in January 2010, and a minor airfield located in Alfès. Also, the town is the western terminus of the Eix Transversal Lleida-Girona, and a railway covering the same distance ("Eix Transversal Ferroviari") is currently under planning.
Lleida's only passenger railway station is Lleida Pirineus. It is served by both Renfe and Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya train lines. In the future a Rodalies Lleida commuter network will connect the town with its adjacent area and the main towns of its province, improving the existing network with more train frequency and newly built infrastructure. A second railway station is Pla de la Vilanoveta in an industrial area, and only used by freight trains. A future railway museum will be located in its facilities.
Since 2008 the bulk of public transport of the Lleida's surrounding area, mainly buses operated by several companies, is managed by Autoritat Territorial de la Mobilitat de l'Àrea de Lleida.
The urban buses, coloured yellow with blue stripes and owned by "Autobusos de Lleida", include the following lines:
In addition to these, there's a tourist bus and a regular night service to nearby clubs.
Lleida has depended long time on nearby airports and had no local air transit. Lleida-Alguaire airport opened in 2010.
A tram-train system is pending approval. Using an existing but outdated passenger line, it would link Balaguer and Lleida, crossing both towns in a much needed move towards better public transportation, both inner-city and between localities.
Lleida is a traditionally Catalan-speaking city and province, with a characteristic dialect (known as Western or, more specifically, North-Western Catalan, or colloquially "lleidatà"). Most of the population is actively bilingual in Spanish.
Lleida was the Capital of Catalan Culture in 2007.
Enric Granados Auditorium is the city's concert hall and main music institution and conservatory. It is named after the composer Enric Granados, who was born in the city. CaixaForum Lleida (formerly known as "Centre Cultural de la Fundació La Caixa") includes a concert hall. Teatre Municipal de l'Escorxador is the town's main theatre; it includes a concert venue, Cafè del Teatre. A theatre and congress centre, La Llotja de Lleida, opened in 2010.
There are two important music festivals in Lleida; MÚSIQUES DISPERSES Folk Festival in March, and the jazz festival JAZZ TARDOR in November. Concerts are also a regular fixture of the two local feasts, Sant Anastasi in May, and Sant Miquel in September.
CaixaForum Lleida is the usual venue for film-related events and screenings. A Latin-American film festival is held yearly in the town ("Mostra de Cinema Llatinoamericà de Lleida"), and an animation film festival called "Animac" is held every May.
The Lleida Museum opened in 2008 and displays historical artefacts and works of art from various periods. The Institut d'Estudis Ilerdencs, a historically relevant building, exhibits both ancient and contemporary art. The Centre d'Art La Panera is a contemporary art institution. The Museu d'Art Jaume Morera displays art from the 20th and 21st centuries (as well as artwork by its namesake).
The city has a number of small municipal galleries, such as the Sala Municipal d'Exposicions de Sant Joan and the Sala Manel Garcia Sarramona. There are also several institutions dedicated to local artists, such as the Sala Leandre Cristòfol, containing artwork by the sculptor and painter Leandre Cristòfol (1908–1998); and the Sala Coma Estadella, dedicated to the sculptor and painter Albert Coma Estadella (1933–1991).
Private art galleries include the Espai Cavallers. The private foundation CaixaForum Lleida and the Public Library of Lleida also offer regular exhibits. The now defunct Petite Galerie was an innovative and influential gallery in the 1970s.
The Escola Municipal de Belles Arts provides higher education in the arts.
Traditional celebrations include the main annual town festivity: "Festa Major"; "Fira de Sant Miquel" and "L’Aplec del Caragol" (escargot-eating festival, the biggest in the world of this sort, held at the Camps Elisis since 1980).
The latter is a gastronomical festivity focused on escargot cooking and is celebrated yearly at the end of May. "L'Aplec" gathers thousands of people around the table to taste the most traditional dishes from Lleida.
Due to its strong popularity, it was declared a traditional festivity of national interest in 2002 by the Generalitat of Catalonia and two years later it was also declared as such by the Spanish Government.
The main traditional celebrations in Lleida are chaired by the twelve emblematic "Gegants de la Paeria" (Giants of the Town Hall), the two oldest made in 1840.
Lleida has a bar and clubbing area, informally known as "Els Vins". The oldest part of the quarter, known as "Els Vins Vells", has been largely replaced by "Els Vins Nous", an architecturally newer and more upscale area. Most big clubs in Lleida are located outside the town and are not easily accessible without a car, though on Saturday nights there is a bus.
Lleida has been always a city with great sport tradition. Probably the most famous sport at the present time is basketball, because the club of basketball of the city a few years ago ascended to the ACB, being the revelation team in the league, this caused a lot of boys and girls to become fond of this little well-known sport.
Lleida has sister relationships with many places worldwide:
The city is the subject of the Catalan folk song "La Presó de Lleida", "The prison of Lleida", which was already attested in the 17th century and may be even older. It is a very popular tune, covered by many artists such as Joan Manuel Serrat.
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Le Mans
Le Mans (, ) is a city in France on the Sarthe River. Traditionally the capital of the province of Maine, it is now the capital of the Sarthe department and the seat of the Roman Catholic diocese of Le Mans. Le Mans is a part of the Pays de la Loire region.
Its inhabitants are called "Manceaux" and "Mancelles". Since 1923, the city has hosted the internationally famous 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance sports car race.
First mentioned by Claudius Ptolemy, the Roman city "Vindinium" was the capital of the Aulerci, a sub tribe of the Aedui. Le Mans is also known as "Civitas Cenomanorum" (City of the Cenomani), or "Cenomanus". Their city, seized by the Romans in 47 BC, was within the ancient Roman province of Gallia Lugdunensis. A 3rd-century amphitheatre is still visible. The "thermae" were demolished during the crisis of the third century when workers were mobilized to build the city's defensive walls. The ancient wall around Le Mans is one of the most complete circuits of Gallo-Roman city walls to survive.
As the use of the French language replaced late Vulgar Latin in the area, "Cenomanus", with dissimilation, became known as "Celmans." "Cel-" was taken to be a form of the French word for "this" and "that", and was replaced by "le", which means "the".
As the principal city of Maine, Le Mans was the stage for struggles in the eleventh century between the counts of Anjou and the dukes of Normandy. When the Normans had control of Maine, William the Conqueror successfully invaded England and established an occupation. In 1069 the citizens of Maine revolted and expelled the Normans, resulting in Hugh V being proclaimed count of Maine. Geoffrey V of Anjou married Matilda of England in the cathedral. Their son Henry II Plantagenet, king of England, was born here. In 1154, during the reign of his uncle King Stephen, Henry landed in England with an army, intent on challenging Stephen for the throne. Some of the members of that feudal force were known by the surname 'del Mans' (Latin for of Mans, as the city was then known.) In medieval records pertaining to the history of Gloucester is a reference to one such man, Walter del Mans, and beside his name 'Cenomanus' was added by the medieval scribe, so that there is no doubt as to Walter's origin. In the English censuses down to the twentieth century the surname Mans (latterly often spelled Manns) was virtually confined to the counties of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and their borderlands, reflecting the original settlement patterns in the Welsh Marches of the original followers of Henry's from Le Mans in 1154. A John Mans/Manns was escheator of Hereford 1399-1400. One family from [Le] Mans held the manor of Dodenham, Worcestershire. (Calendar of the Records of the Corporation of Gloucester, Item 96, ca.1200; Fine Roles Henry III, 23 Aug. 1233 [Hereford];'Parishes: Doddenham', A History of the County of Worcester, volume 4 (1924), pp. 260–62.) Intercourse between England and Le Mans continued throughout the Angevin period.
In the 13th century Le Mans came under the contol of the French crown. It was subsequently invaded by England during the Hundred Years War.
Industrialization took place in the 19th century which saw the development of railway and motor vehicle production as well as textiles and tobacco manufacture.
Wilbur Wright began official public demonstrations of the airplane he had developed with his younger brother Orville on August 8, 1908, at the Hunaudières horse racing track near Le Mans.
Soon after Le Mans was liberated by the U.S. 79th and 90th Infantry Divisions on 8 August 1944, engineers of the Ninth Air Force IX Engineering Command began construction of a combat Advanced Landing Ground outside of the town. The airfield was declared operational on 3 September and designated as "A-35". It was used by several American fighter and transport units until late November of that year in additional offensives across France; the airfield was closed.
Le Mans has an oceanic climate influenced by the mild Atlantic air travelling inland. Summers are warm and occasionally hot, whereas winters are mild and cloudy. Precipitation is relatively uniform and moderate year round.
At the 1999 French census, there were 293,159 inhabitants in the metropolitan area ("aire urbaine") of Le Mans, with 146,105 of these living in the city proper (commune).
The Gare du Mans is the main railway station of Le Mans. It takes 1 hour to reach Paris from Le Mans by TGV high speed train. There are also TGV connections to Lille, Marseille, Nantes, Rennes and Brest. Gare du Mans is also a hub for regional trains. Le Mans inaugurated a new light rail system on 17 November 2007.
The first French Grand Prix took place on a 64-mile (103 km) circuit based at Le Mans in 1906.
Since the 1920s, the city has been best known for its connection with motorsports. There are two official and separate racing tracks at Le Mans, though they share certain portions. The smaller is the Bugatti Circuit (named after Ettore Bugatti, founder of the car company bearing his name), a relatively short permanent circuit, which is used for racing throughout the year and has hosted the French motorcycle Grand Prix. The longer and more famous Circuit de la Sarthe is composed partly of public roads. These are closed to the public when the track is in use for racing. Since 1923, this route has been used for the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car endurance race. Boutiques and shops are set up during the race, selling merchandise and promoting products for cars.
The "Le Mans start" was formerly used in the 24-hour race: drivers lined up across the track from their cars, ran across the track, jumped into their cars and started them to begin the race.
The 1955 Le Mans disaster was a large accident during the race that killed eighty-four spectators.
The city is home to Le Mans Sarthe Basket, 2006 Champion of the LNB Pro A, France's top professional basketball division.
The team plays its home games at the Antarès, which served as one of the host arenas of the FIBA EuroBasket 1999.
Le Mans was the birthplace of:
Notable residents include:
Died in Le Mans:
Le Mans is twinned with:
The culinary specialty of Le Mans is "rillettes", a shredded pork pâté.
Located at Mayet near Le Mans, the Le Mans-Mayet transmitter has a height of 342 m and is one of the tallest radio masts in France.
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Lois McMaster Bujold
Lois McMaster Bujold ( ; born November 2, 1949) is an American speculative fiction writer. She is one of the most acclaimed writers in her field, having won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record (not counting his Retro Hugos). Her novella "The Mountains of Mourning" won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In the fantasy genre, "The Curse of Chalion" won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were for "Paladin of Souls". In 2011 she was awarded the Skylark Award. In 2013 she was awarded the Forry Award for Lifetime Achievement, named for Forrest J. Ackerman, by the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. She has won two Hugo Awards for Best Series, in 2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for the World of the Five Gods series. The Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 36th SFWA Grand Master in 2019.
The bulk of Bujold's works comprises three separate book series: the Vorkosigan Saga, the Chalion series, and the Sharing Knife series.
Bujold is the daughter of Robert Charles McMaster and attributes her early interest in science fiction, as well as certain aspects of the Vorkosigan Saga, to his influence. He was editor of the "Nondestructive Testing Handbook".
Bujold writes that her experience growing up with a famous father is reflected in the same experience that her characters (Miles, Fiametta) have of growing up in the shadow of a "Great Man". Having observed this tendency in both genders, she wonders why it is always called "great man's son syndrome", and never "great man's daughter's syndrome." Her brother, an engineer like their father, helped provide technical details to support her writing of "Falling Free".
She has stated that she was always a "voracious reader". She started reading adult science fiction at the age of nine, picking up the habit from her father. She became a member of science fiction fandom, joined the Central Ohio Science Fiction Society, and co-published "StarDate", a science fiction fanzine in which a story of hers appeared under the byline Lois McMaster. Her reading tastes later expanded and she stated she now reads "history, mysteries, romance, travel, war, poetry, etc".
She attended Ohio State University from 1968 to 1972. While she was interested in writing, she didn't pursue an English major, feeling it was too concerned with literary criticism instead of literary creation.
She married John Fredric Bujold in 1971, but they divorced in the early 1990s. The marriage produced two children, a daughter named Anne (born 1979) and a son named Paul (born 1981). Anne Bujold is currently (January 2020) Artist-In-Residence for the Metals Department at the Appalachian Center for Craft, a campus of Tennessee Tech; formerly she was a metal artist and welder in Portland, Oregon and vice president of the Northwest Blacksmith Association. Bujold currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Bujold had been friends with Lillian Stewart Carl since high school, where they "collaborated on extended story lines [but where] only a fragment of the total was written out.". At one point, she even co-produced a "Star Trek" zine called "StarDate" which she wrote for. In college, she wrote a Sherlock Holmes mystery as well. However, she stopped writing after that, being busy with marriage, family, and a career in hospital patient care.
It wasn't until her thirties that she returned to writing. Bujold has credited her friend Lillian Stewart Carl's first book sales with inspiring her to return to the field: "it occurred to me that if she could do it, I could do it too." She originally planned to write as a hobby again, but discovered the amount of work required was too much for anything other than a profession, so she decided to turn professional. With support from Carl and Patricia Wrede, she was able to complete her first novel.
Lois Bujold wrote three books ("Shards of Honor", "The Warrior's Apprentice" and "Ethan of Athos") before "The Warrior's Apprentice" was finally accepted, after four rejections. "The Warrior's Apprentice" was the first book purchased, though not the first Vorkosigan book written, nor would it be the first one to be published. On the strength of "The Warrior's Apprentice", Baen Books agreed to a three-book deal to include the two bracketing novels. By 2010, Baen Books claimed to have sold 2 million copies of Bujold's books.
Bujold is best known for her Vorkosigan Saga, a series of novels featuring Miles Vorkosigan, a physically impaired interstellar spy and mercenary admiral from the planet Barrayar, set approximately 1000 years in the future. The series also includes prequels starring Miles' parents, along with companion novels centered on secondary characters. Earlier titles are generally firmly in the space opera tradition with no shortage of battles, conspiracies, and wild twists, while in more recent volumes, Miles becomes more of a detective. In "A Civil Campaign", Bujold explores yet another genre: a high-society romance with a plot that pays tribute to Regency romance novelist Georgette Heyer (as acknowledged in the dedication). It centers on a catastrophic dinner party, with misunderstandings and dialogue justifying the subtitle "A Comedy of Biology and Manners".
The author has stated that the series structure is modeled after the Horatio Hornblower books, documenting the life of a single person. In themes and echoes, they also reflect Dorothy L. Sayers' mystery character Lord Peter Wimsey. Bujold has also said that part of the challenge of writing a series is that many readers will encounter the stories in "utterly random order", so she must provide sufficient background in each of them without being excessively repetitious. Most recent printings of her Vorkosigan tales do include an appendix at the end of each book, summarizing the internal chronology of the series.
Bujold has discussed her own views on the optimum reading order for the Vorkosigan series in her blog.
Bujold also wanted to break into the fantasy genre, but met with early setbacks. Her first foray into fantasy was "The Spirit Ring". She wrote the book "on spec", shopped it around, and found low offers, sending her back to Baen Books, where Jim Baen bought it for a fair price in exchange for the promise of more Vorkosigan books. Bujold called this experience very educational; the book received little critical acclaim, and had only mediocre sales.
She would not attempt to break into the fantasy market again for almost another decade, with "The Curse of Chalion". This book was also written on spec and offered up to a book auction. This time, she met with considerable critical and commercial success by tapping into a crossover market of fantasy and romance genre fans. The fantasy world of Chalion was first conceived as a result of a University of Minnesota course she was taking about medieval Spain in her spare time.
The next fantasy world she created was the tetralogy set in the universe of "The Sharing Knife", borrowing inspiration for its landscapes and for the dialect of the "farmers" from ones she grew up with in central Ohio. She writes that her first readers who helped proofread it said she got it exactly right and they could recognize Ohio features in the descriptions and dialects.
Bujold has generally been supportive of fan fiction written about her characters and universe. Amy H. Sturgis, in her essay "From Both Sides Now: Bujold and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon", notes that this is unusual for writers of Bujold's generation, most of whom are opposed to fan fiction. Sturgis relates this to Bujold's own production of "Star Trek" and Sherlock Holmes fan fiction early in her life, which Sturgis saw as an apprenticeship for her professional writing career.
Bujold herself ties her appreciation of fan fiction to her appreciation of "active" readers. To her, good readers are the "unsung collaborators" who make the story work, by actually constructing the world and characters in their heads. Books, to her, don't actually exist until they enter the reader's head and grow there. And sometimes, the characters and stories in a book grow so much that they escape the writer's original confines and become fan fiction. To Bujold, great literature is never "sterile", stopping with only what the original author wrote. She further believes that fan fiction gives authors a unique chance to see into the minds of those "invisible collaborators", the readers.
Despite this, she no longer reads fan fiction about her own characters due to legal and financial concerns, "fascinating as [she] finds it".
Wins
Nominations
Wins
Nominations
Best Science Fiction Novel
Best Fantasy Novel
Wins
Nominations
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Lycopene
Lycopene (from the neo-Latin "Lycopersicum", the tomato species) is a bright red carotenoid hydrocarbon found in tomatoes and other red fruits and vegetables, such as red carrots, watermelons, grapefruits, and papayas, but it is not present in strawberries or cherries. Although lycopene is chemically a carotene, it has no vitamin A activity. Foods that are not red may also contain lycopene, such as asparagus, guava and parsley.
In plants, algae, and other photosynthetic organisms, lycopene is an intermediate in the biosynthesis of many carotenoids, including beta-carotene, which is responsible for yellow, orange, or red pigmentation, photosynthesis, and photoprotection. Like all carotenoids, lycopene is a tetraterpene. It is insoluble in water. Eleven conjugated double bonds give lycopene its deep red color. Owing to the strong color, lycopene is useful as a food coloring (registered as E160d) and is approved for use in the USA, Australia and New Zealand (registered as 160d) and the European Union.
Lycopene is a symmetrical tetraterpene assembled from eight isoprene units. It is a member of the carotenoid family of compounds, and because it consists entirely of carbon and hydrogen, is also a carotene. Isolation procedures for lycopene were first reported in 1910, and the structure of the molecule was determined by 1931. In its natural, all-"trans" form, the molecule is long and straight, constrained by its system of 11 conjugated double bonds. Each extension in this conjugated system reduces the energy required for electrons to transition to higher energy states, allowing the molecule to absorb visible light of progressively longer wavelengths. Lycopene absorbs all but the longest wavelengths of visible light, so it appears red.
Plants and photosynthetic bacteria naturally produce all-"trans" lycopene. When exposed to light or heat, lycopene can undergo isomerization to any of a number of "cis"-isomers, which have a bent rather than linear shape. Different isomers were shown to have different stabilities due to their molecular energy (highest stability: 5-cis ≥ all-trans ≥ 9-cis ≥ 13-cis > 15-cis > 7-cis > 11-cis: lowest). In human blood, various "cis"-isomers constitute more than 60% of the total lycopene concentration, but the biological effects of individual isomers have not been investigated.
Carotenoids like lycopene are found in photosynthetic pigment-protein complexes in plants, photosynthetic bacteria, fungi, and algae. They are responsible for the bright orange–red colors of fruits and vegetables, perform various functions in photosynthesis, and protect photosynthetic organisms from excessive light damage. Lycopene is a key intermediate in the biosynthesis of carotenoids, such as beta-carotene, and xanthophylls.
Dispersed lycopene molecules can be encapsulated into carbon nanotubes enhancing their optical properties. Efficient energy transfer occurs between the encapsulated dye and nanotube — light is absorbed by the dye and without significant loss is transferred to the nanotube. Encapsulation increases chemical and thermal stability of lycopene molecules; it also allows their isolation and individual characterization.
The unconditioned biosynthesis of lycopene in eukaryotic plants and in prokaryotic cyanobacteria is similar, as are the enzymes involved. Synthesis begins with mevalonic acid, which is converted into dimethylallyl pyrophosphate. This is then condensed with three molecules of isopentenyl pyrophosphate (an isomer of dimethylallyl pyrophosphate), to give the 20-carbon geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate. Two molecules of this product are then condensed in a tail-to-tail configuration to give the 40-carbon phytoene, the first committed step in carotenoid biosynthesis. Through several desaturation steps, phytoene is converted into lycopene. The two terminal isoprene groups of lycopene can be cyclized to produce beta-carotene, which can then be transformed into a wide variety of xanthophylls.
Lycopene is the pigment in tomato sauces that turns plastic cookware orange. It is insoluble in plain water, but it can be dissolved in organic solvents and oils. Because of its non-polarity, lycopene in food preparations will stain any sufficiently porous material, including most plastics. To remove this staining, the plastics may be soaked in a solution containing a small amount of chlorine bleach.
The bleach oxidizes the lycopene, thus allowing the now-polarized metabolite to dissolve.
Absorption of lycopene requires that it be combined with bile salts and fat to form micelles. Intestinal absorption of lycopene is enhanced by the presence of fat and by cooking. Lycopene dietary supplements (in oil) may be more efficiently absorbed than lycopene from food.
Lycopene is not an essential nutrient for humans, but is commonly found in the diet mainly from dishes prepared from tomatoes. The median and 99th percentile of dietary lycopene intake have been estimated to be 5.2 and 123 mg/d, respectively.
Fruits and vegetables that are high in lycopene include autumn olive, gac, tomatoes, watermelon, pink grapefruit, pink guava, papaya, seabuckthorn, wolfberry (goji, a berry relative of tomato), and rosehip. Ketchup is a common dietary source of lycopene. Although gac ("Momordica cochinchinensis" Spreng) has the highest content of lycopene of any known fruit or vegetable (multiple times more than tomatoes), tomatoes and tomato-based sauces, juices, and ketchup account for more than 85% of the dietary intake of lycopene for most people. The lycopene content of tomatoes depends on variety and increases as the fruit ripens.
Unlike other fruits and vegetables, where nutritional content such as vitamin C is diminished upon cooking, processing of tomatoes increases the concentration of bioavailable lycopene. Lycopene in tomato paste is up to four times more bioavailable than in fresh tomatoes. Processed tomato products such as pasteurized tomato juice, soup, sauce, and ketchup contain a higher concentration of bioavailable lycopene compared to raw tomatoes.
Cooking and crushing tomatoes (as in the canning process) and serving in oil-rich dishes (such as spaghetti sauce or pizza) greatly increases assimilation from the digestive tract into the bloodstream. Lycopene is fat-soluble, so the oil is said to help absorption. Gac has high lycopene content derived mainly from its seed coats. Cara cara navel, and other citrus fruit, such as pink grapefruit, also contain lycopene. Some foods that do not appear red also contain lycopene, e.g., asparagus, which contains about 30 μg of lycopene per 100-g serving (0.3 μg/g) and dried parsley and basil, which contain around 3.5–7.0 μg/g of lycopene.
In humans, the Observed Safe Level for lycopene is 75 mg/day, according to one preliminary study.
Lycopene is non-toxic and commonly found in the diet, mainly from tomato products. There are cases of intolerance or allergic reaction to dietary lycopene, which may cause diarrhea, nausea, stomach pain or cramps, gas, and loss of appetite. Lycopene may increase the risk of bleeding when taken with anticoagulant drugs. Because lycopene may cause low blood pressure, interactions with drugs that affect blood pressure may occur. Lycopene may affect the immune system, the nervous system, sensitivity to sunlight, or drugs used for stomach ailments.
Lycopenemia is an orange discoloration of the skin that is observed with high intakes of lycopene. The discoloration is expected to fade after discontinuing excessive lycopene intake.
A 2017 review concluded that tomato products and lycopene supplementation had small positive effects on cardiovascular risk factors, such as elevated blood lipids and blood pressure. A 2010 review concluded that research has been insufficient to establish whether lycopene consumption affects human health. Lycopene has been studied in basic and clinical research for its potential effects on cardiovascular diseases and prostate cancer, although there is no good evidence of benefit in prostate cancer.
In a review of literature on lycopene and its potential role as a dietary antioxidant, the European Food Safety Authority concluded that evidence was insufficient for lycopene having antioxidant effects in humans, particularly in skin, heart function, or vision protection from ultraviolet light.
Although lycopene from tomatoes has been tested in humans for cardiovascular diseases and prostate cancer, no effect on any disease was found. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in rejecting manufacturers' requests in 2005 to allow "qualified labeling" for lycopene and the reduction of various cancer risks, provided a conclusion that remains in effect :
"...no studies provided information about whether lycopene intake may reduce the risk of any of the specific forms of cancer. Based on the above, FDA concludes that there is no credible evidence supporting a relationship between lycopene consumption, either as a food ingredient, a component of food, or as a dietary supplement, and any of these cancers."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18735
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Landau
Landau, or Landau in der Pfalz, is an autonomous ("kreisfrei") town surrounded by the Südliche Weinstraße ("Southern Wine Route") district of southern Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is a university town (since 1990), a long-standing cultural centre, and a market and shopping town, surrounded by vineyards and wine-growing villages of the Palatinate wine region. Landau lies east of the Palatinate forest, Europe's largest contiguous forest, on the German Wine Route.
It contains the districts ("Ortsteile") of Arzheim, Dammheim, Godramstein, Mörlheim, Mörzheim, Nussdorf, Queichheim, and Wollmesheim.
Landau was first mentioned as a settlement in 1106. It was in the possession of the counts of Leiningen-Dagsburg-Landeck, whose arms, differenced by an escutcheon of the Imperial eagle, served as the arms of Landau until 1955 . The town was granted a charter in 1274 by King Rudolf I of Germany, who declared the town a Free Imperial Town in 1291; nevertheless Prince-Bishop Emich of Speyer, a major landowner in the district, seized the town in 1324. The town did not regain its ancient rights until 1511 from Maximilian I. An Augustinian monastery was founded in 1276.
Landau was later part of France from 1680 to 1815, during which it was one of the "Décapole", the ten free cities of Alsace, and received its modern fortifications by Louis XIV's military architect Vauban in 1688–99, making the little town (population in 1789 was still only approximately 5,000) one of Europe's strongest citadels. In the War of the Spanish Succession it had four Sieges. After the Siege in 1702 that was lost by the French, an Imperial garrison was installed in Landau. After the 2nd Siege from 13 October to 15 November 1703 the French had regained the city, caused by their victory in the Battle of Speyerbach. The 3rd Siege began on 12 September 1704 by Louis, Margrave of Baden-Baden, and ended on 23 November 1704 with the French defeat. During this siege King Joseph I arrived at Landau coming from Vienna in a newly developed convertible carriage. It became very popular, named Landau in English, or in German. The French got Landau back after the 4th Siege which lasted from 6 June to 20 August 1713 by Marshal General Villars.
Landau was part of Bas-Rhin department between 1789 and 1815. After Napoleon's Hundred Days following his escape from Elba, Landau, which had remained French, was granted to the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1815 and became the capital of one of the thirteen "Bezirksämter" (counties) of the Bavarian Rheinkreis, later renamed Pfalz.
In 1840 famous political cartoonist Thomas Nast was born in Landau.
Following World War II, Landau was an important barracks town for the French occupation.
Landau's large main square ("Rathausplatz") is dominated by the town hall ("Rathaus") and the market hall ("Altes Kaufhaus"). In the 19th century, the former fortifications gave way to a ring road that encircles the old town centre, from which the old industrial buildings have been excluded. A convention hall, the "Festhalle", was built in Art Nouveau style, 1905–07 on a rise overlooking the town park and facing the modernist "Bundesamt", the regional government building.
The Protestant Collegiate Church () in Landau in der Pfalz is one of the oldest buildings in the town. With the construction of the church started in the 14th century, was completed in the mid-16th century.
The zoo is located close to the center of Landau alongside the historical fortifications. Animals are held in natural enclosures. The zoo contains numerous exotic species such as tigers and cheetahs, but also seals, penguins, kangaroos and flamingos and many more.
Wine-making continues to be an important industry of Landau.
The "landau," a luxury open carriage with a pair of folding tops, was invented in the town.
A frequent Ashkenazi surname originates in this town. Probably its most famous bearer was Yechezkel Landau, an 18th-century talmudist and halakhist and the chief rabbi of Prague.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18737
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Liv Ullmann
Liv Johanne Ullmann (born 16 December 1938) is a Norwegian actress and film director. She was one of the "muses" of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.
Ullmann won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama in 1972 for the film "The Emigrants" (1971), and has been nominated for another four. In 2000, she was nominated for the Palme d'Or for her second directorial feature film, "Faithless". She has also received two BAFTA Award nominations, for her performances in "Scenes from a Marriage" (1973) and "Face to Face" (1976), and two Academy Award nominations, for "The Emigrants" and "Face to Face".
Ullmann was born in Tokyo, Japan, the daughter of Erik Viggo Ullmann (1907–1945), a Norwegian aircraft engineer who was working in Tokyo at the time, and Janna Erbe (née Lund; 1910–1996), also Norwegian. Her grandfather was sent to the Dachau concentration camp during the Second World War for helping Jews escape from the town where he lived in Norway; he died in the camp. When she was two years old, the family moved to Toronto, Ontario, where her father worked at the Norwegian air force base on Toronto Island (in Lake Ontario) during the Second World War. The family moved to New York, where four years later, her father died of a brain tumour, an event that affected her greatly. Her mother worked as a bookseller, while raising two daughters. They eventually moved to Norway, settling in Trondheim.
Ullmann began her acting career as a stage actress in Norway during the mid-1950s. She continued to act in theatre for most of her career, and became noted for her portrayal of Nora in Henrik Ibsen's play "A Doll's House", but became better known once she started to work with Swedish movie director Ingmar Bergman. She later acted, with acclaim, in 10 of his movies, including "Persona" (1966), "The Passion of Anna" (1969), "Cries and Whispers" (1972), and "Autumn Sonata" (1978), in the last of which her co-actress Ingrid Bergman resumed her own Swedish cinema career. She co-acted often with Swedish actor and fellow Bergman collaborator Erland Josephson, with whom she made the Swedish television drama "Scenes from a Marriage" (1973), which was also edited to feature-movie length and distributed theatrically. Ullmann acted with Laurence Olivier in "A Bridge Too Far" (1977), directed by Richard Attenborough.
Nominated more than 40 times for awards, including various lifetime achievement awards, she won the best actress prize three times from the National Society of Film Critics, three times from the National Board of Review, received three awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, and a Golden Globe. During 1971, Ullmann was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for the movie "The Emigrants", and again during 1976 for the movie "Face to Face".
Ullmann made her New York City stage debut in 1975 also in "A Doll's House". Appearances in "Anna Christie" and "Ghosts" followed, as well as the less than successful musical version of "I Remember Mama". This show, composed by Richard Rodgers, experienced numerous revisions during a long preview period, then closed after 108 performances. She also featured in the widely deprecated musical movie remake of "Lost Horizon" during 1973. In 1977, when she appeared on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre in Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie", the New York Times said that she "glowed with despair and hope, and was everything one could have wished her to have been" in a performance "not to be missed and never to be forgotten", with her "grace and authority" that was "perhaps more than Garbo...born for Anna Christie:--Or more properly, Anna Christie was born for her."
In 1980, Brian De Palma, who directed "Carrie", wanted Liv Ullmann to play the role of Kate Miller in the erotic crime thriller "Dressed to Kill" and offered it to her, but she declined because of the violence. The role subsequently went to Angie Dickinson. In 1982 Ingmar Bergman wanted Ullmann to play Emelie Ekdahl in his last feature film, "Fanny and Alexander", and wrote the role with this in mind. She declined it, feeling the role was too sad. She later stated in interviews that turning it down was one of the few things she really regretted.
During 1984, she was chairperson of the jury at the 34th Berlin International Film Festival, and during 2002 chaired the jury of the Cannes Film Festival. She introduced her daughter, Linn Ullmann, to the audience with the words: "Here comes the woman whom Ingmar Bergman loves the most". Her daughter was there to receive the Prize of Honour on behalf of her father; she would return to serve the jury herself during 2011.
In 2003, Ullmann reprised her role for "Scenes from a Marriage" in "Saraband" (2003), Bergman's final telemovie. Her previous screen role had been in the Swedish movie "Zorn" (1994).
In 2004, Ullmann revealed that she had received an offer in November 2003 to play in three episodes of the popular American series, "Sex and the City". She was amused by the offer, and said that it was one of the few programs she regularly watched, but she turned it down. Later that year, Steven Soderbergh wrote a role in the movie "Ocean's 12" especially for her, but she also turned that down.
Ullmann narrated the Canada–Norway co-produced animated short movie "The Danish Poet" (2006), which won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film at the 79th Academy Awards during 2007.
In 2008, she was the head of the jury at the 30th Moscow International Film Festival.
She published two autobiographies, "Changing" (1977) and "Choices" (1984).
During 2012, she attended the International Indian Film Academy Awards in Singapore, where she was honored for her "Outstanding Contributions to International Cinema" and she also showed her movie on her relationship with Ingmar Bergman.
Ullmann's first film as a director was "Sofie" (1992); her friend and former co-actor, Erland Josephson, starred on it. She later directed the Bergman-composed movie "Faithless" (2000). "Faithless" garnered nominations for both the Palme d'Or and Best Actress category at the Cannes Film Festival.
During 2006, Ullmann announced that she had been forced to end her longtime wish of making a film based on "A Doll's House". According to her statement, the Norwegian Film Fund was preventing her and writer Kjetil Bjørnstad from pursuing the project. Australian actress Cate Blanchett and British actress Kate Winslet had been cast intended in the main roles of the movie. She later directed Blanchett in the play "A Streetcar Named Desire", by Tennessee Williams, at the Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney, which was performed September through October 2009, and then continued from 29 October to 21 November 2009 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where it won a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Non-resident Production as well as actress and supporting performer for 2009. The play was also performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2013, Ullmann directed a film adaptation of "Miss Julie". The film, released in September 2014, stars Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton. It was widely praised by the Norwegian press.
In addition to Norwegian, Ullmann speaks Swedish, English, and other European languages.
She had a romantic relationship with Ingmar Bergman (1965–1970). Writer Linn Ullmann (b. 1966) is their daughter.
Following an affair with the actor John Lithgow, Ullman married Boston real estate developer Donald Saunders in 1985, and they remain married.
She is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and has traveled widely for the organization. She is also co-founder and honorary chair of the International Rescue Committee's Women's Refugee Commission.
In 2005, King Harald V of Norway made Ullmann a Commander with Star of the Order of St. Olav.
She received an honorary degree in 2006, Doctor of Philosophy, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18738
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Laika
Laika (; c. 1954 – 3 November 1957) was a Soviet space dog who became one of the first animals in space, and the first animal to orbit the Earth. Laika, a stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into outer space on 3 November 1957.
Little was known about the impact of spaceflight on living creatures at the time of Laika's mission, and the technology to de-orbit had not yet been developed, so Laika's survival was never expected. Some scientists believed humans would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space, so engineers viewed flights by animals as a necessary precursor to human missions. The experiment aimed to prove that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure a micro-g environment, paving the way for human spaceflight and providing scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.
Laika died within hours from overheating, possibly caused by a failure of the central R-7 sustainer to separate from the payload. The true cause and time of her death were not made public until 2002; instead, it was widely reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on day six or, as the Soviet government initially claimed, she was euthanised prior to oxygen depletion.
On 11 April 2008, Russian officials unveiled a monument to Laika. A small monument in her honour was built near the military research facility in Moscow that prepared Laika's flight to space. It portrayed a dog standing on top of a rocket. She also appears on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space in Moscow.
After the success of Sputnik 1 in October 1957, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, wanted a spacecraft launched on 7 November 1957, the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution. Construction had already started on a more sophisticated satellite, but it would not be ready until December; this satellite would later become Sputnik 3.
Meeting the November deadline meant building a new craft. Khrushchev specifically wanted his engineers to deliver a "space spectacular", a mission that would repeat the triumph of Sputnik 1, stunning the world with Soviet prowess. Planners settled on an orbital flight with a dog. Soviet rocket engineers had long intended a canine orbit before attempting human spaceflight; since 1951, they had lofted twelve dogs into sub-orbital space on ballistic flights, working gradually toward an orbital mission set for some time in 1958. To satisfy Khrushchev's demands, they expedited the orbital canine flight for the November launch.
According to Russian sources, the official decision to launch Sputnik 2 was made on 10 or 12 October, leaving less than four weeks to design and build the spacecraft. Sputnik 2, therefore, was something of a rush job, with most elements of the spacecraft being constructed from rough sketches. Aside from the primary mission of sending a living passenger into space, Sputnik 2 also contained instrumentation for measuring solar irradiance and cosmic rays.
The craft was equipped with a life-support system consisting of an oxygen generator and devices to avoid oxygen poisoning and to absorb carbon dioxide. A fan, designed to activate whenever the cabin temperature exceeded , was added to keep the dog cool. Enough food (in a gelatinous form) was provided for a seven-day flight, and the dog was fitted with a bag to collect waste. A harness was designed to be fitted to the dog, and there were chains to restrict her movements to standing, sitting, or lying down; there was no room to turn around in the cabin. An electrocardiogram monitored heart rate and further instrumentation tracked respiration rate, maximum arterial pressure, and the dog's movements.
Laika was found as a stray wandering the streets of Moscow. Soviet scientists chose to use Moscow strays since they assumed that such animals had already learned to endure conditions of extreme cold and hunger. This specimen was a mongrel female, approximately three years old. Another account reported that she weighed about . Soviet personnel gave her several names and nicknames, among them Kudryavka (Russian for "Little Curly"), Zhuchka ("Little Bug"), and Limonchik ("Little Lemon"). Laika, the Russian name for several breeds of dogs similar to the husky, was the name popularised around the world. The American press dubbed her Muttnik ("mutt" + suffix "-nik") as a pun on Sputnik, or referred to her as "Curly". Her true pedigree is unknown, although it is generally accepted that she was part husky or other Nordic breed, and possibly part terrier. NASA refers to Laika as a "part-Samoyed terrier." A Russian magazine described her temperament as phlegmatic, saying that she did not quarrel with other dogs.
The Soviet Union and United States had previously sent animals only on sub-orbital flights. Three dogs were trained for the Sputnik 2 flight: Albina, Mushka, and Laika. Soviet space-life scientists Vladimir Yazdovsky and Oleg Gazenko trained the dogs.
To adapt the dogs to the confines of the tiny cabin of Sputnik 2, they were kept in progressively smaller cages for periods of up to 20 days. The extensive close confinement caused them to stop urinating or defecating, made them restless, and caused their general condition to deteriorate. Laxatives did not improve their condition, and the researchers found that only long periods of training proved effective. The dogs were placed in centrifuges that simulated the acceleration of a rocket launch and were placed in machines that simulated the noises of the spacecraft. This caused their pulses to double and their blood pressure to increase by 30–65 torr. The dogs were trained to eat a special high-nutrition gel that would be their food in space.
Before the launch, one of the mission scientists took Laika home to play with his children. In a book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine, Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote, "Laika was quiet and charming ... I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live."
Vladimir Yazdovsky made the final selection of dogs and their designated roles. Laika was to be the "flight dog"—a sacrifice to science on a one-way mission to space. Albina, who had already flown twice on a high-altitude test rocket, was to act as Laika's backup. The third dog, Mushka, was a "control dog"—she was to stay on the ground and be used to test instrumentation and life support.
Before leaving for the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Yazdovsky and Gazenko conducted surgery on the dogs, routing the cables from the transmitters to the sensors that would measure breathing, pulse, and blood pressure.
Because the existing airstrip at Turatam near the cosmodrome was small, the dogs and crew had to be first flown aboard a Tu-104 plane to Tashkent. From there, a smaller and lighter Il-14 plane took them to Turatam. Training of dogs continued upon arrival; one after another they were placed in the capsules to get familiar with the feeding system.
According to a NASA document, Laika was placed in the capsule of the satellite on 31 October 1957—three days before the start of the mission. At that time of year, the temperatures at the launch site were extremely cold, and a hose connected to a heater was used to keep her container warm. Two assistants were assigned to keep a constant watch on Laika before launch. Just prior to liftoff on 3 November 1957, from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Laika's fur was sponged in a weak alcohol solution and carefully groomed, while iodine was painted onto the areas where sensors would be placed to monitor her bodily functions.
One of the technicians preparing the capsule before final liftoff stated that "after placing Laika in the container and before closing the hatch, we kissed her nose and wished her bon voyage, knowing that she would not survive the flight."
The exact time of the launch varies from source to source and is mentioned as 05:30:42 Moscow Time or 07:22 Moscow Time.
At peak acceleration Laika's respiration increased to between three and four times the pre-launch rate. The sensors showed her heart rate was 103 beats/min before launch and increased to 240 beats/min during the early acceleration. After reaching orbit, Sputnik 2's nose cone was jettisoned successfully; however the "Block A" core did not separate as planned, preventing the thermal control system from operating correctly. Some of the thermal insulation tore loose, raising the cabin temperature to . After three hours of weightlessness, Laika's pulse rate had settled back to 102 beats/min, three times longer than it had taken during earlier ground tests, an indication of the stress she was under. The early telemetry indicated that Laika was agitated but eating her food. After approximately five to seven hours into the flight, no further signs of life were received from the spacecraft.
The Soviet scientists had planned to euthanise Laika with a poisoned serving of food. For many years, the Soviet Union gave conflicting statements that she had died either from asphyxia, when the batteries failed, or that she had been euthanised. Many rumours circulated about the exact manner of her death. In 1999, several Russian sources reported that Laika had died when the cabin overheated on the fourth orbit. In October 2002, Dimitri Malashenkov, one of the scientists behind the Sputnik 2 mission, revealed that Laika had died by the fourth circuit of flight from overheating. According to a paper he presented to the World Space Congress in Houston, Texas, "It turned out that it was practically impossible to create a reliable temperature control system in such limited time constraints."
Over five months later, after 2,570 orbits, Sputnik 2—including Laika's remains—disintegrated during re-entry on 14 April 1958.
Due to the overshadowing issue of the Soviet versus U.S. Space Race, the ethical issues raised by this experiment went largely unaddressed for some time. As newspaper clippings from 1957 show, the press was initially focused on reporting the political perspective, while the health and retrieval—or lack thereof—of Laika only became an issue later.
Sputnik 2 was not designed to be retrievable, and Laika had always been intended to die. The mission sparked a debate across the globe on the mistreatment of animals and animal testing in general to advance science. In the United Kingdom, the National Canine Defence League called on all dog owners to observe a minute's silence, while the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) received protests even before Radio Moscow had finished announcing the launch. Animal rights groups at the time called on members of the public to protest at Soviet embassies. Others demonstrated outside the United Nations in New York. These protests were largely stirred up and instrumentalized as an ideological struggle by various interest groups. Laboratory researchers in the U.S. offered some support for the Soviets, at least before the news of Laika's death.
In the Soviet Union, there was less controversy. Neither the media, books in the following years, nor the public openly questioned the decision to send a dog into space. In 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists responsible for sending Laika into space, expressed regret for allowing her to die:
In other Warsaw Pact countries, open criticism of the Soviet space program was difficult because of political censorship, but there were notable cases of criticism in Polish scientific circles. A Polish scientific periodical, ""Kto, Kiedy, Dlaczego"" ("Who, When, Why"), published in 1958, discussed the mission of Sputnik 2. In the periodical's section dedicated to astronautics, Krzysztof Boruń described the Sputnik 2 mission as "regrettable" and criticised not bringing Laika back to Earth alive as "undoubtedly a great loss for science".
Laika is memorialised in the form of a statue and plaque at Star City, Russia, the Russian Cosmonaut training facility. Created in 1997, Laika is positioned behind the cosmonauts with her ears erect. The Monument to the Conquerors of Space, constructed in 1964, also includes Laika. On 11 April 2008 at the military research facility where staff had been responsible for readying Laika for the flight, officials unveiled a monument of her poised on top of a space rocket. Stamps and envelopes picturing Laika were produced, as well as branded cigarettes and matches.
Future space missions carrying dogs would be designed to be recovered. Four other dogs died in Soviet space missions: Bars and Lisichka were killed when their R-7 rocket exploded shortly after launch on 28 July 1960; Pchyolka and Mushka died when Korabl-Sputnik 3 was purposely destroyed with an explosive charge to prevent foreign powers from inspecting the capsule after a wayward atmospheric reentry trajectory on 1 December 1960.
Although never shown, Laika is prominently mentioned in the 1985 film "My Life as a Dog", in which the main character (a young Swedish boy in the late 1950s) identifies strongly with the dog. "Laika", a 2007 graphic novel by Nick Abadzis giving a fictionalized account of Laika's life, won the Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens. Laika is also mentioned in the 2004 song "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" by Arcade Fire, included on their debut album "Funeral". "Lajka" (in English: "Laika") is a 2017 Czech animated science fiction comedy film inspired by Laika.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18739
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Master of Puppets
Master of Puppets is the third studio album by American heavy metal band Metallica, released on March 3, 1986, by Elektra Records. Recorded at Sweet Silence Studios with producer Flemming Rasmussen, it was the band's last album to feature bassist Cliff Burton, who died in a bus accident in Sweden during the album's promotional tour.
The album's artwork, designed by Metallica and Peter Mensch and painted by Don Brautigam, depicts a cemetery field of white crosses tethered to strings, manipulated by a pair of hands in a blood-red sky. Instead of releasing a single or video in advance of the album's release, Metallica embarked on a five-month American tour in support of Ozzy Osbourne. The European leg was canceled after Burton's death in September 1986, and the band returned home to audition a new bassist.
"Master of Puppets" peaked at number 29 on the "Billboard" 200, and received widespread acclaim from critics, who praised its music and political lyrics. Today, it is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time, and is credited with consolidating the American thrash metal scene. It was certified six times platinum by the RIAA in 2003 for shipping six million copies in the United States, and was later certified six times platinum by Music Canada and gold by the BPI. In 2015, "Master of Puppets" became the first metal recording to be selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Metallica's 1983 debut "Kill 'Em All" laid the foundation for thrash metal with its aggressive musicianship and vitriolic lyrics. The album revitalized the American underground scene, and inspired similar records by contemporaries. The band's second album "Ride the Lightning" extended the limits of the genre with its more sophisticated songwriting and improved production. The album caught the attention of Elektra Records representative Michael Alago, who signed the group to an eight-album deal in the fall of 1984, halfway through the album's promotional tour. Elektra reissued "Ride the Lightning" on November 19, and the band began touring larger venues and festivals throughout 1985. After parting with manager Jon Zazula, Metallica hired Q Prime executives Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch. During the summer, the band played the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington, alongside Bon Jovi and Ratt to an audience of 70,000.
Metallica was motivated to make an album that would impress critics and fans, and began writing new material in mid-1985. Lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich were the main songwriters on the album, already titled "Master of Puppets". The two developed ideas at a garage in El Cerrito, California, before inviting bassist Cliff Burton and guitarist Kirk Hammett for rehearsals. Hetfield and Ulrich described the songwriting process as starting with "guitar riffs, assembled and reassembled until they start to sound like a song". After that, the band came up with a song title and topic, and Hetfield wrote lyrics to match the title. "Master of Puppets" is Metallica's first album not to feature songwriting contributions from former lead guitarist Dave Mustaine. Mustaine claimed he had co-written "Leper Messiah", based on an old song called "The Hills Ran Red". The band denied this, but stated that one section incorporated Mustaine's ideas.
The band was not satisfied with the acoustics of the American studios they considered, and decided to record in Ulrich's native Denmark. Ulrich took drum lessons, and Hammett worked with Joe Satriani to learn how to record more efficiently. Ulrich was in talks with Rush's bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee to produce the album, but the collaboration never materialized because of uncoordinated schedules. Metallica recorded the album with producer Flemming Rasmussen at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark, from September 1 to December 27, 1985. The writing of all the songs except "Orion" and "The Thing That Should Not Be" was completed before the band's arrival in Copenhagen. Rasmussen stated that the band brought well-prepared demos of the songs, and only slight changes were made to the compositions in the studio. The recording took longer than the previous album because Metallica had developed a sense of perfectionism and had higher ambitions. Metallica eschewed the slick production and synthesizers of contemporary hard rock and glam metal albums. With a reputation for drinking, the band stayed sober on recording days. Hammett recalled that the group was "just making another album" at the time and "had no idea that the record would have such a range of influence that it went on to have". He also said that the group was "definitely peaking" at the time and that the album had "the sound of a band really gelling, really learning how to work well together".
Rasmussen and Metallica did not manage to complete the mixtapes as planned. Instead, the multitrack recordings were sent in January 1986 to Michael Wagener, who finished the album's mixing. The cover was designed by Metallica and Peter Mensch and painted by Don Brautigam. It depicts a cemetery field of white crosses tethered to strings, manipulated by a pair of hands in a blood-red sky. Ulrich explained that the artwork summarized the lyrical content of the album—people being subconsciously manipulated. The original artwork was sold at Rockefeller Plaza, New York City for $28,000 in 2008. The band mocked the warning stickers promoted by the PMRC with a facetious Parental Advisory label on the cover: "The only track you probably won't want to play is 'Damage, Inc.' due to the multiple use of the infamous 'F' word. Otherwise, there aren't any 'shits', 'fucks', 'pisses', 'cunts', 'motherfuckers', or 'cocksuckers' anywhere on this record".
The album was recorded with the following equipment: Hammett's guitars were a 1974 Gibson Flying V, a Jackson Randy Rhoads, and a Fernandes Stratocaster copy; Hetfield used a Jackson King V played through a Mesa Boogie Mark IIC+ amplifier modified as a pre-amp; Burton played an Aria Pro II SB1000 through Mesa Boogie amplifier heads and cabinets; Ulrich played Tama drum equipment, and borrowed a rare Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum from Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen.
"Master of Puppets" features dynamic music and thick arrangements. Metallica delivered a more refined approach and performance compared to the previous two albums, with multilayered songs and technical dexterity. This album and its predecessor "Ride the Lightning" follow a similar track sequencing: both open with an up-tempo song with an acoustic intro, followed by a lengthy title track, and a fourth track with ballad qualities. Although both albums are similarly structured, the musicianship on "Master of Puppets" is more powerful and epic in scope, with tight rhythms and delicate guitar solos. According to music writer Joel McIver, "Master of Puppets" introduced a new level of heaviness and complexity in thrash metal, displaying atmospheric and precisely executed songs. Hetfield's vocals had matured from the hoarse shouting of the first two albums to a deeper, in-control, yet aggressive style. The songs explore themes such as control and the abuse of power. The lyrics describe the consequences of alienation, oppression, and feelings of powerlessness. Author Ryan Moore thought the lyrics depicted "ominous yet unnamed forces of power wielding total control over helpless human subjects". The lyrics were considered perceptive and harrowing, and were praised for being honest and socially conscious by writer Brock Helander. Referring to the epic proportions of the songs, BBC Music's Eamonn Stack stated that "at this stage in their careers Metallica weren't even doing songs, they were telling stories". The compositions and arrangements benefited from Burton's classical training and understanding of harmony.
"Battery" refers to angry violence, as in the term "assault and battery". Some critics contended that the title actually refers to an artillery battery, and interpreted it as "Hetfield of a war tactic as the aggressor" personifying destruction. The song begins with bass-heavy acoustic guitars that build upon multitracked layers until they are joined by a sonic wall of distorted electric guitars. It then breaks into fast, aggressive riffing, featuring off-beat rhythms and heavily distorted minor dyads where root-fifth power chords might be expected. Hetfield improvised the riff while relaxing in London. "Master of Puppets" consists of several riffs with odd meters and a cleanly picked middle section with melodic solo. The song shares a similar structure with "The Four Horsemen" from the band's first album: two verse-chorus sets lead to a lengthy interlude to another verse-chorus set. The opening and pre-verse sections feature fast downstroked chromatic riffing at around 220 beats per minute in mostly time. Every fourth bar of each verse and the outro is cut short by more than a beat; the time signature of these bars is often inaccurately analyzed as being , but it is closer to . A lengthy interlude follows the second chorus, beginning with a clean, arpeggiated section over which Hetfield contributes a melodic solo; the riffing becomes distorted and progressively more heavy and Hammett provides a more virtuosic solo before the song eventually returns to the main verse. The song closes with a fade-out of sinister laughter. The lyrical theme is cocaine addiction.
"The Thing That Should Not Be" was inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos created by famed horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, with notable direct references to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and to Cthulhu himself, who is the subject matter of the song's chorus. It is considered the heaviest track on the album, with the main riff emulating a beast dragging itself into the sea. The Black Sabbath-influenced guitars are down-tuned, creating slow and moody ambience. "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" was based on Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and conveys the thoughts of a patient unjustly caged in a mental institution. The song opens with a section of clean single strings and harmonics. The clean, arpeggiated main riff is played in alternating and time signatures. The song is structured with alternating somber clean guitars in the verses, and distorted heavy riffing in the choruses, unfolding into an aggressive finale. This structure follows a pattern of power ballads Metallica set with "Fade to Black" on "Ride the Lightning", "One" on "...And Justice for All" and later "The Day That Never Comes" on "Death Magnetic".
"Disposable Heroes" is an anti-war song about a young soldier whose fate is controlled by his superiors. With sections performed at 220 beats per minute, it is one of the most intense tracks on the record. The guitar passage at the end of each verse was Hammett's imitation of the sort of music he found in war films. The syncopated riffing of "Leper Messiah" challenges the hypocrisy of the televangelism that emerged in the 1980s. The song describes how people are willingly turned into blind religious followers who mindlessly do whatever they are told. The 136 beats per minute mid-tempo riffing of the verses culminates in a descending chromatic riff in the chorus; it increases to a galloping 184 beats per minute for the middle section that climaxes in a distorted scream of "Lie!". The title derives from the lyrics to the David Bowie song "Ziggy Stardust". "Orion" is a multipart instrumental highlighting Burton's bass playing. It opens with a fade-in bass section, heavily processed to resemble an orchestra. It continues with mid-tempo riffing, followed by a bass solo at half-tempo. The tempo accelerates during the latter part, and ends with music fading out. Burton arranged the middle section, which features its moody bass line and multipart guitar harmonies. "Damage, Inc." rants about senseless violence and reprisal at an unspecified target. It starts with a series of reversed bass chords based on the chorale prelude of Bach's "Come, Sweet Death". The song then jumps into a rapid rhythm with a pedal-point riff in E that Hammett says was influenced by Deep Purple.
"Master of Puppets" was hailed as a masterpiece by critics outside of the thrash metal audience and cited by some as the genre's greatest album. In a contemporary review, Tim Holmes of "Rolling Stone" asserted that the band had redefined heavy metal with the technical skill and subtlety showcased on the album, which he described as "the sound of global paranoia". "Kerrang!" wrote that "Master of Puppets" "finally put Metallica into the big leagues where they belong". Editor Tom King said Metallica was at an "incredible song-writing peak" during the recording sessions, partially because Burton contributed to the songwriting. By contrast, "Spin" magazine's Judge I-Rankin was disappointed with the album and said, although the production is exceptional and Metallica's experimentation is commendable, it eschews the less "intellectual" approach of "Kill 'Em All" for a MDC-inspired direction that is inconsistent.
In a retrospective review, AllMusic's Steve Huey viewed "Master of Puppets" as Metallica's best album and remarked that, although it was not as unexpected as "Ride the Lightning", it is a more musically and thematically consistent album. Greg Kot of the "Chicago Tribune" said the songs were the band's most intense at that point, and veer toward "the progressive tendency of Rush." Adrien Begrand of PopMatters praised the production as "a metal version of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound" and believed none of Metallica's subsequent albums could match its passionate and intense musical quality. BBC Music's Eamonn Stack called the album "hard, fast, rock with substance" and likened the songs to stories of "biblical proportions". Canadian journalist Martin Popoff compared the album to "Ride the Lightning" and found "Master of Puppets" not a remake, though similar in "awesome power and effect". Robert Christgau was more critical. Writing in "" (1990), he said the band's energy and political motivations are respectable, but the music evokes clichéd images of "revolutionary heroes" who are "male chauvinists too inexperienced to know better". The philosopher Roger Scruton, a critic of contemporary pop music, has praised Metallica, and in particular this album, writing, "I have actually been listening to quite a bit of heavy metal lately, and Metallica, I think, is genuinely talented. Master of Puppets I think has got something genuinely both poetic – violently poetic – and musical. Every now and then something like that stands out."
Released on March 3, 1986, the album had a 72-week run on the "Billboard" 200 album charts and earned the band its first gold certification. The album debuted on March 29, 1986, at number 128 and peaked at number 29 on the "Billboard" 200 chart. "Billboard" reported that 300,000 copies were sold in its first three weeks. More than 500,000 copies were sold in its first year, even with virtually no radio airplay and no music videos. In 2003, "Master of Puppets" was certified 6× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), with six million copies shipped in the United States. Between the beginning of the Nielsen SoundScan era in 1991 and 2009, 4,578,000 copies were sold. The album was less successful on an international level, despite entering the top 5 on the Finnish and the top 40 on the German and Swiss album charts in its inaugural year. In 2004, it peaked within the top 15 in Sweden. In 2008, the album reached the top 40 on the Australian and Norwegian album charts. It received 6× platinum certification from Music Canada and a golden award from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for shipments of 600,000 and 100,000 copies, respectively.
"Master of Puppets" has appeared in several publications' best album lists. It was ranked number 167 on the list of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list. The magazine would also later rank it second on its 2017 list of "100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time", behind Black Sabbath's "Paranoid". "Time" included the album in its list of the 100 best albums of all time. According to the magazine's Josh Tyrangiel, "Master of Puppets" reinforced the velocity of playing in heavy metal and diminished some of its clichés. "Slant Magazine" placed the album at number 90 on its list of the best albums of the 1980s, saying "Master of Puppets" is Metallica's best and most sincere recording. The album is featured in Robert Dimery's book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". IGN named "Master of Puppets" the best heavy metal album of all time. The website stated it was Metallica's best because it "built upon and perfected everything they had experimented with prior" and that "all the pieces come together in glorious cohesion". Music journalist Martin Popoff also ranked it the best heavy metal album. The album was voted the fourth greatest guitar album of all time by "Guitar World" in 2006, and the title track ranked number 61 on the magazine's list of the 100 greatest guitar solos. "Total Guitar" ranked the main riff of the title track at number 7 among the top 20 guitar riffs. The April 2006 edition of "Kerrang!" was dedicated to the album and gave away to readers the cover album "Master of Puppets: Remastered".
"Master of Puppets " became thrash metal's first platinum album and by the early 1990s thrash metal successfully challenged and redefined the mainstream of heavy metal. Metallica and a few other bands headlined arena concerts and appeared regularly on MTV, although radio play remained incommensurate with their popularity. "Master of Puppets" is widely accepted as the genre's most accomplished album, and paved the way for subsequent development. The album, in the words of writer Christopher Knowles, "ripped Metallica away from the underground and put them atop the metal mountain". David Hayter from "Guitar Planet" recognized the album as one of the most influential records ever made and a benchmark by which other metal albums should be judged. MTV's Kyle Anderson had similar thoughts, saying that 25 years after its release the album remained a "stone cold classic". Carlos Ramirez from Noisecreep believes that "Master of Puppets" stands as one of the most representative albums of its genre.
1986 is seen as a pinnacle year for thrash metal in which the genre broke out of the underground due to albums such as Megadeth's "Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?" and Slayer's "Reign in Blood". Anthrax released "Among the Living" in 1987, and by the end of the year these bands, alongside Metallica, were being called the "Big Four" of thrash metal. "Master of Puppets" frequently tops critic and fan polls of favorite thrash metal albums—the most frequent rival is Slayer's "Reign in Blood", also released in 1986 and also considered that band's peak. The rivalry partially stemmed from a contrast in approaches on the two albums, between the sophistication of "Master of Puppets" and the velocity of "Reign in Blood". Histories of the band tend to position "Ride the Lightning", "Master of Puppets", and "...And Justice for All" as a trilogy over the course of which the band's music progressively matured and became more sophisticated. In 2015, the album was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry.
Metallica opted for extensive touring instead of releasing a single or video to promote the album. Metallica spent March to August 1986 touring as the opening act for Ozzy Osbourne in the United States, the first tour Metallica played to arena-sized audiences. During sound checks, the group played riffs from Osbourne's previous band Black Sabbath, which Osbourne perceived as a mockery toward him. Referring to that occasion, Ulrich stated that Metallica was honored to play with Osbourne, who treated the band well on the tour. Metallica was noted by the media for its excessive drinking habit while touring and earned the nickname "Alcoholica". The band members occasionally wore satirical T-shirts reading "Alcoholica/Drank 'Em All". The band usually played a 45-minute set often followed by an encore. According to Ulrich, the audiences in bigger cities were already familiar with Metallica's music, unlike in the smaller towns they've visited. "In the B-markets, people really don't know what we're all about. But after 45 or 50 minutes we can tell we've won them over. And fans who come to hear Ozzy go home liking Metallica." Metallica won over Osbourne's fans and slowly began to establish a mainstream following.
The tour, however, was notable for several incidents. Hetfield broke his wrist in a mid-tour skateboarding accident, and his guitar technician John Marshall played rhythm guitar on several dates. The European leg of the Damage, Inc. Tour commenced in September, with Anthrax as the supporting band. After the performance of September 26 in Stockholm, the band's bus rolled over on a stretch of icy road the following morning. Burton was thrown through a window and killed instantly. The driver was charged with manslaughter but was not convicted. The band returned to San Francisco and hired Flotsam and Jetsam bassist Jason Newsted to replace Burton. Many of the songs that appeared on the band's next album, "...And Justice for All", were composed during Burton's career with the band.
All of the songs have been performed live and some became permanent setlist features. Four tracks were featured on the nine-song set list for the album's promotional tour: "Battery" as opener, "Master of Puppets", "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", and "Damage, Inc." The title track, which was issued as a single in France, became a live staple and the most played Metallica song. "Loudwire"s Chad Childers characterized the band's performance as "furious" and the song as the set's highlight. "Rolling Stone" described the live performance as "a classic in all its eight-minute glory". While filming its 3D movie "" (2013) at the Rogers Arena in Vancouver, crosses were rising from the stage during the song, reminiscent of the album's cover art.
"Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" is the second-most performed song from the album. The live performance is often accompanied by lasers, pyrotechnical effects and film screens. "Battery" is usually played at the beginning of the setlist or during the encore, accompanied by lasers and flame plumes. "Disposable Heroes" is featured in the video album "" (2009) filmed in Mexico City, in which the song was played on the second of three nights at the Foro Sol. "Orion" is the least-performed song from the album. Its first live performance was during the Escape from the Studio '06 tour, when the band performed the album in its entirety, honoring the 20th anniversary of its release. The band performed the album in the middle of the set. "Battery", "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", "Damage, Inc." and the full-length "Master of Puppets" were revived for the band's concerts in 1998 and 1999, after having been retired for a number of years.
All lyrics written by James Hetfield. The bonus tracks on the digital re-release were recorded live at the Seattle Coliseum, Seattle, Washington on August 29 and 30, 1989, and also appeared on the live album "" (1993).
In 2017, the album was remastered and reissued in a limited edition deluxe box set with an expanded track listing and bonus content. The deluxe edition set includes the original album on vinyl and CD, with two additional vinyl records containing a live recording from Chicago, nine CDs of interviews, rough mixes, demo recordings, outtakes, and live recordings recorded from 1985 to 1987, a cassette of a live recording of a 1986 concert in Stockholm, and two DVDs of interviews and live recordings recorded in 1986.
Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.
Metallica
Production
Artwork
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18756
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Ride the Lightning
Ride the Lightning is the second studio album by American heavy metal band Metallica, released on July 27, 1984, by the independent record label Megaforce Records. The album was recorded in three weeks with producer Flemming Rasmussen at the Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark. The artwork, based on a concept by the band, depicts an electric chair being struck by lightning flowing from the band logo. The title was taken from a passage in Stephen King's novel "The Stand". Although rooted in the thrash metal genre, the album showcased the band's musical growth and lyrical sophistication. This was partly because bassist Cliff Burton introduced the basics of music theory to the rest of the band and had more input in the songwriting. Instead of relying heavily on fast tempos as on its debut "Kill 'Em All", Metallica broadened its approach by employing acoustic guitars, extended instrumentals, and more complex harmonies. The overall recording costs were paid by Metallica's European label Music for Nations because Megaforce was unable to cover it. It is the last album to feature songwriting contributions from former lead guitarist Dave Mustaine, and the first to feature contributions from his replacement, Kirk Hammett. At 47 minutes, it is Metallica's shortest studio album.
"Ride the Lightning" received positive response from music critics, who saw it as a more ambitious effort than its predecessor. Metallica promoted the album on the Bang That Head That Doesn't Bang European tour in late 1984, and on its North American leg in the first half of 1985. The band performed at major music festivals such as Monsters of Rock and Day on the Green later that year. Two months after its release, Elektra Records signed Metallica to a multi-year deal and reissued the album. "Ride the Lightning" peaked at number 100 on the "Billboard" 200 with no radio exposure. Although 75,000 copies were initially pressed for the American market, the album sold half a million by November 1987. It was certified 6× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2012 for shipping six million copies in the United States. Many rock publications have ranked "Ride the Lightning" on their best album lists, saying it had a lasting impact on the genre.
Metallica released their debut album, "Kill 'Em All", on the independent label Megaforce Records on July 25, 1983. The album helped to establish thrash metal, a heavy metal subgenre defined by its brisk riffs and intense percussion. After finishing its promotional tour, Metallica began composing new material, and from September, began performing the songs that were to make up "Ride the Lightning" at concerts. Because the band had little money, its members often ate one meal a day and stayed at fans' homes while playing at clubs across the United States. An incident occurred when part of Metallica's gear was stolen in Boston, and Anthrax lent Metallica some of its equipment to complete the remaining dates. When not gigging, the band stayed in a rented house in El Cerrito, California, called the Metallica Mansion. Frontman James Hetfield felt uneasy about performing double duty on vocals and rhythm guitar, so the band offered the job to Armored Saint singer John Bush, who turned down the offer because Armored Saint was doing well at the time. Hetfield gradually built confidence as lead vocalist and kept his original role. Metallica started recording on February 20, 1984 at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark. The album was produced by Flemming Rasmussen, the founder of Sweet Silence Studios. Drummer Lars Ulrich chose Rasmussen, because he liked his work on Rainbow's "Difficult to Cure" (1981), and was keen to record in Europe. Rasmussen, who had not heard of Metallica, agreed to work on the album, even though his studio employees questioned the band's talent. Rasmussen listened to Metallica's tapes before the members arrived and thought the band had great potential. Metallica rehearsed the album's material at Mercyful Fate's practice room in Copenhagen.
Before entering the studio, Metallica collected ideas on "riff tape" recordings of various jam sessions. Hetfield and Ulrich went through the tapes and selected the strongest riffs to assemble into songs. Instruments were recorded separately, with only Hetfield playing rhythm guitar. Rasmussen, with the support of drum roadie Flemming Larsen, taught the basics of timing and beat duration to Ulrich, who had a tendency to increase speed and had little knowledge of rhythm theory. Drums were recorded in an empty warehouse at the back of the studio, which was not soundproof, and caused reverberation. Although four tracks were already arranged, the band members were not used to creating songs in the studio, as they had not done so for "Kill 'Em All". "For Whom the Bell Tolls", "Trapped Under Ice", and "Escape" were written mostly in Copenhagen, and the band put finishing touches on "Fight Fire with Fire", "Ride the Lightning", "Creeping Death", and "The Call of Ktulu", which had already been performed live. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett took the album's name from a passage in Stephen King's novel "The Stand". The cover art, displaying an electric chair in the midst of lightning bolts, was conceived before recording began. Metallica initially had sound problems, because its gear was stolen three weeks before the band arrived in Copenhagen. The band members slept in the studio by day as they could not afford a hotel and recorded by night, because the studio was booked by other artists during the daytime. Because the group was looking for a major label deal, several A&R representatives from different labels visited the studio. At first, it seemed that Metallica was going to sign with Bronze Records, but the deal was canceled, because Bronze executive Gerry Bron did not appreciate the work done at Sweet Silence Studios, and wanted the US edition to be remixed by engineer Eddie Kramer, and even considered re-recording the album in another studio. Metallica was put off by Bron's failure to share the band's artistic vision and decided to look for another label for the US release, though Bronze had already advertised Metallica as one of its bands.
Metallica had to record quickly because of European shows scheduled 29 days after entering the studio. Recording finished on March 14, and Megaforce released the album on July 27. Although the original album budget was $20,000, the final expense was above . Metallica's European label Music for Nations paid the studio costs because Megaforce owner Jon Zazula could not afford them. Metallica was unhappy with the lack of promotion by Megaforce, and decided to part ways with Zazula. Major label Elektra Records employee Michael Alago noticed Metallica at The Stone gig in San Francisco, and invited Elektra's chairman and the head of promotion to see the August show in New York. The performance at Roseland Ballroom, with Anthrax and Metallica opening for Raven, pleased the Elektra staff, and the band was offered a contract the following morning. On September 12, Metallica signed with Elektra, which re-released the album on November 19. Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch of Q Prime were concurrently appointed as the band's new managers. "Ride the Lightning" is the last Metallica album to feature co-writing contributions from former lead guitarist Dave Mustaine, who received credit on the title track and "The Call of Ktulu". The album also represented the first time Hammett was given writing credits.
Music writers opine that "Ride the Lightning" exhibits greater musical maturity, with sonically broader songs than "Kill 'Em All", which was noted for its one-dimensional sound. This is partially because of bassist Cliff Burton's knowledge of music theory. He showed Hetfield how to augment core notes with complementary counter-melodies and how basic guitar harmony works, which reflected on the song compositions. Hetfield developed more socially aware lyrics, as well as ominous and semi-philosophical references. Ulrich explained that Metallica opted not to rely strictly on fast tempos as on the previous album, but to explore other musical approaches that sounded powerful and heavy. "Grinder" magazine's Kevin Fisher summarized the album as "ultimate thrash, destruction and total blur" that reminded him of the speed and power of "Kill 'Em All". Music journalist Martin Popoff observed that "Ride the Lightning" offered "sophistication and brutality in equal measure" and was seen as something new at the time of its release. Discussing the album's lyrical content, philosopher William Irwin wrote: "After "Kill 'Em All", the rebellion and aggression became much more focused as the enemy became more clearly defined. Metallica was deeply concerned about various domains in which the common man was wrongfully yet ingeniously deceived. More precisely, they were highly critical of those in power".
The major-key acoustic introduction to "Fight Fire with Fire" displays Metallica's evolution towards a more harmonically complex style of songwriting. The fastest Metallica song in terms of picking speed, it is driven by nimbly tremolo-picked riffs in the verses and chorus. The extended solo at the end dissolves in a sound effect of a vast nuclear explosion. The main riff was taped during the Kill 'Em All Tour and the acoustic intro was something Burton was playing on acoustic guitar at the time. The song discouraged the "eye for an eye" approach, and its lyrical themes focused on nuclear warfare and Armageddon. "Ride the Lightning" is Metallica's first song to have emphasized the misery of the criminal justice system. The lyrics are in the perspective of a death row inmate anticipating execution by the electric chair. The song, one of the two album tracks that credits Mustaine, begins in a mid-tempo which gradually accelerates as the song progress. One of the riffs, originally composed by Mustaine, was simplified. It features an instrumental middle section highlighted by Hammett's soloing. According to Hetfield, the song is not a criticism of capital punishment, but a tale of a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, as in the opening lyrics: "Guilty as charged/But damn it/It ain't right".
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" begins with a bell tolling, followed by a marching riff and high-register bass melody. The chromatic introduction, which Burton wrote before he joined Metallica, is often mistaken for an electric guitar but is actually Burton's bass guitar augmented with distortion and a wah-wah pedal. The lyrics were inspired by Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel of the same name, which explores the horror and dishonor of modern warfare. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was released as a promotional single in two versions, an edit on side A and the album version on side B. "Fade to Black" is a power ballad with lyrics about suicide. Hetfield wrote the words because he felt powerless after the band's equipment was stolen before the January 1984 show in Boston. Musically, the song begins with an acoustic guitar introduction overlaid with electric soloing. The song becomes progressively heavier and faster, ending with multi-layered guitar solos. The ballad's arpeggiated chords and reserved singing was incongruous for thrash metal bands at the time and disappointed some of Metallica's fans. The song's structure foreshadows later Metallica ballads, "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", "One", and "The Day That Never Comes". "Fade to Black" was released as a promotional single in 1984, in phosphorescent green.
"Trapped Under Ice" is about a person who wakes from a cryonic state. Realizing there is nowhere to go, and no-one will come to the rescue, the person helplessly awaits impending doom. The song is built on a fast-picked galloping riff, reminiscent of the album's opener. It was inspired by a track Hammett's former band Exodus had demoed called "Impaler", which was later released on that band's 2004 album "Tempo of the Damned".
"Escape" was originally titled "The Hammer" and was intended to be released as a single due to its lighter riffs and conventional song structure. The intro features a counterpoint bass melody and a chugging guitar riff that resolves into a standard down-picked riff. "Escape" is Hetfield's most disliked Metallica song, due to it being the result of the record company forcing Metallica to write something more radio friendly. Book authors Mick Wall and Malcolm Dome said the song was influenced by the album-oriented rock of 1970s bands such as Journey and Foreigner, but fans perceived it as an attempt for airplay on rock radio. Metallica performed "Escape" live only once, at the 2012 Orion Music + More festival, while performing "Ride the Lightning" in its entirety.
"Creeping Death" describes the (Exodus 12:29). The lyrics deal with the ten plagues visited on Ancient Egypt; four of them are mentioned throughout the song, as well as the Passover. The title was inspired by a scene from "The Ten Commandments" while the band was watching the movie at Burton's house. The bridge, with its chant "Die, by my hand!", was originally written by Hammett for the song "Die by His Hand" while he was playing in Exodus, who recorded it as a demo but did not feature it on a studio album. Journalist Joel McIver called the song a "moshpit anthem" due to its epic lyrical themes and dramatic atmosphere. "Creeping Death" was released as a single with a B-side titled "Garage Days Revisited" made up of covers of Diamond Head's "Am I Evil?" and Blitzkrieg's "Blitzkrieg". "The Call of Ktulu", tentatively titled "When Hell Freezes Over", was inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's book "The Shadow over Innsmouth", which was introduced to the rest of the band by Burton. The title was taken from one of Lovecraft's key stories featuring Cthulhu, "The Call of Cthulhu", although the original name was modified to "Ktulu" for easier pronunciation. The track begins with a D minor chord progression in the intro, written by Mustaine (Mustaine later re-used the chord structure on Megadeth's track "Hangar 18") followed by a two-minute bass solo over a rhythmic riff pattern. Conductor Michael Kamen rearranged the piece for Metallica's 1999 "S&M" project and won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 2001.
"Ride the Lightning" received widespread acclaim from music critics. According to "Q" magazine, the album confirmed Metallica's status as the leading heavy metal band of the modern era. The magazine credited the group for redefining the norms of thrash metal with "Fade to Black", the genre's first power ballad. British rock magazine "Kerrang!" stated that the album's maturity and musical intelligence helped Metallica expand heavy metal's boundaries. Greg Kot of the "Chicago Tribune" described "Ride the Lightning" as a more refined extension of the group's debut. In a retrospective review, Sputnikmusic's Channing Freeman named it as one of the few albums that can be charming and powerful at the same time. He praised Hetfield's vocal performance and concluded that Metallica was "firing on all cylinders". AllMusic's Steve Huey saw the album as a more ambitious and remarkable effort than "Kill 'Em All". He called "Ride the Lightning" an "all-time metal classic" because of the band's rich musical imagination and lyrics that avoided heavy metal cliches. "The Rolling Stone Album Guide" viewed the album as a great step forward for the band and as an album that established the concept for Metallica's following two records. Colin Larkin, writing in the "Encyclopedia of Popular Music", singled out "For Whom the Bell Tolls" as an example of Metallica's growing music potential. Popoff regards "Ride the Lightning" as an album where "extreme metal became art". "This literally was the first album since (Judas Priest's 1976) "Sad Wings of Destiny" where the rulebook has changed. This was a new kind of heaviness; the soft, billowy but explosive production was amazing, the speed was superhuman", stated Popoff. Reviewing the 2016 reissue, Jason Anderson of "Uncut" considers "Ride the Lightning" the second best Metallica album which set the pace for metal in the years to come.
Megaforce initially pressed 75,000 copies of the album for the US market, while Music for Nations serviced the European market. By late 1984, 85,000 copies of "Ride the Lightning" had been sold in Europe, resulting in Metallica's first cover story for "Kerrang!" in its December issue. After signing Metallica, Elektra released the single "Creeping Death" in a sleeve depicting a bridge and a skull painted grey and green. The album peaked at number 100 on the "Billboard" 200 with no radio exposure. In 1984, the French record label Bernett Records misprinted the color of the album cover in green, rather than blue, and 400 copies with the green cover were produced. Because of their rarity, these green albums have become collectors' items. "Ride the Lightning" went gold by November 1987 and in 2012 was certified 6× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for six million copies shipped in the US. The album, along with "Kill 'Em All", was reissued in 2016 as a boxed set including demos and live recordings. Many rock publications have ranked "Ride the Lightning" on their best album lists. The album placed fifth on IGN Music's "Top 25 Metal Albums" list. "Spin" listed it as a thrash metal essential, declaring it "the thrashiest thrash ever". According to "Guitar World", "Ride the Lightning" "didn't just change the band's trajectory—it reset the course of metal itself". Corey Deiterman of the "Houston Press" considers "Ride the Lightning" the most influential Metallica album, saying it had a lasting impact on genres such as crossover thrash and hardcore punk. In 2017, it was ranked 11th on "Rolling Stone" list of "100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time".
After recording was completed, Music for Nations founder Martin Hooker wanted to arrange a triple bill UK tour in March / April 1984 with Exciter, Metallica, and The Rods. The Hell on Earth Tour never materialized because of poor ticket sales. To promote "Ride the Lightning", Metallica commenced the Bang That Head That Doesn't Bang European tour on November 16, in Rouen, France, with British NWOBHM band Tank as support. The tour continued with dates in Belgium, Italy, Germany, and the Nordic countries to an average crowd of 1,300. After a Christmas break, the group embarked on a 50-date North American tour, firstly as a co-headlining act with W.A.S.P. and then as headliners with Armored Saint supporting. At a gig in Portland, Oregon, Metallica covered "The Money Will Roll Right In" by Fang, with Armored Saint onstage. The American leg ended in May 1985, and the band spent the following two months working on the next studio album, "Master of Puppets", whose recording sessions were scheduled to begin in September. Metallica performed at the Monsters of Rock festival held at Castle Donington in England on August 17 in front of 70,000 fans. The band was placed between Ratt and Bon Jovi, two glam metal groups whose sound and appearance were much unlike Metallica's. At the start of the set, Hetfield pronounced to the audience: "If you came here to see spandex, eye make-up, and the words 'oh baby' in every fuckin' song, this ain't the fuckin' band!" Two weeks later, Metallica appeared on the Day on the Green festival in Oakland, California, before 90,000 people. The last show Metallica played before recording began was the Loreley Metal Hammer festival in Germany, headlined by Venom. Metallica finished 1985 with a show at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium on December 29 opening for Y&T, and a New Year's Eve concert at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on a bill with Metal Church, Exodus, and Megadeth, the first time Metallica and Megadeth shared a stage. At this gig, Metallica premiered "Master of Puppets" and "Disposable Heroes", songs from the then-upcoming third studio album.
All lyrics written by James Hetfield (Kirk Hammett also contributed to lyrics for "Creeping Death"). The bonus tracks on the digital re-release were recorded live at the Seattle Coliseum, Seattle, Washington on August 29 and 30, 1989, and later appeared on the live album "" (1993).
In 2016, the album was remastered and reissued in a limited edition deluxe box set with an expanded track listing and bonus content. The deluxe edition set includes the original album on vinyl and CD, with an additional vinyl record containing a live show recorded in Los Angeles, a picture disc containing the "Creeping Death" single tracklist, six CDs of live recordings, interviews, rough mixes, and demos recorded from 1984 to 1985, and one DVD of live shows and interviews with the band.
Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.
Metallica
* Jason Newsted – bass, backing vocals on digital re-release bonus tracks
Production
Packaging
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Metallica (album)
Metallica (commonly known as The Black Album) is the fifth studio album by American heavy metal band Metallica, released on August 12, 1991, through Elektra Records. It was recorded in an eight-month span at One on One Recording Studios in Los Angeles. The recording of the album was troubled, however, and, during production, the band frequently came into conflict with their new producer Bob Rock. The album marked a change in the band's sound from the thrash metal style of the previous four albums to a slower and heavier one rooted in heavy metal.
Metallica promoted "Metallica" with a series of tours. They also released five singles to promote the album: "Enter Sandman", "The Unforgiven", "Nothing Else Matters", "Wherever I May Roam", and "Sad but True", all of which have been considered to be among the band's best-known songs. The song "Don't Tread on Me" was also issued to rock radio shortly after the album's release but did not receive a commercial single release.
"Metallica" received widespread critical acclaim and became the band's best-selling album. It debuted at number one in ten countries and spent four consecutive weeks at the top of the "Billboard" 200, making it Metallica's first album to top the album charts. "Metallica" is one of the best-selling albums worldwide, and also one of the best-selling albums in the United States since Nielsen SoundScan tracking began. The album was certified 16× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2012, and has sold over sixteen million copies in the United States, being the first album in the SoundScan era to do so.
Metallica played "Metallica" in its entirety during the 2012 European Black Album Tour. In 2003, the album was ranked number 255 on "Rolling Stone"s 500 greatest albums of all time. In December 2019, "Metallica" became the fourth release in American history to enter the 550 week milestone on the "Billboard" 200. It also became the second longest-charting traditional title in history, and the second to spend 550 weeks on the album charts.
At the time of "Metallica" recording, the band's songs were written mainly by frontman James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, with Hetfield being the lyricist. The duo frequently composed together at Ulrich's house in Berkeley, California. Several song ideas and concepts were conceived by other members of the band, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Jason Newsted. For instance, Newsted wrote the main riff of "My Friend of Misery", which was originally intended to be an instrumental, one of which had been included on every previous Metallica album. The songs were written in two months in mid-1990; the ideas for some of them were originated during the Damaged Justice Tour. Metallica was impressed with Bob Rock's production work on Mötley Crüe's "Dr. Feelgood" (1989) and decided to hire him to work on their album. Initially, the band members were not interested in having Rock producing the album as well, but changed their minds. Ulrich said, "We felt that we still had our best record in us and Bob Rock could help us make it".
Four demos for the album were recorded on August 13, 1990; "Enter Sandman", "The Unforgiven", "Nothing Else Matters" and "Wherever I May Roam." The lead single "Enter Sandman" was the first song to be written and the last to receive lyrics. On October 4, 1990, a demo of "Sad but True" was recorded. In October 1990, Metallica began recording at One on One Recording Studios in Los Angeles, California, to record the album, and also at Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia for about a week. On June 2, 1991, a demo of "Holier Than Thou" was recorded. Hetfield stated about the recording: "What we really wanted was a live feel. In the past, Lars and I constructed the rhythm parts without Kirk and Jason. This time I wanted to try playing as a band unit in the studio. It lightens things up and you get more of a vibe."
Because it was Rock's first time producing a Metallica album, he had the band make the album in different ways; he asked them to record songs collaboratively rather than individually in separate locations. He also suggested recording tracks live and using harmonic vocals for Hetfield. Rock was expecting the production to be "easy" but had trouble working with the band, leading to frequent, engaged arguments with the band members over aspects of the album. Rock wanted Hetfield to write better lyrics and found his experience recording with Metallica disappointing. Since the band was perfectionist, Rock insisted they recorded as many takes as needed to get the sound they wanted. The album was remixed three times and cost . The troubled production coincided with Ulrich, Hammett, and Newsted divorcing their wives; Hammett said this influenced their playing because they were "trying to take those feeling of guilt and failure and channel them into the music, to get something positive out of it".
Rock altered Metallica's familiar recording routine and the recording experience was so stressful that Rock briefly swore never to work with the band again. The tension between band and producer was documented in "A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica" and "Classic Albums: Metallica – Metallica", documentaries that explore the intense recording process that resulted in "Metallica". Despite the controversies between the band and Rock, he continued to work with Metallica through to the 2003 album "St. Anger". After the production of "St. Anger" (2003), the fourth and final Metallica record Rock would produce, a petition signed by 1,500 fans was posted online in an attempt to encourage the band to prohibit Rock from producing Metallica albums, saying he had too much influence on the band's sound and musical direction. Rock said the petition hurt his children's feelings; he said, "sometimes, even with a great coach, a team keeps losing. You have to get new blood in there."
According to Robert Palmer of "Rolling Stone", "tempos were often slowed down in exchange for slower BPMs, while they expand its music and expressive range". The album was a change in Metallica's direction from the thrash metal style of the band's previous four studio albums towards a more commercial, heavy metal sound, but still had characteristics of thrash metal. Many fans consider the album to be a transition from the often ostentatious compositions of Metallica's previous releases to the slower, divested style of the band's later albums, where "old" and "new" Metallica are distinguished from one another. Instruments not usually used by heavy metal bands, such as the cellos in "The Unforgiven" and the orchestra in "Nothing Else Matters", were added at Rock's insistence. Rock also raised the volume of the bass guitar, which had been nearly inaudible on the previous album "...And Justice for All". Newsted said he tried to "create a real rhythm section rather than a one-dimensional sound" with his bass. Ulrich said he tried to avoid the "progressive Peartian paradiddles which became boring to play live" in his drumming and used a basic sound similar to those of The Rolling Stones' Charlie Watts and AC/DC's Phil Rudd.
The band took a simpler approach partly because the members felt the songs on "...And Justice for All" were too long and complex. Hetfield said that radio airplay was not their intention, but because they felt "we had pretty much done the longer song format to death," and considered a good change doing songs with just two riffs and "only taking two minutes to get the point across". Ulrich added that the band was feeling a musical insecurity — "We felt inadequate as musicians and as songwriters, That made us go too far, around "Master of Puppets" and "Justice", in the direction of trying to prove ourselves. 'We'll do all this weird-ass shit sideways to prove that we are capable musicians and songwriters'" – and Hetfield added he wanted to avoid getting stale: "Sitting there and worrying about whether people are going to like the album, therefore we have to write a certain kind of song — you just end up writing for someone else. Everyone's different. If everyone was the same, it would be boring as shit."
The lyrics of "Metallica" written by James Hetfield were more personal and introspective in nature than those of previous Metallica albums; Rock said Hetfield's songwriting became more confident, and that he was inspired by Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and John Lennon. According to Chris True of AllMusic, "Enter Sandman" is about "nightmares and all that come with them". "The God That Failed" dealt with the death of Hetfield's mother from cancer and her Christian science beliefs, which kept her from seeking medical treatment. "Nothing Else Matters" was a love song Hetfield wrote about missing his girlfriend while on tour. Hetfield said the album's lyrical themes were more introspective because he wanted "lyrics that the band could stand behind – but we are four completely different individuals. So the only way to go was in."
Metallica had many discussions about the album title; the members considered calling it "Five" or using the title of one of the songs, but eventually chose an eponym because they "wanted to keep it simple." The album's cover depicts the band's logo angled against the upper left corner and a coiled snake derived from the Gadsden flag in the bottom right corner. For the initial release, both emblems were embossed so they could barely be seen against the black background, giving "Metallica" the nickname ""The Black Album"". These emblems also appear on the back cover of the album. For later and current releases, both emblems are dark gray so they stand out more prominently. The motto of the Gadsden flag, "Don't Tread on Me", is also the title of a song on the album. A folded, pageless booklet depicts the faces of the band's members against a black background. The lyrics and liner notes are also printed on a grey background. The cover is reminiscent of Spinal Tap's album "Smell the Glove", which the band jokingly acknowledged in its documentary "A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica". Members of Spinal Tap appeared on the film and asked Metallica about it, with Lars Ulrich commenting that British rock group Status Quo was the original inspiration as that band's "Hello!" album cover was also black.
Six tracks on "Metallica" were released as singles. "Enter Sandman" was released as the lead single on July 29, 1991; it reached number 16 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 singles chart and was certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The follow-up single, "Don't Tread on Me", was released promotionally and peaked at number 21 on the "Billboard" Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks singles chart. "The Unforgiven" was a Top 40 hit; it peaked in the Top 10 in Australia. In 1992, "Nothing Else Matters" was released to more success, reaching number six in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The fifth single from the album was also released in 1992; "Wherever I May Roam" peaked at number two on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart but was less successful on the Hot 100 chart, failing to reach the Top 80. In 1993, "Sad but True" did not repeat the successes of the album's previous singles, charting for one week on the "Billboard" Hot 100 at 98. Almost all singles were accompanied by music videos; the Wayne Isham-directed "Enter Sandman" promotional film won an MTV Video Music Award for Best Rock Video at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards.
In 1991, for the fourth time, Metallica played as part of the Monsters of Rock festival tour. The last concert of the tour was held on September 28, 1991, at Tushino Airfield in Moscow; it was described as "the first free outdoor Western rock concert in Soviet history" and was attended by an estimated 150,000 to 500,000 people. Some unofficial estimates put the attendance as high as 1,600,000. The first tour directly intended to support the album, the Wherever We May Roam Tour, included a performance at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, at which Metallica performed a short set list, consisting of "Enter Sandman", "Sad but True" and "Nothing Else Matters", and Hetfield performed the Queen song "Stone Cold Crazy" with John Deacon, Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen and Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath. At one of the tour's first gigs the floor of the stage collapsed. The January 13 and 14, 1992, shows in San Diego were later released in the box set "", while the tour and the album were documented in the documentary "A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica".
Metallica's Wherever We May Roam Tour also overlapped with Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion Tour. Hetfield suffered second and third degree burns to his arms, face, hands, and legs on August 8, 1992, during a Montreal show in the co-headlining Guns N' Roses/Metallica Stadium Tour. The tour included pyrotechnics, which were installed on-stage. Hetfield accidentally walked into a flame shot from a pyrotechnic during a live performance of the introduction of "Fade to Black". The show was cut short shortly after this accident, so that Guns N' Roses began their concert to malicious reactions from fans. Newsted said Hetfield's skin was "bubbling like on "The Toxic Avenger"". The tour recommenced on August 25 in Phoenix, and although Hetfield could sing, he could not play guitar for the remainder of the tour. Guitar technician John Marshall, who had previously filled in on rhythm guitar and was then playing in Metal Church, played guitar for the recovering Hetfield. Brazilian musician, Andreas Kisser from Sepultura was initially considered for play the tour, but Marshall finally was chosen.
The shows in Mexico City across February and March 1993 during the Nowhere Else to Roam tour were recorded, filmed and later also released as part of the band's first box set, which was released in November 1993 and titled "Live Shit: Binge & Purge". The collection contained three live CDs, three home videos, and a book filled with riders and letters. Pressings of the box set since November 2002 includes two DVDs, the first one being filmed at San Diego on the Wherever We May Roam Tour, and the latter at Seattle on the Damaged Justice Tour. "Binge & Purge" was packaged as a cardboard box resembling that of a typical tour equipment transport box. The box set also featured a recreated copy of an access pass to the "Snakepit" part of the tour stage, as well as a cardboard drawing/airbrush stencil for the "Scary Guy" logo. The Mexico City shows were also the first time the band met future member Robert Trujillo, who was in Suicidal Tendencies at the time.
The final tour supporting the album, the Shit Hits the Sheds Tour, included a performance at Woodstock '94 that followed Nine Inch Nails and preceded Aerosmith on August 13 in front of a crowd of 350,000. Some songs, such as "Enter Sandman", "Nothing Else Matters" and "Sad but True", became permanent staples of Metallica's concert setlists during these and subsequent tours. Other songs though, such as "Holier Than Thou", "The God That Failed", "Through the Never", and "The Unforgiven" were no longer included in performances after 1995 and would not be played again until the 2000s, when Metallica, with Robert Trujillo on bass, began performing a more extensive back catalog of songs after Trujillo joined the band upon completion of the album "St. Anger".
After touring duties for the album were finished, Metallica filed a lawsuit against Elektra Records, which tried to force the record label to terminate the band's contract and give the band ownership of their master recordings. The band based its claim on a section of the California Labor Code that allows employees to be released from a personal services contract after seven years. Metallica had sold 40 million copies worldwide upon the filing of the suit. Metallica had been signed to the label for over a decade but was still operating under the terms of its original 1984 contract, which provided a relatively low 14% royalty rate. The band members said they were taking the action because they were ambivalent about Robert Morgado's refusal to give them another record deal along with Bob Krasnow, who retired from his job at the label shortly afterwards. Elektra responded by counter-suing the band, but in December 1994, Warner Music Group United States chairman Doug Morris offered Metallica a lucrative new deal in exchange for dropping the suit, which was reported to be even more generous than the earlier Krasnow deal. In January 1995, both parties settled out of court with a non-disclosure agreement. Metallica played the album in its entirety during the 2012 European Black Album Tour.
"Metallica" was released to widespread acclaim from both heavy metal journalists and mainstream publications, including "NME", "The New York Times", and "The Village Voice". In "Entertainment Weekly", David Browne called it "rock's preeminent speed-metal cyclone", and said, "Metallica may have invented a new genre: progressive thrash". "Q" magazine's Mark Cooper said he found the album's avoidance of metal's typically clumsy metaphors and glossy production refreshing; he said, "Metallica manage to rekindle the kind of intensity that fired the likes of Black Sabbath before metal fell in love with its own cliches". "Select" magazine's David Cavanagh believed the album lacks artifice and is "disarmingly genuine". In his review for "Spin", Alec Foege found the music's harmonies vividly performed and said that Metallica showcase their "newfound versatility" on songs such as "The Unforgiven" and "Holier Than Thou". Robert Palmer, writing in "Rolling Stone", said that several songs sound like "hard-rock classics" and that, apart from "Don't Tread on Me", "Metallica" is an "exemplary album of mature but still kickass rock & roll". In his guide to Metallica's albums up to that point, Greg Kot of the "Chicago Tribune" recommended the album as "a great place for Metallica neophytes to start, with its more concise songs and explosive production." Jonathan Gold was less enthusiastic in the "Los Angeles Times". He said while Metallica embraced pop sensibilities "quite well", there was a sense the group was "no longer in love with the possibilities of its sound" on an album whose difficulty being embraced by the "metal cult" mirrored Bob Dylan going electric in the mid 1960s.
In a retrospective article, "Kerrang!" said "Metallica" is the album that "propelled [the band] out of the metal ghetto to true mainstream global rock superstardom". "Melody Maker" said that as a deliberate departure from the band's thrash style on "...And Justice for All", ""Metallica" was slower, less complicated, and probably twice as heavy as anything they'd done before". In his review for BBC Music, Sid Smith said that although staunch listeners of the band accused them of selling out, Metallica confidently departed from the style of their previous albums and transitioned "from cult metal gods to bona fide rock stars". "Classic Rock" called it "the absolute pinnacle of Metallica's long and successful career", and credited the album for inspiring 1990s post-grunge music and convincing the music industry to embrace heavy metal as a genre with mass appeal. AllMusic's Steve Huey believed the massive popularity of "Metallica" inspired other speed metal bands to also embrace a simpler, less progressive sound. He deemed the record "a good, but not quite great" album, one whose best moments deservedly captured the heavy metal crown, but whose approach also foreshadowed a creative decline for Metallica. "Village Voice" critic Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic, saying he "put James Hetfield out of his misery in under five plays" and that he "found life getting shorter with every song". In "Christgau's Consumer Guide" (2000), he later graded the album a "dud", indicating "a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought".
"Metallica" was voted the eighth best album of the year in "The Village Voice"s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll for 1991. "Melody Maker" ranked it number 16 in its December 1991 list of the year's best albums. In 1992, the album won a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance. In 2000 it was voted number 88 in Colin Larkin's "All Time Top 1000 Albums". In 2003 and 2012, "Rolling Stone" ranked "Metallica" number 255 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time and 25th on their 2017 list of "100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time". "Spin" ranked it number 52 in its 1999 list of the "90 Greatest Albums of the '90s" and said, "this record's diamond-tipped tuneage stripped the band's melancholy guitar excess down to melodic, radio-ready bullets and ballads". It was included in "Q" magazine's August 2000 list of the "Best Metal Albums of All Time"; the magazine said the album "transformed them from cult metal heroes into global superstars, bringing a little refinement to their undoubted power". In 1999, eight years after its release, the album won a Billboard Music Award for Catalog Album of the Year.
"Metallica" was released on August 12, 1991, and was the band's first album to debut at number one on the "Billboard" 200, selling 598,000 copies in its first week. It was certified platinum in two weeks and spent four consecutive weeks atop the "Billboard" 200. Logging over 488 weeks on the "Billboard" 200, it is the third longest charting album in the Nielsen SoundScan era, behind Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" and Carole King's "Tapestry". In 2009, it surpassed Shania Twain's "Come On Over" as the best-selling album of the SoundScan era. It became the first album in the SoundScan era to pass 16 million in sales, and with 16.4 million copies sold by 2016, "Metallica" is the best-selling album in the United States since Nielsen SoundScan tracking began in 1991. Of that sum, 5.8 million were purchased on cassette. The album never sold less than 1,000 copies in a week, and moved a weekly average of 5,000 copies in 2016. "Metallica" was certified 16× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2012 for shipping sixteen million copies in the US. "Metallica" sold 31 million copies worldwide on physical media. All five of "Metallica"s singles, "Enter Sandman", "The Unforgiven", "Nothing Else Matters", "Wherever I May Roam" and "Sad but True" reached the "Billboard" Hot 100.
"Metallica" debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, and was certified 2× platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for shipping 600,000 copies in the UK. "Metallica" topped the charts in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. It also reached the top five in Austria, Finland, and Japan, as well as the top 10 in Spain. The album failed to reach the top 20 in Ireland, having peaked at number 27. The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) certified the album 12× platinum. It was given a diamond plaque from the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) and the Recorded Music NZ (RMNZ) for shipping a million and 150,000 copies, respectively.
Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.
Metallica
Additional musicians
Production and design
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Load (album)
Load is the sixth studio album by the American heavy metal band Metallica, released on June 4, 1996 by Elektra Records in the United States and by Vertigo Records internationally. The album showed more of a hard rock side of Metallica than the band's typical thrash metal style, which alienated much of the band's fanbase. It also featured influences from genres such as Southern rock, blues rock, country rock and alternative rock. Drummer Lars Ulrich said about "Load" more exploratory nature, "This album and what we're doing with it – that, to me, is what Metallica are all about: exploring different things. The minute you stop exploring, then just sit down and fucking die". "Load" is the first of Metallica's albums to feature only three songwriters, the other being 2016's "Hardwired...To Self-Destruct". At 79 minutes, "Load" is Metallica's longest studio album.
"Load" debuted and spent four consecutive weeks at number one on the US "Billboard" 200 chart. "Load" sold 680,000 units in its first week, making it the biggest opening week for Metallica as well as the biggest debut of 1996. It was certified 5× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for shipping five million copies in the United States. Four singles—"Until It Sleeps", "Hero of the Day", "Mama Said", and "King Nothing"—were released as part of the marketing campaign for the album.
"Load", released approximately five years after the commercially successful album "Metallica", saw the band shifting toward hard rock and away from their thrash metal roots. As on previous releases, the album's fourteen songs began as rough demos created by principal songwriters James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich in Ulrich's basement recording studio, "The Dungeon". In early 1995, the band took over thirty demos into The Plant Studios, where they would work for approximately one year. Metallica worked with producer Bob Rock, who had been at the helm during the recording process for "Metallica".
The songwriting dispenses almost entirely with the thrash metal style that characterized the band's sound in the 1980s. In place of staccato riffs, Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett experimented with blues rock-based tones and styles. Additionally, Ulrich adopted a minimalist approach to his drum recording, abandoning the speed and complex double bass drumming patterns of previous albums, and using simpler techniques and playing styles. Hetfield displayed a lyrical evolution, writing what many said were his most personal and introspective lyrics. "Until It Sleeps", the album's lead single, addressed his mother's unsuccessful battle with cancer, and "Mama Said" also explores his relationship with her. All of this marked a departure from the political and social overtones of "...And Justice for All" and "Master of Puppets". Hammett, encouraged by producer Bob Rock, also played rhythm guitar on a Metallica album for the first time, having previously only played lead parts with Hetfield playing all the rhythm parts to achieve a tighter feel, in contrast to the looser feel they were looking for here. Hammett continued playing rhythm until "Death Magnetic" when Hetfield once again played all the rhythm parts.
At 79 minutes, "Load" is Metallica's longest studio album. With the CD length at 78:59, initial pressings of the album were affixed with stickers boasting of its long playtime, simply reading "78:59". "The Outlaw Torn" had to be shortened by about one minute to fit on the album; the full version of the track was released on the single "The Memory Remains" as "The Outlaw Torn (Unencumbered by Manufacturing Restrictions Version)", with a running time of 10:48. An explanation on the single's back cover stated:
"Load" was Metallica's first album on which all tracks were down-tuned to E♭ tuning. Hammett states:
Hetfield also felt that the change to E♭ was a bonus, as it was easier to perform string bends in the riffs.
The band had recorded songs on earlier albums in tunings lower than E; "The God That Failed" on "Metallica" which was in E♭, and the same album's "Sad but True" and "The Thing That Should Not Be" from "Master of Puppets" were in D tuning. The Australian CD release of "Load" includes a bonus interview CD that is unavailable elsewhere. 10 songs from the album have been played live including "King Nothing", "Until It Sleeps", "Ain't My Bitch", "Bleeding Me", "Wasting My Hate", "Hero of the Day", "The Outlaw Torn", "2 X 4", "Poor Twisted Me", "Mama Said". Songs that have not been played live in their entirety are "The House Jack Built", "Cure", "Thorn Within", and "Ronnie".
The cover of "Load" is an original artwork titled "Semen and Blood III". It is one of three photographic studies that Andres Serrano created in 1990 by mingling bovine blood and his own semen between two sheets of Plexiglas. The liner notes simply state "cover art by Andres Serrano" rather than listing the title of the work. In a 2009 interview with "Classic Rock", Hetfield expressed his dislike of the album cover and its inspiration:
"Load" also marked the first appearance of a new Metallica logo that rounded off the stabbing edges of the band's earlier logo, greatly simplifying its appearance. The M from the original logo was used to make a shuriken-like symbol known as the "ninja star", which was used as an alternate logo on this and future albums, and on related artwork. The album featured an expansive booklet containing photographs by Anton Corbijn. These photographs depict the band in various dress, including white A-shirts with suspenders, Cuban suits, and gothic. In the aforementioned 2009 interview, James Hetfield said:
"Load" received positive to mixed reviews from critics. "Rolling Stone" said, "The foursome dams the bombast and chugs half-speed ahead, settling into a wholly magnetizing groove that bridges old-school biker rock and the doomier side of post-grunge '90s rock." "Q" enthused, "These boys set up their tents in the darkest place of all, in the naked horror of their own heads... Metallica make existential metal and they've never needed the props... Metallica are still awesome... What is new is streamlined attack, the focus and, yes, the tunes."
"Melody Maker" expressed reservations about "Load"'s heaviness compared to its predecessors: "A Metallica album is traditionally an exhausting event. It should rock you to exhaustion, leave you brutalised and drained. This one is no exception. It is, however, the first Metallica album to make me wonder at any point, 'What the fuck was that?' It's as if the jackboot grinding the human face were to take occasional breaks for a pedicure." AllMusic considered "Load" repetitive, uninteresting and poorly executed. In "The Village Voice", Robert Christgau said "this is just a metal record with less solo room, which is good because it concentrates their chops, and more singing, which isn't because they can't."
"Some of that stuff was pretty cool," remarked Lars Ulrich of the album and its sequel. "With "Load", it was disappointing that some people's reaction to the music was biased by how they dealt with the pictures – the hair and all that crap "[see Artwork, above]". People have come up to me years afterwards and said, 'I never gave the record a fair chance because I couldn't get beyond Jason Newsted wearing eyeliner.' But 'The Outlaw Torn', some of that shit is pretty fucking awesome."
Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.
Metallica
Production
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18761
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Metallica
Metallica is an American heavy metal band. The band was formed in 1981 in Los Angeles by vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, and has been based in San Francisco for most of its career. The band's fast tempos, instrumentals and aggressive musicianship made them one of the founding "big four" bands of thrash metal, alongside Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer. Metallica's current lineup comprises founding members and primary songwriters Hetfield and Ulrich, longtime lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, and bassist Robert Trujillo. Guitarist Dave Mustaine (who went on to form Megadeth after being fired from the band) and bassists Ron McGovney, Cliff Burton (who died in a bus accident in Sweden in 1986) and Jason Newsted are former members of the band.
Metallica earned a growing fan base in the underground music community and won critical acclaim with its first five albums. The band's third album, "Master of Puppets" (1986), was described as one of the heaviest and most influential thrash metal albums. Its eponymous fifth album, "Metallica" (1991), the band's first to root predominantly in heavy metal, appealed to a more mainstream audience, achieving substantial commercial success and selling over 16 million copies in the United States to date, making it the best-selling album of the SoundScan era. After experimenting with different genres and directions in subsequent releases, the band returned to its thrash metal roots with the release of its ninth album, "Death Magnetic" (2008), which drew similar praise to that of the band's earlier albums.
In 2000, Metallica led the case against the peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster, in which the band and several other artists filed lawsuits against the service for sharing their copyright-protected material without consent; after reaching a settlement, Napster became a pay-to-use service in 2003. Metallica was the subject of the acclaimed 2004 documentary film "", which documented the troubled production of the band's eighth album, "St. Anger" (2003), and the internal struggles within the band at the time. In 2009, Metallica was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The band wrote the screenplay for and starred in the 2013 IMAX concert film "", in which the band performed live against a fictional thriller storyline.
Metallica has released ten studio albums, four live albums, a cover album, five extended plays, 37 singles and 39 music videos. The band has won nine Grammy Awards from 23 nominations, and its last six studio albums (beginning with "Metallica") have consecutively debuted at number one on the "Billboard" 200. Metallica ranks as one of the most commercially successful bands of all time, having sold over 125 million albums worldwide as of 2018. Metallica has been listed as one of the greatest artists of all time by magazines such as "Rolling Stone", which ranked them at no. 61 on its "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" list. As of 2017, Metallica is the third best-selling music artist since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991, selling a total of 58 million albums in the United States.
Metallica was formed in Los Angeles in late 1981 when Danish-born drummer Lars Ulrich placed an advertisement in a Los Angeles newspaper, "The Recycler", which read, "Drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam with Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head and Iron Maiden." Guitarists James Hetfield and Hugh Tanner of Leather Charm answered the advertisement. Although he had not formed a band, Ulrich asked Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel if he could record a song for the label's upcoming compilation album, "Metal Massacre". Slagel accepted, and Ulrich recruited Hetfield to sing and play rhythm guitar. The band was officially formed on October 28, 1981, five months after Ulrich and Hetfield first met.
The band name came from Ulrich's friend Ron Quintana, who was brainstorming names for a fanzine and was considering "MetalMania" or "Metallica". After hearing the two names, Ulrich wanted Metallica for his band, so he suggested Quintana use MetalMania instead. Dave Mustaine replied to an advertisement for a lead guitarist; Ulrich and Hetfield recruited him after seeing his expensive guitar equipment. In early 1982, Metallica recorded its first original song, "Hit the Lights", for the "Metal Massacre I" compilation. Hetfield played bass, rhythm guitar and sang while Lloyd Grant was credited with a guitar solo and Lars Ulrich played drums. "Metal Massacre I" was released on June 14, 1982; early pressings listed the band incorrectly as "Mettallica", angering the band. The song generated word of mouth and the band played its first live performance on March 14, 1982, at Radio City in Anaheim, California, with newly recruited bassist Ron McGovney. Their first live success came early; they were chosen to open for British heavy metal band Saxon at one gig of their 1982 US tour. This was Metallica's second gig. Metallica recorded its first demo, "Power Metal", whose name was inspired by Quintana's early business cards in early 1982.
The term "thrash metal" was coined in February 1984 by "Kerrang!" journalist Malcolm Dome in reference to Anthrax's song "Metal Thrashing Mad". Prior to this, Hetfield referred to Metallica's sound as "power metal". In late 1982, Ulrich and Hetfield attended a show at the West Hollywood nightclub Whisky a Go Go, which featured bassist Cliff Burton in the band Trauma. The two were "blown away" by Burton's use of a wah-wah pedal and asked him to join Metallica. Hetfield and Mustaine wanted McGovney to leave because they thought he "didn't contribute anything, he just followed". Although Burton initially declined the offer, by the end of the year, he had accepted on the condition the band move to El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay Area. Metallica's first live performance with Burton was at the nightclub The Stone in March 1983, and the first recording to feature Burton was the "Megaforce" demo (1983).
Metallica was ready to record their debut album, but when Metal Blade was unable to cover the cost, they began looking for other options. Concert promoter Johny "Z" Zazula, who had heard the demo "No Life 'til Leather" (1982), offered to broker a record deal between Metallica and New York City-based record labels. After those record labels showed no interest, Zazula borrowed enough money to cover the recording budget and signed Metallica to his own label, Megaforce Records.
In May 1983, Metallica traveled to Rochester, New York to record its debut album, "Metal Up Your Ass", which was produced by Paul Curcio. The other members decided to eject Mustaine from the band because of his drug and alcohol abuse, and violent behavior just before the recording sessions on April 11, 1983. Exodus guitarist Kirk Hammett replaced Mustaine the same afternoon. Metallica's first live performance with Hammett was on April 16, 1983, at a nightclub in Dover, New Jersey called The Showplace; the support act was Anthrax's original line-up, which included Dan Lilker and Neil Turbin. This was the first time the two bands performed live together.
Mustaine, who went on to form Megadeth, has expressed his dislike for Hammett in interviews, saying Hammett "stole" his job. Mustaine was "pissed off" because he believes Hammett became popular by playing guitar leads that Mustaine himself had written. In a 1985 interview with "Metal Forces", Mustaine said, "it's real funny how Kirk Hammett ripped off every lead break I'd played on that "No Life 'til Leather" tape and got voted No. 1 guitarist in your magazine". On Megadeth's debut album "Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good!" (1985), Mustaine included the song "Mechanix", which Metallica had previously reworked and retitled "The Four Horsemen" on "Kill 'Em All". Mustaine said he did this to "straighten Metallica up" because Metallica referred to Mustaine as a drunk and said he could not play guitar.
Because of conflicts with its record label and the distributors' refusal to release an album titled "Metal Up Your Ass", the album was renamed "Kill 'Em All". It was released on Megaforce Records in the U.S. and on Music for Nations in Europe, and peaked at number 155 on the "Billboard" 200 in 1986. Although the album was not initially a financial success, it earned Metallica a growing fan base in the underground metal scene. To support the release, Metallica embarked on the Kill 'Em All for One tour with Raven. In February 1984, Metallica supported Venom on the Seven Dates of Hell tour, during which the bands performed in front of 7,000 people at the Aardschok Festival in Zwolle, Netherlands.
Metallica recorded its second studio album, "Ride the Lightning", at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was released in August 1984 and reached number 100 on the "Billboard" 200. A French printing press mistakenly printed green covers for the album, which are now considered collectors' items. Mustaine received writing credit for "Ride the Lightning" and "The Call of Ktulu".
Elektra Records A&R director Michael Alago, and co-founder of Q-Prime Management Cliff Burnstein, attended a Metallica concert in September 1984. They were impressed with the performance, signed Metallica to Elektra, and made the band a client of Q-Prime Management. Metallica's growing success was such that the band's British label Music for Nations released "Creeping Death" as a limited edition single, which sold 40,000 copies as an import in the U.S. Two of the three songs on the recordcover versions of Diamond Head's "Am I Evil?" and Blitzkrieg's "Blitzkrieg"appeared on the 1988 Elektra reissue of "Kill 'Em All". Metallica embarked on its first major European tour with Tank to an average crowd of 1,300. Returning to the U.S., it embarked upon a tour co-headlining with W.A.S.P. and supported by Armored Saint. Metallica played its largest show at the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park, England, on August 17, 1985, with Bon Jovi and Ratt, playing to 70,000 people. At a show in Oakland, California, at the Day on the Green festival, the band played to a crowd of 60,000.
Metallica's third studio album, "Master of Puppets", was recorded at Sweet Silence Studios and released in March 1986. The album reached number 29 on the "Billboard" 200 and spent 72 weeks on the chart. It was the band's first album to be certified gold on November 4, 1986, and was certified six times platinum in 2003. Steve Huey of AllMusic considered the album "the band's greatest achievement". Following the release of the album, Metallica supported Ozzy Osbourne on a U.S. tour. Hetfield broke his wrist while skateboarding; he continued with the tour, performing vocals, with guitar technician John Marshall playing rhythm guitar.
On September 27, 1986, during the European leg of Metallica's Damage, Inc. Tour, members drew cards to determine which bunks on the tour bus they would sleep in. Burton won and chose to sleep in Hammett's bunk. At around sunrise near Dörarp, Sweden, the bus driver lost control and skidded, which caused the bus to overturn several times. Ulrich, Hammett, and Hetfield sustained no serious injuries; however, bassist Burton was pinned under the bus and died. Hetfield said:
I saw the bus lying right on him. I saw his legs sticking out. I freaked. The bus driver, I recall, was trying to yank the blanket out from under him to use for other people. I just went, 'Don't fucking do that!' I already wanted to kill the [bus driver]. I don't know if he was drunk or if he hit some ice. All I knew was, he was driving and Cliff wasn't alive anymore.
Burton's death left Metallica's future in doubt. The three remaining members decided Burton would want them to carry on, and with the Burton family's blessings the band sought a replacement. Roughly 40 people, including Hammett's childhood friend, Les Claypool of Primus, Troy Gregory of Prong, and Jason Newsted, formerly of Flotsam and Jetsam, auditioned for the band. Newsted learned Metallica's entire set list; after the audition Metallica invited him to Tommy's Joynt in San Francisco. Hetfield, Ulrich, and Hammett decided on Newsted as Burton's replacement; Newsted's first live performance with Metallica was at the Country Club in Reseda, California. The members initiated Newsted by tricking him into eating a ball of wasabi.
After Newsted joined Metallica, the band left its El Cerrito practice spacea suburban house formerly rented by sound engineer Mark Whitaker dubbed "the Metalli-mansion"and relocated to the adjacent cities of Berkeley and Albany before eventually settling in the Marin County city of San Rafael, north of San Francisco.
Metallica finished its tour in the early months of 1987. In March 1987, Hetfield again broke his wrist while skateboarding, forcing the band to cancel an appearance on "Saturday Night Live". In August 1987, an all-covers extended play (EP) titled "The $5.98 E.P. - Garage Days Re-Revisited" was released. The EP was recorded in an effort to use the band's newly constructed recording studio, test Newsted's talents, and to relieve grief and stress following the death of Burton. A video titled "Cliff 'Em All" commemorating Burton's three years in Metallica was released in 1987; the video included bass solos, home videos, and pictures.
Metallica's first studio album since Burton's death, "...And Justice for All", was released in 1988. The album was a commercial success, reaching number six on the "Billboard" 200, and was the band's first album to enter the top 10. The album was certified platinum nine weeks after its release. There were complaints about the production; Steve Huey of AllMusic said Ulrich's drums were clicking more than thudding, and the guitars "buzz thinly". To promote the album, Metallica embarked on a tour called Damaged Justice.
In 1989, Metallica received its first Grammy Award nomination for "...And Justice for All" in the new Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrument category. Metallica was the favorite to win but the award was given to Jethro Tull for the album "Crest of a Knave". The award was controversial with fans and the press; Metallica was standing off-stage waiting to receive the award after performing the song "One". Jethro Tull had been advised by its manager not to attend the ceremony because he was expecting Metallica to win. The award was named in "Entertainment Weekly" "Grammy's 10 Biggest Upsets".
Following the release of "...And Justice for All", Metallica released its debut music video for the song "One", which the band performed in an abandoned warehouse. The footage was remixed with the film "Johnny Got His Gun". Rather than organize an ongoing licensing deal, Metallica purchased the rights to the film. The remixed video was submitted to MTV with an alternative, performance-only version that was held back in case MTV banned the remixed version. MTV accepted the remixed version; the video was viewers' first exposure to Metallica. In 1999, it was voted number 38 in MTV's "Top 100 Videos of All Time" countdown; it was featured in the network's 25th Anniversary edition of "ADD Video", which showcased the most popular videos on MTV in the last 25 years.
In October 1990, Metallica entered One on One Recording's studio in North Hollywood to record its next album. Bob Rock, who had worked with Aerosmith, The Cult, Bon Jovi, and Mötley Crüe, was hired as the producer. "Metallica"also known as "The Black Album"was remixed three times, cost , and ended three marriages. Although the release was delayed until 1991, "Metallica" debuted at number one in ten countries, selling 650,000 units in the U.S. during its first week. The album brought Metallica mainstream attention; it has been certified 16 times platinum in the U.S., which makes it the 25th-best-selling album in the country. The making of "Metallica" and the following tour was documented in "A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica". The tour in support of the album, called the Wherever We May Roam Tour, lasted 14 months and included dates in the U.S., Japan, and the UK. In September 1991, 1.6 million rock music fans converged in Moscow to enjoy the first open-air rock concert to be held in the former Soviet Union, part of the Monsters of Rock series. In April 1992, Metallica appeared at The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert and performed a three-song set. Hetfield later performed "Stone Cold Crazy" with the remaining members of Queen and Tony Iommi.
On August 8, 1992, during the co-headlining Guns N' Roses/Metallica Stadium Tour, Hetfield suffered second and third degree burns to his arms, face, hands, and legs. There had been some confusion with the new pyrotechnics setup, which resulted in Hetfield walking into a flame during "Fade to Black". Newsted said Hetfield's skin was "bubbling like on "The Toxic Avenger"". Metallica returned to the stage 17 days later with guitar technician and Metal Church member John Marshall replacing Hetfield on guitar for the remainder of the tour, although Hetfield was able to sing. Later in 1993, Metallica went on the Nowhere Else to Roam Tour, playing five shows in Mexico City. "", the band's first box set, was released in November 1993. The collection contained three live CDs, three home videos, and a book filled with riders and letters.
After almost three years of touring to promote "Metallica", including a headlining performance at Woodstock '94, Metallica returned to the studio to write and record its sixth studio album. The band went on a brief hiatus in the summer of 1995 and played a short tour, Escape from the Studio '95, comprising three outdoor shows, including a headline show at Donington Park supported by Slayer, Skid Row, Slash's Snakepit, Therapy?, and Corrosion of Conformity. The band spent about a year writing and recording new songs, resulting in the release of "Load" in 1996. "Load" debuted at number one on the "Billboard" 200 and ARIA Charts; it was the band's second number-one album. The cover art, "Blood and Semen III", was created by Andres Serrano, who pressed a mixture of his own semen and blood between sheets of plexiglass. The release marked a change in the band's musical direction and a new image; the bandmembers' hair was cut. Metallica headlined the alternative rock festival Lollapalooza festival in mid-1996.
During early production of the album, the band had recorded enough material to fill a double album. It was decided that half of the songs were to be released; the band would continue to work on the remaining songs and release them the following year. This resulted in follow-up album titled "Reload". The cover art was again created by Serrano, this time using a mixture of blood and urine. "Reload" debuted at number one on the "Billboard" 200 and reached number two on the Top Canadian Album chart. Hetfield said in the 2004 documentary film "" that the band initially thought some of the songs on these albums were of average quality; these were "polished and reworked" until judged releasable. To promote "Reload", Metallica performed "Fuel" and "The Memory Remains" with Marianne Faithfull on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" in December 1997.
In 1998, Metallica compiled a double album of cover songs, "Garage Inc." The first disc contained newly recorded covers of songs by Diamond Head, Killing Joke, the Misfits, Thin Lizzy, Mercyful Fate, Black Sabbath, and others. The second disc featured the original version of "The $5.98 E.P. - Garage Days Re-Revisited", which had become a scarce collectors' item. The album entered the "Billboard" 200 at number two.
On April 21 and 22, 1999, Metallica recorded two performances with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Kamen, who had previously worked with producer Rock on "Nothing Else Matters". Kamen approached Metallica in 1991 with the idea of pairing the band's music with a symphony orchestra. Kamen and his staff of over 100 composed additional orchestral material for Metallica songs. Metallica wrote two new Kamen-scored songs for the event, "No Leaf Clover" and "-Human". The audio recording and concert footage were released in 1999 as the album and concert film "S&M". It entered the "Billboard" 200 at number two and the Australian ARIA charts and Top Internet Albums chart at number one.
In 2000, Metallica discovered that a demo of its song "I Disappear", which was supposed to be released in combination with the , was receiving radio airplay. Tracing the source of the leak, the band found the file on the Napster peer-to-peer file-sharing network, and also found that the band's entire catalogue was freely available. Legal action was initiated against Napster; Metallica filed a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, alleging that Napster violated three areas of the law: copyright infringement, unlawful use of digital audio interface device, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
Ulrich provided a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding copyright infringement on July 11, 2000. Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ordered the site to place a filter on the program within 72 hours or be shut down. A settlement between Metallica and Napster was reached when German media conglomerate Bertelsmann BMG showed interest in purchasing the rights to Napster for $94 million. Under the terms of settlement, Napster agreed to block users who shared music by artists who do not want their music shared. On June 3, 2002, Napster filed for Chapter 11 protection under U.S. bankruptcy laws. On September 3, 2002, an American bankruptcy judge blocked the sale of Napster to Bertelsmann and forced Napster to liquidate its assets according to Chapter 7 of the U.S. bankruptcy laws.
At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, Ulrich appeared with host Marlon Wayans in a skit that criticized the idea of using Napster to share music. Marlon played a college student listening to Metallica's "I Disappear". Ulrich walked in and asked for an explanation. Ulrich responded to Wayans' excuse that using Napster was just "sharing" by saying that Wayans' idea of sharing was "borrowing things that were not yours without asking". He called in the Metallica road crew, who proceeded to confiscate all of Wayans' belongings, leaving him almost naked in an empty room. Napster creator Shawn Fanning responded later in the ceremony by presenting an award wearing a Metallica shirt, saying, "I borrowed this shirt from a friend. Maybe, if I like it, I'll buy one of my own." Ulrich was later booed on stage at the award show when he introduced the final musical act, Blink-182.
Newsted left Metallica on January 17, 2001, as plans were being made to enter the recording studio. He said he left the band for "private and personal reasons, and the physical damage I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love". During a "Playboy" interview with Metallica, Newsted said he wanted to release an album with his side project, Echobrain. Hetfield was opposed to the idea and said, "When someone does a side project, it takes away from the strength of Metallica", and that a side project is "like cheating on your wife in a way". Newsted said Hetfield had recorded vocals for a song used in the film "", and appeared on two Corrosion of Conformity albums. Hetfield replied, "My name isn't on those records. And I'm not out trying to sell them", and raised questions such as, "Where would it end? Does he start touring with it? Does he sell shirts? Is it his band?"
In April 2001, filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky began following Metallica to document the recording process of the band's next studio album. Over two years they recorded more than 1,000 hours of footage. On July 19, 2001, before preparations to enter the recording studio, Hetfield entered rehab to treat his "alcoholism and other addictions". All recording plans were put on hold and the band's future was in doubt. Hetfield left rehab on December 4, 2001, and the band returned to the recording studio on April 12, 2002. Hetfield was required to limit his work to four hours a day between noon and 4 pm, and to spend the rest of his time with his family. The footage recorded by Berlinger and Sinofsky was compiled into the documentary "", which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004. In the documentary, Newsted said his former bandmates' decision to hire a therapist to help solve their problems which he felt they could have solved on their own was "really fucking lame and weak".
In June 2003, Metallica's eighth studio album, "St. Anger", debuted at number one on the "Billboard" 200, and drew mixed reactions from critics. Ulrich's "steely" sounding snare drum and the absence of guitar solos received particular criticism. Kevin Forest Moreau of "Shakingthrough.net" said, "the guitars stumble in a monotone of mid-level, processed rattle; the drums don't propel as much as struggle to disguise an all-too-turgid pace; and the rage is both unfocused and leavened with too much narcissistic navel-gazing". Brent DiCrescenzo of "Pitchfork" described it as "an utter mess". However, "Blender" magazine called it the "grimiest and grimmest of the band's Bob Rock productions", and "New York Magazine" called it "utterly raw and rocking". The title track, "St. Anger", won the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 2004; it was used as the official theme song for WWE's "SummerSlam 2003".
For the duration of "St. Anger"s recording period, producer Bob Rock played bass on the album and in several live shows at which Metallica performed during that time. Once the record was completed, the band started to hold auditions for Newsted's permanent replacement. Bassists Pepper Keenan, Jeordie White, Scott Reeder, Eric Avery, Danny Lohner, and Chris Wyseamong othersauditioned for the role. After three months of auditions, Robert Trujillo, formerly of Suicidal Tendencies and Ozzy Osbourne's band, was chosen as the new bassist. Newsted, who had joined Canadian thrash metal band Voivod by that time, was Trujillo's replacement in Osbourne's band during the 2003 Ozzfest tour, which included Voivod.
Before the band's set at the 2004 Download Festival, Ulrich was rushed to the hospital after having an anxiety seizure and was unable to perform. Hetfield searched for last-minute volunteers to replace Ulrich. Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison volunteered. Lombardo performed "Battery" and "The Four Horsemen", Ulrich's drum technician Flemming Larsen performed "Fade to Black", and Jordison performed the remainder of the set. Having toured for two years in support of "St. Anger" on the Summer Sanitarium Tour 2003 and the Madly in Anger with the World Tour, with multi-platinum rock band Godsmack in support, Metallica took a break from performing and spent most of 2005 with friends and family. The band opened for The Rolling Stones at SBC Park in San Francisco on November 13 and 15, 2005.
In December 2006, Metallica released a DVD titled "The Videos 1989–2004", which sold 28,000 copies in its first week and entered the "Billboard" Top Videos chart at number three. Metallica recorded a guitar-based interpretation of Ennio Morricone's "The Ecstasy of Gold" for a tribute album titled "We All Love Ennio Morricone", which was released in February 2007. The track received a Grammy nomination at the 50th Grammy Awards for the category "Best Rock Instrumental Performance". A recording of "The Ecstasy of Gold" has been played to introduce Metallica's performances since the 1980s. Earlier that year, Metallica announced on its official website that after 15 years, long-time producer Bob Rock would not be producing the band's next studio album. Instead, the band chose to work with producer Rick Rubin. Metallica scheduled the release of "Death Magnetic" as September 12, 2008, and the band filmed a music video for the album's first single, "The Day That Never Comes".
On September 2, 2008, a record store in France began selling copies of "Death Magnetic" nearly two weeks before its scheduled worldwide release date, which resulted in the album being made available on peer-to-peer clients. This prompted the band's UK distributor Vertigo Records to officially release the album on September 10, 2008. Rumors of Metallica or Warner Bros. taking legal action against the French retailer were unconfirmed, though drummer Lars Ulrich responded to the leak by saying, "...We're ten days from release. I mean, from here, we're golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me", and, "By 2008 standards, that's a victory. If you'd told me six months ago that our record wouldn't leak until 10 days out, I would have signed up for that."
"Death Magnetic" debuted at number one in the U.S. selling 490,000 units; Metallica became the first band to have five consecutive studio albums debut at number one in the history of the "Billboard" 200. A week after its release, "Death Magnetic" remained at number one on the "Billboard" 200 and the European album chart; it also became the fastest selling album of 2008 in Australia. "Death Magnetic" remained at number one on the "Billboard" 200 album chart for three consecutive weeks. Metallica was one of two artists whose albumthe other being Jack Johnson's album "Sleep Through the Static"remained on the "Billboard" 200 for three consecutive weeks at number one in 2008. "Death Magnetic" also remained at number one on "Billboard"'s Hard Rock, Modern Rock/Alternative and Rock album charts for five consecutive weeks. The album reached number one in 32 countries outside the U.S., including the UK, Canada, and Australia. In November 2008, Metallica's record deal with Warner Bros. ended and the band considered releasing its next album through the internet.
On January 14, 2009, it was announced that Metallica would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 4, 2009, and that former bassist Jason Newstedwho left the band in 2001would perform with the band at the ceremony. Initially, it was announced that the matter had been discussed and that bassist Trujillo had agreed not to play because he "wanted to see the Black Album band". However, during the band's set of "Master of Puppets" and "Enter Sandman", both Trujillo and Newsted were on stage. Ray Burton, father of the late Cliff Burton, accepted the honor on his behalf. Although he was not to be inducted with them, Metallica invited Dave Mustaine to take part in the induction ceremony. Mustaine declined because of his touring commitments in Europe.
Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax performed on the same bill for the first time on June 16, 2010, at Warsaw Babice Airport, Warsaw, as a part of the Sonisphere Festival series. The show in Sofia, Bulgaria, on June 22, 2010, was broadcast via satellite to cinemas. The bands also played concerts in Bucharest on June 26, 2010, and Istanbul on June 27, 2010. On June 28, 2010, "Death Magnetic" was certified double platinum by the RIAA. Metallica's World Magnetic Tour ended in Melbourne on November 21, 2010. The band had been touring for over two years in support of "Death Magnetic". To accompany the final tour dates in Australia and New Zealand, a live, limited edition EP of past performances in Australia called "Six Feet Down Under" was released. The EP was followed by "Six Feet Down Under (Part II)", which was released on November 12, 2010. Part 2 contains a further eight songs recorded during the first two Oceanic Legs of the World Magnetic Tour. On November 26, 2010, Metallica released a live EP titled "Live at Grimey's", which was recorded in June 2008 at Grimey's Record Store, just before the band's appearance at Bonnaroo Music Festival that year.
In a June 2009 interview with Italy's Rock TV, Ulrich said Metallica was planning to continue touring until August 2010, and that there were no plans for a tenth album. He said he was sure the band would collaborate with producer Rick Rubin again. According to Blabbermouth.net, the band was considering recording its next album in the second half of 2011. In November 2010, during an interview with The Pulse of Radio, Ulrich said Metallica would return to writing in 2011. Ulrich said, "There's a bunch of balls in the air for 2011, but I think the main one is we really want to get back to writing again. We haven't really written since, what, '06, '07, and we want to get back to kind of just being creative again. Right now we are going to just chill out and then probably start up again in, I'd say, March or April, and start probably putting the creative cap back on and start writing some songs."
In an interview at the April 2011 Big Four concert, Robert Trujillo said Metallica will work with Rick Rubin again as producer for the new album and were "really excited to write some new music. There's no shortage of riffage in Metallica world right now." He added, "The first album with Rick was also the first album for me, so in a lot of ways, you're kind of testing the water. Now that we're comfortable with Rick and his incredible engineer, Greg Fidelman, who worked with Slayer, actually, on this last recordit's my heroit's a great team. And it's only gonna better; I really believe that. So I'm super-excited." In June 2011, Rubin said Metallica had begun writing its new album. On November 9, 2010, Metallica announced it would be headlining the Rock in Rio festival in Rio de Janeiro on September 25, 2011.
On December 13, 2010, the band announced it would again play as part of the "big four" during the Sonisphere Festival at Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, on July 8, 2011. It was the first time all of the "big four" members played on the same stage in the UK. On December 17, 2010, Another "big four" Sonisphere performance that would take place in France on July 9 was announced. On January 25, 2011, another "big four" performance on April 23, 2011, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, was announced. It was the first time all of the "big four" members played on the same stage in the U.S. On February 17, 2011, a show in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, on July 2, 2011, was announced. On February 22, a "big four" show in Milan on July 6, 2011, was announced. On March 2, 2011, another "big four" concert, which took place in Gothenburg on July 3, 2011, was announced. The final "big four" concert was in New York City, at Yankee Stadium, on September 14, 2011.
On June 15, 2011, Metallica announced that recording sessions with singer-songwriter Lou Reed had concluded. The album, which was titled "Lulu", was recorded over several months and comprised ten songs based on Frank Wedekind's "Lulu" plays "Earth Spirit" and "Pandora's Box". The album was released on October 31, 2011. The recording of the album was problematic at times; Lars Ulrich later said Lou Reed challenged him to a "street fight". On October 16, 2011, Robert Trujillo confirmed that the band was back in the studio and writing new material. He said, "The writing process for the new Metallica album has begun. We've been in the studio with Rick Rubin, working on a couple of things, and we're going to be recording during the most of next year."
Metallica was due to make its first appearance in India at the "India Rocks" concert, supporting the 2011 Indian Grand Prix. However, the concert was canceled when the venue was proven to be unsafe. Fans raided the stage during the event and the organizers were later arrested for fraud. Metallica made its Indian debut in Bangalore on October 30, 2011. On November 10, it was announced that Metallica would headline the main stage on Saturday June 9, 2012, at the Download Festival at Donington Park and that the band would play "The Black Album" in its entirety. Metallica celebrated its 30th anniversary by playing four shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco in December 2011. The shows were exclusive to Met Club members and tickets were charged at $6 each or $19.81 for all four nights. The shows consisted of songs from the band's career and featured guest appearances by artists who had either helped or had influenced Metallica. These shows were notable because Lloyd Grant, Dave Mustaine, Jason Newsted, Glenn Danzig, Ozzy Osbourne, Jerry Cantrell, Apocalyptica, members of Diamond Head, and King Diamond joined Metallica on stage for all appropriate songs. In December 2011, Metallica began releasing songs that were written for "Death Magnetic" but were not included on the album online. On December 13, 2011, the band released "Beyond Magnetic", a digital EP release exclusively on iTunes. It was released on CD in January 2012.
On February 7, 2012, Metallica announced that it would start a new music festival called Orion Music + More, which took place on June 23 and 24, 2012, in Atlantic City. Metallica also confirmed that it would headline the festival on both days and would perform two of its most critically acclaimed albums in their entirety: "The Black Album" on one night, and "Ride the Lightning" on the other. In a July 2012 interview with Canadian radio station 99.3 The Fox, Ulrich said Metallica would not release its new album until at least early 2014. In November 2012, Metallica left Warner Bros. Records and launched an independent record label, Blackened Recordings, which will produce the band's future releases. The band has acquired the rights to all of its studio albums, which will be reissued through the new label. Blackened releases will be licensed through Warner subsidiary Rhino Entertainment in North America and internationally through Universal Music. On September 20, 2012, Metallica announced via its official website that a new DVD containing footage of shows it performed in Quebec in 2009 would be released that December; fans would get the chance to vote for two setlists that would appear on the DVD. The film, titled "Quebec Magnetic", was released in the U.S. on December 10, 2012.
In an interview with "Classic Rock" on January 8, 2013, Ulrich said regarding the band's upcoming album, "What we're doing now certainly sounds like a continuation [of "Death Magnetic"]". He also said, "I love Rick [Rubin]. We all love Rick. We're in touch with Rick constantly. We'll see where it goes. It would stun me if the record came out in 2013." Also in 2013, the band starred in a 3D concert film titled "", which was directed by Antal Nimród and was released in IMAX theaters on September 27. In an interview dated July 22, 2013, Ulrich told "Ultimate Guitar", "2014 will be all about making a new Metallica record"; he said the album will most likely be released during 2015. Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo later confirmed the band's intention to enter the studio. At the second Orion Music + More festival held in Detroit, the band played under the name "Dehaan"a reference to actor Dane DeHaan, who starred in "Metallica: Through the Never". The band performed its debut album "Kill 'Em All" in its entirety, celebrating the 30th anniversary of its release. On December 8, 2013, the band played a show called "Freeze 'Em All" in Antarctica, becoming the first band to play on all seven continents. The performance was filmed and released as a live album the same month.
At the 56th Annual Grammy Awards in January 2014, Metallica performed "One" with Chinese pianist Lang Lang. In March 2014, Metallica began a tour called "Metallica By Request", in which fans request songs for the band to perform. A new song, titled "Lords of Summer" was written for the concerts and released as a "first take" demo in June 2014. In June 2014, the band headlined the Glastonbury Festival in an attempt to attract new fans. Ulrich said, "We have one shot, you never know if you'll be invited back". In November 2014, Metallica performed at the closing ceremony of BlizzCon 2014. In January 2015, Metallica announced a "Metallica Night" with the San Jose Sharks, which featured a Q&A session with the band and a charity auction benefiting the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, but no performances. They were announced to headline Lollapalooza in March 2015, returning to perform there for the first time in 20 years. On May 2, 2015, Metallica performed their third annual Metallica Day at AT&T Park. Metallica were also announced to play at X Games for the first time at X Games Austin 2015 in Austin, Texas. On June 14, 2015, Hetfield and Hammett performed The Star-Spangled Banner live via electric guitars prior to game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors at Oracle Arena in Oakland, California. In late October, the band unveiled a new website with an introduction from Ulrich containing footage from the studio of the band working on new material. On November 2, Metallica were announced to play "The Night Before" Super Bowl 50 at AT&T Park. Metallica announced they would be opening the U.S. Bank Stadium on August 20, 2016, with Avenged Sevenfold and Volbeat as support.
In April 2016, during the week leading up to Record Store Day, for which the band was its ambassador for 2016, Ulrich told "Billboard" that the band's expanded role within the music industry had played a part in the amount of time that it had taken to write and record the album. "The way we do things now is very different than the way we did things back in the days of "Kill 'Em All" and "Ride the Lightning". Nowadays we like to do so many different things." Ulrich was also optimistic that production of the album had almost reached its completion. "Unless something radical happens it would be difficult for me to believe that it won't come out in 2016". On August 18, 2016, the band announced via their website that their tenth studio album, "Hardwired... to Self-Destruct", would be released worldwide on November 18, 2016, via their independent label, Blackened Recordings. They also unveiled the track listing, album artwork, and released a music video for the album's first single, "Hardwired". The album was released as scheduled and debuted at number one on the "Billboard" 200.
Metallica announced they would be touring the US in summer of 2017 for the WorldWired Tour. The stadium tour also includes Avenged Sevenfold, Volbeat and Gojira as supporting acts. On August 7, 2017, Metallica was invited by the San Francisco Giants again for the fifth annual "Metallica Night" with Hammett and Hetfield performing the national anthem. In January 2018, the band announced that they would be reissuing "The $5.98 E.P. - Garage Days Re-Revisited" on April 13 for Record Store Day, and the sixth annual "Metallica Night" was also announced a few weeks later, this time in April, with all proceeds going to the All Within My Hands Foundation, which the band created in late 2017. In February 2018, the band announced a second set of North American tour dates, most of which for cities that they had not visited in up to thirty years.
In an interview with Australian magazine "The Music"s official podcast in March 2019, Trujillo said that Metallica had begun jamming on new material for its next studio album. "I'm excited about the next record because I believe it will also be a culmination of the two [previous] records and another journey. There's no shortage of original ideas, that's the beauty of being in this band." He estimated that the album would be released "a lot sooner than the previous two did... this time around I think we'll be able to jump on it a lot quicker and jump in the studio and start working. We've all vowed to get this one going sooner than later." In an interview with Australian magazine "Mixdown" the following month, Hammett said that the band had tentative plans to enter the studio after the conclusion of its WorldWired Tour. He stated, "We're in our third year since "Hardwired". Maybe we can get a bit more focus and go into the studio a bit sooner." After not contributing any writing to "Hardwired... to Self-Destruct", Hammett said regarding his ideas for the new album, "I have a ton of material. I've over-compensated, so I'm ready to go anytime."
In March 2019, Metallica announced that its WorldWired Tour would continue into Australia and New Zealand in October with Slipknot in support. Later that month, the band announced that it would perform at the grand opening of San Francisco's new Chase Center with the San Francisco Symphony in September to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of "S&M". The commemorative shows, titled "S&M2", were screened in over 3,000 theaters worldwide on October 9; the event featured arrangements from the original "S&M" concerts as well as new arrangements for songs recorded since then and a cover of the Alexander Mosolov piece "Iron Foundry", and were conducted by Edwin Outwater and San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas. "S&M2" went on to earn $5.5 million at the box office, making it the biggest global rock event cinema release of all time; a second screening was later announced for October 30 as a result.
In July 2019, Metallica announced a set of South American tour dates for April 2020 with Greta Van Fleet in support. In September, ahead of that year's Global Citizen Festival, it was announced that Metallica would perform at the following year's festival in September 2020 alongside artists such as Billie Eilish, Miley Cyrus and Coldplay, in what would be the final event of Global Poverty Project's year-long Global Goal Live: The Possible Dream campaign. The following day, on September 27, Metallica announced that Hetfield had re-entered a rehabilitation program and that its Australia/New Zealand tour would be postponed. In a statement by Ulrich, Hammett and Trujillo, the band spoke of the devastation of the news, saying that Hetfield "[had] been struggling with addiction on and off for many years" and that all tickets would be fully refunded. Ulrich later added that Hetfield was "in the process of healing himself", and that the band hoped to return to Australia and New Zealand in 2020. The band's other commitments, including a benefit concert in March 2020, were still expected to continue as planned; a further five US festival appearances were announced in October.
Metallica was influenced by early heavy metal and hard rock bands and artists Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Ted Nugent, AC/DC, Rush, Aerosmith, Judas Priest, Scorpions and by new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) bands Venom, Motörhead, Saxon, Diamond Head, Blitzkrieg, and Iron Maiden. Early punk rock bands Ramones, Sex Pistols, and the Misfits also influenced Metallica's style as did post-punk band Killing Joke and hardcore punk acts Discharge and Suicidal Tendencies. The band's early releases contained fast tempos, harmonized leads, and nine-minute instrumental tracks. Steve Huey of AllMusic said "Ride the Lightning" featured "extended, progressive epics; tight, concise groove-rockers". Huey said Metallica expanded its compositional technique and range of expression to take on a more aggressive approach in following releases, and lyrics dealt with personal and socially conscious issues. Religious and military leaders, rage, insanity, monsters, and drugsamong other themeswere explored on "Master of Puppets".
In 1991, Huey said Metallica with new producer Bob Rock simplified and streamlined its music for a more commercial approach to appeal to mainstream audiences. Robert Palmer of "Rolling Stone" said the band abandoned its aggressive, fast tempos to expand its music and expressive range. The change in direction proved commercially successful; "Metallica" was the band's first album to peak at number one on the "Billboard" 200. Metallica noticed changes to the rock scene created by the grunge movement of the early 1990s. In "Load"—an album that has been described as having "an almost alternative rock" approach—the band changed musical direction and focused on non-metal influences. Metallica's new lyrical approach moved away from drugs and monsters, and focused on anger, loss, and retribution. Some fans and critics were not pleased with this change, which included haircuts, the cover art of "Load", and headlining the Lollapalooza festival of 1996. David Fricke of "Rolling Stone" described the move as "goodbye to the moldy stricture and dead-end Puritanism of no-frills thrash", and called "Load" the heaviest record of 1996. With the release of "ReLoad" in 1997, the band displayed blues and early hard rock influences, incorporating more rhythm and harmony in song structures.
"St. Anger" marked another large change in the band's sound. Guitar solos were excluded from the album, leaving a "raw and unpolished sound". The band used drop C tuning; Ulrich's snare drum received particular criticism. "New York Magazine"s Ethan Brown said it "reverberates with a thwong". The album's lyrics deal with Hetfield's drug rehabilitation and include references to the devil, anti-drug themes, claustrophobia, impending doom, and religious hypocrisy. At the advice of producer Rick Rubin, for its ninth studio album "Death Magnetic", the band returned to standard tuning and guitar solos. As a return to Metallica's thrash roots, "Death Magnetic" was a riff-oriented album featuring intense guitar solos and subtle lyrics dealing with suicide and redemption.
Metallica has become one of the most influential heavy metal bands of all time, and is credited as one of the "big four" of thrash metal, along with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth. The band has sold more than 125 million records worldwide, including an RIAA-certified 66 million and Nielsen SoundScan-reported 58,000,000 in the US, making Metallica one of the most commercially successful bands of all time. The writers of "The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll" said Metallica gave heavy metal "a much-needed charge". Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Greg Prato of Allmusic said Metallica "expanded the limits of thrash, using speed and volume not for their own sake, but to enhance their intricately structured compositions", and called the band "easily the best, most influential heavy metal band of the '80s, responsible for bringing the music back to Earth".
Jonathan Davis of Korn said he respects Metallica as his favorite band; he said, "I love that they've done things their own way and they've persevered over the years and they're still relevant to this day. I think they're one of the greatest bands ever." Godsmack drummer Shannon Larkin said Metallica has been the biggest influence on the band, stating, "they really changed my life when I was 16 years oldI'd never heard anything that heavy". Vocalist and guitarist Robb Flynn of Machine Head said that when creating the band's 2007 album, "The Blackening", "What we mean is an album that has the power, influence and epic grandeur of that album "Master of Puppets"and the staying powera timeless record like that". Trivium guitarists Corey Beaulieu and Matt Heafy said that when they heard Metallica they wanted to start playing guitar. M. Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold said touring with Metallica was the band's career highlight, and said, "Selling tons of records and playing huge shows will never compare to meeting your idols "Metallica"". God Forbid guitarists Doc and Dallas Coyle were inspired by Metallica as they grew up, and the band's bassist John Outcalt admires Burton as a "rocker". Ill Niño drummer Dave Chavarri said he finds early Metallica releases are "heavy, raw, rebellious. It said, 'fuck you'", and Adema drummer Kris Kohls said the band is influenced by Metallica.
On April 4, 2009, Metallica were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. They entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the second year they were eligible and first year they were nominated. Metallica's induction into the Hall included its current lineup, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Robert Trujillo, and Lars Ulrich, and former members Jason Newsted and Cliff Burton.
MTV ranked Metallica the third "Greatest Heavy Metal Band in History". Metallica was ranked 42nd on VH1's "100 Greatest Artists Of All Time", was listed fifth on VH1's "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock", and the band was number one on VH1's "20 Greatest Metal Bands" list. "Rolling Stone" placed the band 61st on its list of "The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time"; its albums "Master of Puppets" and "Metallica" were ranked at numbers 167 and 252 respectively on the magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". "Master of Puppets" was named in "Q Magazine" "50 Heaviest Albums of All Time", and was ranked number one on IGN's "Top 25 Metal Albums", and number one on Metal-rules.com's "Top 100 Heavy Metal Albums" list. "Enter Sandman" was ranked number 399 on "Rolling Stone" "500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
"Kerrang!" released a tribute album titled "Master of Puppets: Remastered" with the April 8, 2006, edition of the magazine to celebrate the 20th anniversary of "Master of Puppets". The album featured cover versions of Metallica songs by Machine Head, Bullet for My Valentine, Chimaira, Mastodon, Mendeed, and Triviumall of which are influenced by Metallica. At least 15 Metallica tribute albums have been released. On September 10, 2006, Metallica guest starred on "The Simpsons" eighteenth-season premiere, "The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer". Hammett's and Hetfield's voices were used in three episodes of the animated television series "Metalocalypse". Finnish cello metal band Apocalyptica released a tribute album titled "Plays Metallica by Four Cellos", which features eight Metallica songs played on cellos. A parody band named Beatallica plays music using a combination of The Beatles and Metallica songs. Beatallica faced legal troubles when Sony, which owns The Beatles' catalog, issued a cease and desist order, claiming "substantial and irreparable injury" and ordering the group to pay damages. Ulrich, a fan of Beatallica, asked Metallica's lawyer Peter Paterno to help settle the case.
On March 7, 1999, Metallica was inducted into the San Francisco Walk of Fame. The mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, proclaimed the day "Official Metallica Day". The band was awarded the MTV Icon award in 2003, and a concert paying tribute to the band with artists performing its songs was held. Performances included Sum 41 and a medley of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", "Enter Sandman", and "Master of Puppets". Staind covered "Nothing Else Matters", Avril Lavigne played "Fuel", hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg performed "Sad but True", Korn played "One", and Limp Bizkit performed "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)".
The "Guitar Hero" video game series included several of Metallica's songs. "One" was used in "Guitar Hero III". The album "Death Magnetic" was later released as purchasable, downloadable content for the game. "Trapped Under Ice" was featured in the sequel, "Guitar Hero World Tour". In 2009, Metallica collaborated with the game's developers to make "", which included a number of Metallica's songs. Harmonix' video game series "Rock Band" included "Enter Sandman" and "Battery"; "Ride the Lightning", "Blackened", and "...And Justice for All" were released as downloadable tracks. In 2013, due to expiring content licenses, "Ride the Lightning", "Blackened", and "...And Justice for All" are no longer available for download.
Current members
Former members
Session/touring members
Grammy Awards
The 1988 re-issue of "Kill 'Em All" on Elektra Records also charted on the Billboard 200, peaking at number 120.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18787
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Mural
A mural is any piece of artwork painted or applied directly on a wall, ceiling or other permanent surfaces. A distinguishing characteristic of mural painting is that the architectural elements of the given space are harmoniously incorporated into the picture.
Some wall paintings are painted on large canvases, which are then attached to the wall (e.g., with marouflage), but the technique has been in common use since the late 19th century.
Murals of sorts date to Upper Paleolithic times such as the cave paintings in the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave in Borneo (40,000-52,000 BP), Chauvet Cave in Ardèche department of southern France (around 32,000 BP). Many ancient murals have been found within ancient Egyptian tombs (around 3150 BC), the Minoan palaces (Middle period III of the Neopalatial period, 1700–1600 BC), the Oxtotitlán cave and Juxtlahuaca in Mexico (around 1200-900 BC) and in Pompeii (around 100 BC – AD 79).
During the Middle Ages murals were usually executed on dry plaster (secco). The huge collection of Kerala mural painting dating from the 14th century are examples of fresco secco. In Italy, circa 1300, the technique of painting of frescos on wet plaster was reintroduced and led to a significant increase in the quality of mural painting.
In modern times, the term became more well known with the Mexican muralism art movement (Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and José Orozco). There are many different styles and techniques. The best-known is probably "fresco", which uses water-soluble paints with a damp lime wash, rapid use of the resulting mixture over a large surface, and often in parts (but with a sense of the whole). The colors lighten as they dry. The "marouflage" method has also been used for millennia.
Murals today are painted in a variety of ways, using oil or water-based media. The styles can vary from abstract to "trompe-l'œil" (a French term for "fool" or "trick the eye"). Initiated by the works of mural artists like Graham Rust or Rainer Maria Latzke in the 1980s, trompe-l'oeil painting has experienced a renaissance in private and public buildings in Europe.
Today, the beauty of a wall mural has become much more widely available with a technique whereby a painting or photographic image is transferred to poster paper or canvas which is then pasted to a wall surface "(see wallpaper, Frescography)" to give the effect of either a hand-painted mural or realistic scene.
A special type of mural painting is Lüftlmalerei, still practised today in the villages of the Alpine valleys. Well-known examples of such façade designs from the 18th and 19th centuries can be found in Mittenwald, Garmisch, Unter- and Oberammergau.
In the history of mural several methods have been used:
"A fresco" painting, from the Italian word "affresco" which derives from the adjective "fresco" ("fresh"), describes a method in which the paint is applied on plaster on walls or ceilings.
The "buon fresco" technique consists of painting in pigment mixed with water on a thin layer of wet, fresh, lime mortar or plaster. The pigment is then absorbed by the wet plaster; after a number of hours, the plaster dries and reacts with the air: it is this chemical reaction which fixes the pigment particles in the plaster. After this the painting stays for a long time up to centuries in fresh and brilliant colors.
"Fresco-secco" painting is done on dry plaster ("secco" is "dry" in Italian). The pigments thus require a binding medium, such as egg (tempera), glue or oil to attach the pigment to the wall.
"Mezzo-fresco" is painted on nearly-dry plaster, and was defined by the sixteenth-century author Ignazio Pozzo as "firm enough not to take a thumb-print" so that the pigment only penetrates slightly into the plaster. By the end of the sixteenth century this had largely displaced the "buon fresco" method, and was used by painters such as Gianbattista Tiepolo or Michelangelo. This technique had, in reduced form, the advantages of "a secco" work.
In Greco-Roman times, mostly encaustic colors applied in a cold state were used.
Tempera painting is one of the oldest known methods in mural painting. In tempera, the pigments are bound in an albuminous medium such as egg yolk or egg white diluted in water.
In 16th-century Europe, oil painting on canvas arose as an easier method for mural painting. The advantage was that the artwork could be completed in the artist's studio and later transported to its destination and there attached to the wall or ceiling. Oil paint may be a less satisfactory medium for murals because of its lack of brilliance in colour. Also, the pigments are yellowed by the binder or are more easily affected by atmospheric conditions.
Different muralists tend to become experts in their preferred medium and application, whether that be oil paints, emulsion or acrylic paints applied by brush, roller or airbrush/aerosols. Clients will often ask for a particular style and the artist may adjust to the appropriate technique.
A consultation usually leads to detailed design and layout of the proposed mural with a price quote that the client approves before the muralist starts on the work. The area to be painted can be gridded to match the design allowing the image to be scaled accurately step by step. In some cases, the design is projected straight onto the wall and traced with pencil before painting begins. Some muralists will paint directly without any prior sketching, preferring the spontaneous technique.
Once completed the mural can be given coats of varnish or protective acrylic glaze to protect the work from UV rays and surface damage.
In modern, quick form of muralling, young enthusiasts also use POP clay mixed with glue or bond to give desired models on canvas board. The canvas is later set aside to let the clay dry. Once dried, the canvas and the shape can be painted with your choice of colors and later coated with varnish.
As an alternative to a hand-painted or airbrushed mural, digitally printed murals can also be applied to surfaces. Already existing murals can be photographed and then be reproduced in near-to-original quality.
The disadvantages of pre-fabricated murals and decals are that they are often mass-produced and lack the allure and exclusivity of original artwork. They are often not fitted to the individual wall sizes of the client and their personal ideas or wishes cannot be added to the mural as it progresses. The Frescography technique, a digital manufacturing method (CAM) invented by Rainer Maria Latzke addresses some of the personalisation and size restrictions.
Digital techniques are commonly used in advertisements. A "wallscape" is a large advertisement on or attached to the outside wall of a building. Wallscapes can be painted directly on the wall as a mural, or printed on vinyl and securely attached to the wall in the manner of a billboard. Although not strictly classed as murals, large scale printed media are often referred to as such. Advertising murals were traditionally painted onto buildings and shops by sign-writers, later as large scale poster billboards.
Murals are important in that they bring art into the public sphere. Due to the size, cost, and work involved in creating a mural, muralists must often be commissioned by a sponsor. Often it is the local government or a business, but many murals have been paid for with grants of patronage. For artists, their work gets a wide audience who otherwise might not set foot in an art gallery. A city benefits by the beauty of a work of art.
Murals can be a relatively effective tool of social emancipation or achieving a political goal. Murals have sometimes been created against the law, or have been commissioned by local bars and coffee shops. Often, the visual effects are an enticement to attract public attention to social issues. State-sponsored public art expressions, particularly murals, are often used by totalitarian regimes as a tool of propaganda. However, despite the propagandist character of that works, some of them still have an artistic value.
Murals can have a dramatic impact whether consciously or subconsciously on the attitudes of passers-by, when they are added to areas where people live and work. It can also be argued that the presence of large, public murals can add aesthetic improvement to the daily lives of residents or that of employees at a corporate venue. Large-format hand-painted murals were the norm for advertisements in cities across America, before the introduction of vinyl and digital posters. It was an expensive form of advertising with strict signage laws but gained attention and improved local aesthetics.
Other world-famous murals can be found in Mexico, New York City, Philadelphia, Belfast, Derry, Los Angeles, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Philippines, and in India. They have functioned as an important means of communication for members of socially, ethnically and racially divided communities in times of conflict. They also proved to be an effective tool in establishing a dialogue and hence solving the cleavage in the long run.
The Indian state Kerala has exclusive murals. These Kerala mural painting are on walls of Hindu temples. They can be dated from 9th century AD.
The San Bartolo murals of the Maya civilization in Guatemala, are the oldest example of this art in Mesoamerica and are dated at 300 BC.
Many rural towns have begun using murals to create tourist attractions in order to boost economic income. Colquitt, Georgia was chosen to host the 2010 Global Mural Conference. The town had more than twelve murals completed, and hosted the Conference along with Dothan, Alabama, and Blakely, Georgia.
The Mexican mural movement in the 1930s brought new prominence to murals as a social and political tool. Diego Rivera, José Orozco and David Siqueiros were the most famous artists of the movement. Between 1932 and 1940, Rivera also painted murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City. In 1933, he completed a famous series of twenty-seven fresco panels entitled "Detroit Industry" on the walls of an inner court at the Detroit Institute of Arts. During the McCarthyism of the 1950s, a was placed in the courtyard defending the artistic merit of the murals while attacking his politics as "detestable".
In 1948, the Colombian government hosted the IX Pan-American Conference to establish the Marshall plan for the Americas. The director of the OEA and the Colombian government commissioned master Santiago Martinez Delgado, to paint a mural in the Colombian congress building to commemorate the event. Martinez decided to make it about the Cúcuta Congress, and painted Bolívar in front of Santander, making liberals upset; so, due to the murder of Jorge Elieser Gaitan the mobs of el bogotazo tried to burn the capitol, but the Colombian Army stopped them. Years later, in the 1980s, with liberals in charge of the Congress, they passed a resolution to turn the whole chamber in the Elliptic Room 90 degrees to put the main mural on the side and commissioned Alejandro Obregon to paint a non-partisan mural in the surrealist style.
Northern Ireland contains some of the most famous political murals in the world. Almost 2,000 murals have been documented in Northern Ireland since the 1970s. In recent times, many murals are non-sectarian, concerning political and social issues such as racism and environmentalism, and many are completely apolitical, depicting children at play and scenes from everyday life. (See Northern Irish murals.)
A not political, but social related mural covers a wall in an old building, once a prison, at the top of a cliff in Bardiyah, in Libya. It was painted and signed by the artist in April 1942, weeks before his death on the first day of the First Battle of El Alamein. Known as the Bardia Mural, it was created by English artist, private John Frederick Brill.
In 1961 East Germany began to erect a wall between East and West Berlin, which became famous as the Berlin Wall. While on the East Berlin side painting was not allowed, artists painted on the Western side of the Wall from the 80s until the fall of the Wall in 1989.
Many unknown and known artists such as Thierry Noir and Keith Haring painted on the Wall, the "World's longest canvas". The sometimes detailed artwork were often painted over within hours or days. On the Western side the Wall was not protected, so everybody could paint on the Wall. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Eastern side of the Wall became also a popular "canvas" for many mural and graffiti artists.
Orgosolo, in Sardinia, is a most important center of murals politics.
It is also common for mural graffiti to be used as a memoir. In the 2001 book "Somebody Told Me", Rick Bragg writes about a series of communities, mainly located in New York, that have walls dedicated to the people who died. These memorials, both written word and mural style, provide the deceased to be present in the communities in which they lived. Bragg states that the "murals have woven themselves in the fabric of the neighborhoods, and the city". These memorials remind people of the deaths caused by inner city violence.
Many people like to express their individuality by commissioning an artist to paint a mural in their home. This is not an activity exclusively for owners of large houses. A mural artist is only limited by the fee and therefore the time spent on the painting; dictating the level of detail; a simple mural can be added to the smallest of walls.
Private commissions can be for dining rooms, bathrooms, living rooms or, as is often the case- children's bedrooms. A child's room can be transformed into the 'fantasy world' of a forest or racing track, encouraging imaginative play and an awareness of art.
The current trend for feature walls has increased commissions for muralists in the UK. A large hand-painted mural can be designed on a specific theme, incorporate personal images and elements and may be altered during the course of painting it. The personal interaction between client and muralist is often a unique experience for an individual not usually involved in the arts.
In the 1980s, illusionary wall painting experienced a renaissance in private homes. The reason for this revival in interior design could, in some cases be attributed to the reduction in living space for the individual. Faux architectural features, as well as natural scenery and views, can have the effect of 'opening out' the walls. Densely built-up areas of housing may also contribute to people's feelings of being cut off from nature in its free form. A mural commission of this sort may be an attempt by some people to re-establish a balance with nature.
Commissions of murals in schools, hospitals, and retirement homes can achieve a pleasing and welcoming atmosphere in these caring institutions. Murals in other public buildings, such as public houses are also common.
Recently, graffiti and street art have played a key role in contemporary wall painting. Such graffiti/street artists as Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey, Above, Mint&Serf, Futura 2000, Os Gemeos, and Faile among others have successfully transcended their street art aesthetic beyond the walls of urban landscape and onto walls of private and corporate clients. As graffiti/street art became more mainstream in the late 1990s, youth-oriented brands such as Nike and Red Bull, with Wieden Kennedy, have turned to graffiti/street artists to decorate walls of their respective offices. This trend continued through 2000's with graffiti/street art gaining more recognition from art institutions worldwide.
Many homeowners choose to display the traditional art and culture of their society or events from their history in their homes. Ethnic murals have become an important form of interior decoration. Warli painting murals are becoming a preferred mode of wall decor in India. Warli painting is an ancient Indian art form in which the tribal people used to depict different phases of their life on the walls of their mud houses.
Tile murals are murals made out of stone, ceramic, porcelain, glass and or metal tiles that are installed within, or added onto the surface of an existing wall. They are also inlaid into floors. Mural tiles are painted, glazed, sublimation printed (as described below) or more traditionally cut out of stone, ceramic, mosaic glass(opaque) and stained glass. Some artists use pottery and plates broken into pieces. Unlike the traditional painted murals described above, tile murals are always made by fitting pieces of the selected materials together to create the design or image.
Mosaic murals are made by combining small 1/4" to 2" size pieces of colorful stone, ceramic, or glass tiles which are then laid out to create a picture. Modern day technology has allowed commercial mosaic mural makers to use computer programs to separate photographs into colors that are automatically cut and glued onto sheets of mesh creating precise murals fast and in large quantities.
The azulejo (, ) refers to a typical form of Portuguese or Spanish painted, tin-glazed, ceramic tilework. They have become a typical aspect of Portuguese culture, manifesting without interruption during five centuries, the consecutive trends in art.
Azulejos can be found inside and outside churches, palaces, ordinary houses and even railway stations or subway stations.
They were not only used as an ornamental art form, but also had a specific functional capacity like temperature control in homes. Many "azulejos" chronicle major historical and cultural aspects of Portuguese history.
Custom-printed tile murals can be produced using digital images for kitchen splashbacks, wall displays, and flooring. Digital photos and artwork can be resized and printed to accommodate the desired size for the area to be decorated. Custom tile printing uses a variety of techniques including dye sublimation and ceramic-type laser toners. The latter technique can yield fade-resistant custom tiles which are suitable for long term exterior exposure.
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Microeconomics
Microeconomics (from Greek prefix "mikro-" meaning "small" + "economics") is a branch of economics that studies the behaviour of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms.
One goal of microeconomics is to analyze the market mechanisms that establish relative prices among goods and services and allocate limited resources among alternative uses. Microeconomics shows conditions under which free markets lead to desirable allocations. It also analyzes market failure, where markets fail to produce efficient results.
While microeconomics focuses on firms and individuals, macroeconomics focuses on the sum total of economic activity, dealing with the issues of growth, inflation, and unemployment and with national policies relating to these issues. Microeconomics also deals with the effects of economic policies (such as changing taxation levels) on microeconomic behavior and thus on the aforementioned aspects of the economy. Particularly in the wake of the Lucas critique, much of modern macroeconomic theories has been built upon microfoundations—i.e. based upon basic assumptions about micro-level behavior.
Microeconomic theory typically begins with the study of a single rational and utility maximizing individual. To economists, rationality means an individual possesses stable preferences that are both complete and transitive.
The technical assumption that preference relations are continuous is needed to ensure the existence of a utility function. Although microeconomic theory can continue without this assumption, it would make comparative statics impossible since there is no guarantee that the resulting utility function would be differentiable.
Microeconomic theory progresses by defining a competitive budget set which is a subset of the consumption set. It is at this point that economists make the technical assumption that preferences are locally non-satiated. Without the assumption of LNS (local non-satiation) there is no 100% guarantee but there would be a rational rise
in individual utility. With the necessary tools and assumptions in place the utility maximization problem (UMP) is developed.
The utility maximization problem is the heart of consumer theory. The utility maximization problem attempts to explain the action axiom by imposing rationality axioms on consumer preferences and then mathematically modeling and analyzing the consequences. The utility maximization problem serves not only as the mathematical foundation of consumer theory but as a metaphysical explanation of it as well. That is, the utility maximization problem is used by economists to not only explain "what" or "how" individuals make choices but "why" individuals make choices as well.
The utility maximization problem is a constrained optimization problem in which an individual seeks to maximize utility subject to a budget constraint. Economists use the extreme value theorem to guarantee that a solution to the utility maximization problem exists. That is, since the budget constraint is both bounded and closed, a solution to the utility maximization problem exists. Economists call the solution to the utility maximization problem a Walrasian demand function or correspondence.
The utility maximization problem has so far been developed by taking consumer tastes (i.e. consumer utility) as the primitive. However, an alternative way to develop microeconomic theory is by taking consumer choice as the primitive. This model of microeconomic theory is referred to as revealed preference theory.
The theory of supply and demand usually assumes that markets are perfectly competitive. This implies that there are many buyers and sellers in the market and none of them have the capacity to significantly influence prices of goods and services. In many real-life transactions, the assumption fails because some individual buyers or sellers have the ability to influence prices. Quite often, a sophisticated analysis is required to understand the demand-supply equation of a good model. However, the theory works well in situations meeting these assumptions.
Mainstream economics does not assume "a priori" that markets are preferable to other forms of social organization. In fact, much analysis is devoted to cases where market failures lead to resource allocation that is suboptimal and creates deadweight loss. A classic example of suboptimal resource allocation is that of a public good. In such cases, economists may attempt to find policies that avoid waste, either directly by government control, indirectly by regulation that induces market participants to act in a manner consistent with optimal welfare, or by creating "missing markets" to enable efficient trading where none had previously existed.
This is studied in the field of collective action and public choice theory. "Optimal welfare" usually takes on a Paretian norm, which is a mathematical application of the Kaldor–Hicks method. This can diverge from the Utilitarian goal of maximizing utility because it does not consider the distribution of goods between people. Market failure in positive economics (microeconomics) is limited in implications without mixing the belief of the economist and their theory.
The demand for various commodities by individuals is generally thought of as the outcome of a utility-maximizing process, with each individual trying to maximize their own utility under a budget constraint and a given consumption set.
Economists commonly consider themselves microeconomists or macroeconomists. The difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics was introduced in 1933 by the Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch, the co-recipient of the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969.
Consumer demand theory relates preferences for the consumption of both goods and services to the consumption expenditures; ultimately, this relationship between preferences and consumption expenditures is used to relate preferences to consumer demand curves. The link between personal preferences, consumption and the demand curve is one of the most closely studied relations in economics. It is a way of analyzing how consumers may achieve equilibrium between preferences and expenditures by maximizing utility subject to consumer budget constraints.
Production theory is the study of production, or the economic process of converting inputs into outputs. Production uses resources to create a good or service that is suitable for use, gift-giving in a gift economy, or exchange in a market economy. This can include manufacturing, storing, shipping, and packaging. Some economists define production broadly as all economic activity other than consumption. They see every commercial activity other than the final purchase as some form of production.
The cost-of-production theory of value states that the price of an object or condition is determined by the sum of the cost of the resources that went into making it. The cost can comprise any of the factors of production (including labor, capital, or land) and taxation. Technology can be viewed either as a form of fixed capital (e.g. an industrial plant) or circulating capital (e.g. intermediate goods).
In the mathematical model for the cost of production, the short-run total cost is equal to fixed cost plus total variable cost. The fixed cost refers to the cost that is incurred regardless of how much the firm produces. The variable cost is a function of the quantity of an object being produced. The cost function can be used to characterize production through the duality theory in economics, developed mainly by Ronald Shephard (1953, 1970) and other scholars (Sickles & Zelenyuk, 2019, ch.2).
Opportunity cost is closely related to the idea of time constraints. One can do only one thing at a time, which means that, inevitably, one is always giving up other things. The opportunity cost of any activity is the value of the next-best alternative thing one may have done instead. Opportunity cost depends only on the value of the next-best alternative. It doesn't matter whether one has five alternatives or 5,000.
Opportunity costs can tell when "not" to do something as well as when to do something. For example, one may like waffles, but like chocolate even more. If someone offers only waffles, one would take it. But if offered waffles or chocolate, one would take the chocolate. The opportunity cost of eating waffles is sacrificing the chance to eat chocolate. Because the cost of not eating the chocolate is higher than the benefits of eating the waffles, it makes no sense to choose waffles. Of course, if one chooses chocolate, they are still faced with the opportunity cost of giving up having waffles. But one is willing to do that because the waffle's opportunity cost is lower than the benefits of the chocolate. Opportunity costs are unavoidable constraints on behaviour because one has to decide what's best and give up the next-best alternative.
Supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a perfectly competitive market. It concludes that in a perfectly competitive market with no externalities, per unit taxes, or price controls, the unit price for a particular good is the price at which the quantity demanded by consumers equals the quantity supplied by producers. This price results in a stable economic equilibrium.
Prices and quantities have been described as the most directly observable attributes of goods produced and exchanged in a market economy. The theory of supply and demand is an organizing principle for explaining how prices coordinate the amounts produced and consumed. In microeconomics, it applies to price and output determination for a market with perfect competition, which includes the condition of no buyers or sellers large enough to have price-setting power.
For a given market of a commodity, demand is the relation of the quantity that all buyers would be prepared to purchase at each unit price of the good. Demand is often represented by a table or a graph showing price and quantity demanded (as in the figure). Demand theory describes individual consumers as rationally choosing the most preferred quantity of each good, given income, prices, tastes, etc. A term for this is "constrained utility maximization" (with income and wealth as the constraints on demand). Here, utility refers to the hypothesized relation of each individual consumer for ranking different commodity bundles as more or less preferred.
The law of demand states that, in general, price and quantity demanded in a given market are inversely related. That is, the higher the price of a product, the less of it people would be prepared to buy (other things unchanged). As the price of a commodity falls, consumers move toward it from relatively more expensive goods (the substitution effect). In addition, purchasing power from the price decline increases ability to buy (the income effect). Other factors can change demand; for example an increase in income will shift the demand curve for a normal good outward relative to the origin, as in the figure. All determinants are predominantly taken as constant factors of demand and supply.
"Supply" is the relation between the price of a good and the quantity available for sale at that price. It may be represented as a table or graph relating price and quantity supplied. Producers, for example business firms, are hypothesized to be "profit maximizers", meaning that they attempt to produce and supply the amount of goods that will bring them the highest profit. Supply is typically represented as a function relating price and quantity, if other factors are unchanged.
That is, the higher the price at which the good can be sold, the more of it producers will supply, as in the figure. The higher price makes it profitable to increase production. Just as on the demand side, the position of the supply can shift, say from a change in the price of a productive input or a technical improvement. The "Law of Supply" states that, in general, a rise in price leads to an expansion in supply and a fall in price leads to a contraction in supply. Here as well, the determinants of supply, such as price of substitutes, cost of production, technology applied and various factors inputs of production are all taken to be constant for a specific time period of evaluation of supply.
Market equilibrium occurs where quantity supplied equals quantity demanded, the intersection of the supply and demand curves in the figure above. At a price below equilibrium, there is a shortage of quantity supplied compared to quantity demanded. This is posited to bid the price up. At a price above equilibrium, there is a surplus of quantity supplied compared to quantity demanded. This pushes the price down. The model of supply and demand predicts that for given supply and demand curves, price and quantity will stabilize at the price that makes quantity supplied equal to quantity demanded. Similarly, demand-and-supply theory predicts a new price-quantity combination from a shift in demand (as to the figure), or in supply.
For a given quantity of a consumer good, the point on the demand curve indicates the value, or marginal utility, to consumers for that unit. It measures what the consumer would be prepared to pay for that unit. The corresponding point on the supply curve measures marginal cost, the increase in total cost to the supplier for the corresponding unit of the good. The price in equilibrium is determined by supply and demand. In a perfectly competitive market, supply and demand equate marginal cost and marginal utility at equilibrium.
On the supply side of the market, some factors of production are described as (relatively) "variable" in the short run, which affects the cost of changing output levels. Their usage rates can be changed easily, such as electrical power, raw-material inputs, and over-time and temp work. Other inputs are relatively "fixed", such as plant and equipment and key personnel. In the long run, all inputs may be adjusted by management. These distinctions translate to differences in the elasticity (responsiveness) of the supply curve in the short and long runs and corresponding differences in the price-quantity change from a shift on the supply or demand side of the market.
Marginalist theory, such as above, describes the consumers as attempting to reach most-preferred positions, subject to income and wealth constraints while producers attempt to maximize profits subject to their own constraints, including demand for goods produced, technology, and the price of inputs. For the consumer, that point comes where marginal utility of a good, net of price, reaches zero, leaving no net gain from further consumption increases. Analogously, the producer compares marginal revenue (identical to price for the perfect competitor) against the marginal cost of a good, with "marginal profit" the difference. At the point where marginal profit reaches zero, further increases in production of the good stop. For movement to market equilibrium and for changes in equilibrium, price and quantity also change "at the margin": more-or-less of something, rather than necessarily all-or-nothing.
Other applications of demand and supply include the distribution of income among the factors of production, including labour and capital, through factor markets. In a competitive labour market for example the quantity of labour employed and the price of labour (the wage rate) depends on the demand for labour (from employers for production) and supply of labour (from potential workers). Labour economics examines the interaction of workers and employers through such markets to explain patterns and changes of wages and other labour income, labour mobility, and (un)employment, productivity through human capital, and related public-policy issues.
Demand-and-supply analysis is used to explain the behaviour of perfectly competitive markets, but as a standard of comparison it can be extended to any type of market. It can also be generalized to explain variables across the economy, for example, total output (estimated as real GDP) and the general price level, as studied in macroeconomics. Tracing the qualitative and quantitative effects of variables that change supply and demand, whether in the short or long run, is a standard exercise in applied economics. Economic theory may also specify conditions such that supply and demand through the market is an efficient mechanism for allocating resources.
Market structure refers to features of a market, including the number of firms in the market, the distribution of market shares between them, product uniformity across firms, how easy it is for firms to enter and exit the market, and forms of competition in the market. A market structure can have several types of interacting market systems.
Different forms of markets are a feature of capitalism and market socialism, with advocates of state socialism often criticizing markets and aiming to substitute or replace markets with varying degrees of government-directed economic planning.
Competition acts as a regulatory mechanism for market systems, with government providing regulations where the market cannot be expected to regulate itself. One example of this is with regards to building codes, which if absent in a purely competition regulated market system, might result in several horrific injuries or deaths to be required before companies would begin improving structural safety, as consumers may at first not be as concerned or aware of safety issues to begin putting pressure on companies to provide them, and companies would be motivated not to provide proper safety features due to how it would cut into their profits.
The concept of "market type" is different from the concept of "market structure." Nevertheless, it is worth noting here that there are a variety of types of markets.
Perfect competition is a situation in which numerous small firms producing identical products compete against each other in a given industry. Perfect competition leads to firms producing the socially optimal output level at the minimum possible cost per unit. Firms in perfect competition are "price takers" (they do not have enough market power to profitably increase the price of their goods or services). A good example would be that of digital marketplaces, such as eBay, on which many different sellers sell similar products to many different buyers. Consumers in a perfect competitive market have perfect knowledge about the products that are being sold in this market.
Imperfect competition is a type of market structure showing some but not all features of competitive markets.
Monopolistic competition is a situation in which many firms with slightly different products compete. Production costs are above what may be achieved by perfectly competitive firms, but society benefits from the product differentiation. Examples of industries with market structures similar to monopolistic competition include restaurants, cereal, clothing, shoes, and service industries in large cities.
A monopoly is a market structure in which a market or industry is dominated by a single supplier of a particular good or service. Because monopolies have no competition they tend to sell goods and services at a higher price and produce below the socially optimal output level. However, not all monopolies are a bad thing, especially in industries where multiple firms would result in more costs than benefits (i.e. natural monopolies).
An oligopoly is a market structure in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of firms (oligopolists). Oligopolies can create the incentive for firms to engage in collusion and form cartels that reduce competition leading to higher prices for consumers and less overall market output. Alternatively, oligopolies can be fiercely competitive and engage in flamboyant advertising campaigns.
A monopsony is a market where there is only one buyer and many sellers.
A bilateral monopoly is a market consisting of both a monopoly (a single seller) and a monopsony (a single buyer).
An oligopsony is a market where there are a few buyers and many sellers.
Game theory is a major method used in mathematical economics and business for modeling competing behaviors of interacting agents. The term "game" here implies the study of any strategic interaction between people. Applications include a wide array of economic phenomena and approaches, such as auctions, bargaining, mergers & acquisitions pricing, fair division, duopolies, oligopolies, social network formation, agent-based computational economics, general equilibrium, mechanism design, and voting systems, and across such broad areas as experimental economics, behavioral economics, information economics, industrial organization, and political economy.
Information economics is a branch of microeconomic theory that studies how information and information systems affect an economy and economic decisions. Information has special characteristics. It is easy to create but hard to trust. It is easy to spread but hard to control. It influences many decisions. These special characteristics (as compared with other types of goods) complicate many standard economic theories. The economics of information has recently become of great interest to many - possibly due to the rise of information based companies inside the technology industry. From a game theory approach, we can loosen the usual constraints that agents have complete information to further examine the consequences of having incomplete information. This gives rise to many results which are applicable to real life situations. For example, if one does loosen this assumption, then it is possible to scrutinize the actions of agents in situations of uncertainty. It is also possible to more fully understand the impacts – both positive and negative – of agents seeking out or acquiring information.
Applied microeconomics includes a range of specialized areas of study, many of which draw on methods from other fields.
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Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix "makro-" meaning "large" + "economics") is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as GDP, unemployment rates, national income, price indices, output, consumption, unemployment, inflation, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
Macroeconomics and microeconomics are the two most general fields in economics.
Macroeconomics descended from the once divided fields of business cycle theory and monetary theory. The quantity theory of money was particularly influential prior to World War II. It took many forms, including the version based on the work of Irving Fisher:
In the typical view of the quantity theory, money velocity (V) and the quantity of goods produced (Q) would be constant, so any increase in money supply (M) would lead to a direct increase in price level (P). The quantity theory of money was a central part of the classical theory of the economy that prevailed in the early twentieth century.
Ludwig Von Mises's work "Theory of Money and Credit", published in 1912, was one of the first books from the Austrian School to deal with macroeconomic topics.
Macroeconomics, at least in its modern form, began with the publication of John Maynard Keynes's "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money". When the Great Depression struck, classical economists had difficulty explaining how goods could go unsold and workers could be left unemployed. In classical theory, prices and wages would drop until the market cleared, and all goods and labor were sold. Keynes offered a new theory of economics that explained why markets might not clear, which would evolve (later in the 20th century) into a group of macroeconomic schools of thought known as Keynesian economics – also called Keynesianism or Keynesian theory.
In Keynes's theory, the quantity theory broke down because people and businesses tend to hold on to their cash in tough economic times – a phenomenon he described in terms of liquidity preferences. Keynes also explained how the multiplier effect would magnify a small decrease in consumption or investment and cause declines throughout the economy. Keynes also noted the role uncertainty and animal spirits can play in the economy.
The generation following Keynes combined the macroeconomics of the "General Theory" with neoclassical microeconomics to create the neoclassical synthesis. By the 1950s, most economists had accepted the synthesis view of the macroeconomy. Economists like Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, James Tobin, and Robert Solow developed formal Keynesian models and contributed formal theories of consumption, investment, and money demand that fleshed out the Keynesian framework.
Milton Friedman updated the quantity theory of money to include a role for money demand. He argued that the role of money in the economy was sufficient to explain the Great Depression, and that aggregate demand oriented explanations were not necessary. Friedman also argued that monetary policy was more effective than fiscal policy; however, Friedman doubted the government's ability to "fine-tune" the economy with monetary policy. He generally favored a policy of steady growth in money supply instead of frequent intervention.
Friedman also challenged the Phillips curve relationship between inflation and unemployment. Friedman and Edmund Phelps (who was not a monetarist) proposed an "augmented" version of the Phillips curve that excluded the possibility of a stable, long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. When the oil shocks of the 1970s created a high unemployment and high inflation, Friedman and Phelps were vindicated. Monetarism was particularly influential in the early 1980s. Monetarism fell out of favor when central banks found it difficult to target money supply instead of interest rates as monetarists recommended. Monetarism also became politically unpopular when the central banks created recessions in order to slow inflation.
New classical macroeconomics further challenged the Keynesian school. A central development in new classical thought came when Robert Lucas introduced rational expectations to macroeconomics. Prior to Lucas, economists had generally used adaptive expectations where agents were assumed to look at the recent past to make expectations about the future. Under rational expectations, agents are assumed to be more sophisticated. A consumer will not simply assume a 2% inflation rate just because that has been the average the past few years; they will look at current monetary policy and economic conditions to make an informed forecast. When new classical economists introduced rational expectations into their models, they showed that monetary policy could only have a limited impact.
Lucas also made an influential critique of Keynesian empirical models. He argued that forecasting models based on empirical relationships would keep producing the same predictions even as the underlying model generating the data changed. He advocated models based on fundamental economic theory that would, in principle, be structurally accurate as economies changed. Following Lucas's critique, new classical economists, led by Edward C. Prescott and Finn E. Kydland, created real business cycle (RB C) models of the macro economy.
RB C models were created by combining fundamental equations from neo-classical microeconomics. In order to generate macroeconomic fluctuations, RB C models explained recessions and unemployment with changes in technology instead of changes in the markets for goods or money. Critics of RB C models argue that money clearly plays an important role in the economy, and the idea that technological regress can explain recent recessions is implausible. However, technological shocks are only the more prominent of a myriad of possible shocks to the system that can be modeled. Despite questions about the theory behind RB C models, they have clearly been influential in economic methodology.
New Keynesian economists responded to the new classical school by adopting rational expectations and focusing on developing micro-founded models that are immune to the Lucas critique. Stanley Fischer and John B. Taylor produced early work in this area by showing that monetary policy could be effective even in models with rational expectations when contracts locked in wages for workers. Other new Keynesian economists, including Olivier Blanchard, Julio Rotemberg, Greg Mankiw, David Romer, and Michael Woodford, expanded on this work and demonstrated other cases where inflexible prices and wages led to monetary and fiscal policy having real effects.
Like classical models, new classical models had assumed that prices would be able to adjust perfectly and monetary policy would only lead to price changes. New Keynesian models investigated sources of sticky prices and wages due to imperfect competition, which would not adjust, allowing monetary policy to impact quantities instead of prices.
By the late 1990s economists had reached a rough consensus. The nominal rigidity of new Keynesian theory was combined with rational expectations and the RBC methodology to produce dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. The fusion of elements from different schools of thought has been dubbed the new neoclassical synthesis. These models are now used by many central banks and are a core part of contemporary macroeconomics.
New Keynesian economics, which developed partly in response to new classical economics, strives to provide microeconomic foundations to Keynesian economics by showing how imperfect markets can justify demand management.
The AD-AS model has become the standard textbook model for explaining the macroeconomy. This model shows the price level and level of real output given the equilibrium in aggregate demand and aggregate supply. The aggregate demand curve's downward slope means that more output is demanded at lower price levels. The downward slope is the result of three effects: the Pigou or real balance effect, which states that as real prices fall, real wealth increases, resulting in higher consumer demand of goods; the Keynes or interest rate effect, which states that as prices fall, the demand for money decreases, causing interest rates to decline and borrowing for investment and consumption to increase; and the net export effect, which states that as prices rise, domestic goods become comparatively more expensive to foreign consumers, leading to a decline in exports.
In the conventional Keynesian use of the AS-AD model, the aggregate supply curve is horizontal at low levels of output and becomes inelastic near the point of potential output, which corresponds with full employment. Since the economy cannot produce beyond the potential output, any AD expansion will lead to higher price levels instead of higher output.
The AD–AS diagram can model a variety of macroeconomic phenomena, including inflation. Changes in the non-price level factors or determinants cause changes in aggregate demand and shifts of the entire aggregate demand (AD) curve. When demand for goods exceeds supply there is an inflationary gap where demand-pull inflation occurs and the AD curve shifts upward to a higher price level. When the economy faces higher costs, cost-push inflation occurs and the AS curve shifts upward to higher price levels. The AS–AD diagram is also widely used as a pedagogical tool to model the effects of various macroeconomic policies.
The IS–LM model gives the underpinnings of aggregate demand (itself discussed above). It answers the question “At any given price level, what is the quantity of goods demanded?” This model shows what combination of interest rates and output will ensure equilibrium in both the goods and money markets. The goods market is modeled as giving equality between investment and public and private saving (IS), and the money market is modeled as giving equilibrium between the money supply and liquidity preference.
The IS curve consists of the points (combinations of income and interest rate) where investment, given the interest rate, is equal to public and private saving, given output The IS curve is downward sloping because output and the interest rate have an inverse relationship in the goods market: as output increases, more income is saved, which means interest rates must be lower to spur enough investment to match saving.
The LM curve is upward sloping because the interest rate and output have a positive relationship in the money market: as income (identically equal to output) increases, the demand for money increases, resulting in a rise in the interest rate in order to just offset the incipient rise in money demand.
The IS-LM model is often used to demonstrate the effects of monetary and fiscal policy. Textbooks frequently use the IS-LM model, but it does not feature the complexities of most modern macroeconomic models. Nevertheless, these models still feature similar relationships to those in IS-LM.
The neoclassical growth model of Robert Solow has become a common textbook model for explaining economic growth in the long-run. The model begins with a production function where national output is the product of two inputs: capital and labor. The Solow model assumes that labor and capital are used at constant rates without the fluctuations in unemployment and capital utilization commonly seen in business cycles.
An increase in output, or economic growth, can only occur because of an increase in the capital stock, a larger population, or technological advancements that lead to higher productivity (total factor productivity). An increase in the savings rate leads to a temporary increase as the economy creates more capital, which adds to output. However, eventually the depreciation rate will limit the expansion of capital: savings will be used up replacing depreciated capital, and no savings will remain to pay for an additional expansion in capital. Solow's model suggests that economic growth in terms of output per capita depends solely on technological advances that enhance productivity.
In the 1980s and 1990s endogenous growth theory arose to challenge neoclassical growth theory. This group of models explains economic growth through other factors, such as increasing returns to scale for capital and learning-by-doing, that are endogenously determined instead of the exogenous technological improvement used to explain growth in Solow's model.
Macroeconomics encompasses a variety of concepts and variables, but there are three central topics for macroeconomic research. Macroeconomic theories usually relate the phenomena of output, unemployment, and inflation. Outside of macroeconomic theory, these topics are also important to all economic agents including workers, consumers, and producers.
National output is the total amount of everything a country produces in a given period of time. Everything that is produced and sold generates an equal amount of income. The total output of the economy is measured GDP per person. The output and income are usually considered equivalent and the two terms are often used interchangeably, output changes into income. Output can be measured or it can be viewed from the production side and measured as the total value of final goods and services or the sum of all value added in the economy.
Macroeconomic output is usually measured by gross domestic product (GDP) or one of the other national accounts. Economists interested in long-run increases in output study economic growth. Advances in technology, accumulation of machinery and other capital, and better education and human capital are all factors that lead to increase economic output over time. However, output does not always increase consistently over time. Business cycles can cause short-term drops in output called recessions. Economists look for macroeconomic policies that prevent economies from slipping into recessions and that lead to faster long-term growth.
The amount of unemployment in an economy is measured by the unemployment rate, i.e. the percentage of workers without jobs in the labor force. The unemployment rate in the labor force only includes workers actively looking for jobs. People who are retired, pursuing education, or discouraged from seeking work by a lack of job prospects are excluded.
Unemployment can be generally broken down into several types that are related to different causes.
A general price increase across the entire economy is called inflation. When prices decrease, there is deflation. Economists measure these changes in prices with price indexes. Inflation can occur when an economy becomes overheated and grows too quickly. Similarly, a declining economy can lead to deflation.
Central bankers, who manage a country's money supply, try to avoid changes in price level by using monetary policy. Raising interest rates or reducing the supply of money in an economy will reduce inflation. Inflation can lead to increased uncertainty and other negative consequences. Deflation can lower economic output. Central bankers try to stabilize prices to protect economies from the negative consequences of price changes.
Changes in price level may be the result of several factors. The quantity theory of money holds that changes in price level are directly related to changes in the money supply. Most economists believe that this relationship explains long-run changes in the price level. Short-run fluctuations may also be related to monetary factors, but changes in aggregate demand and aggregate supply can also influence price level. For example, a decrease in demand due to a recession can lead to lower price levels and deflation. A negative supply shock, such as an oil crisis, lowers aggregate supply and can cause inflation.
Macroeconomic policy is usually implemented through two sets of tools: fiscal and monetary policy. Both forms of policy are used to stabilize the economy, which can mean boosting the economy to the level of GDP consistent with full employment. Macroeconomic policy focuses on limiting the effects of the business cycle to achieve the economic goals of price stability, full employment, and growth.
Central banks implement monetary policy by controlling the money supply through several mechanisms. Typically, central banks take action by issuing money to buy bonds (or other assets), which boosts the supply of money and lowers interest rates, or, in the case of contractionary monetary policy, banks sell bonds and take money out of circulation. Usually policy is not implemented by directly targeting the supply of money.
Central banks continuously shift the money supply to maintain a targeted fixed interest rate. Some of them allow the interest rate to fluctuate and focus on targeting inflation rates instead. Central banks generally try to achieve high output without letting loose monetary policy that create large amounts of inflation.
Conventional monetary policy can be ineffective in situations such as a liquidity trap. When interest rates and inflation are near zero, the central bank cannot loosen monetary policy through conventional means.
Central banks can use unconventional monetary policy such as quantitative easing to help increase output. Instead of buying government bonds, central banks can implement quantitative easing by buying not only government bonds, but also other assets such as corporate bonds, stocks, and other securities. This allows lower interest rates for a broader class of assets beyond government bonds. In another example of unconventional monetary policy, the United States Federal Reserve recently made an attempt at such a policy with Operation Twist. Unable to lower current interest rates, the Federal Reserve lowered long-term interest rates by buying long-term bonds and selling short-term bonds to create a flat yield curve.
Fiscal policy is the use of government's revenue and expenditure as instruments to influence the economy. Examples of such tools are expenditure, taxes, debt.
For example, if the economy is producing less than potential output, government spending can be used to employ idle resources and boost output. Government spending does not have to make up for the entire output gap. There is a multiplier effect that boosts the impact of government spending. For instance, when the government pays for a bridge, the project not only adds the value of the bridge to output, but also allows the bridge workers to increase their consumption and investment, which helps to close the output gap.
The effects of fiscal policy can be limited by crowding out. When the government takes on spending projects, it limits the amount of resources available for the private sector to use. Crowding out occurs when government spending simply replaces private sector output instead of adding additional output to the economy. Crowding out also occurs when government spending raises interest rates, which limits investment. Defenders of fiscal stimulus argue that crowding out is not a concern when the economy is depressed, plenty of resources are left idle, and interest rates are low.
Fiscal policy can be implemented through automatic stabilizers. Automatic stabilizers do not suffer from the policy lags of discretionary fiscal policy. Automatic stabilizers use conventional fiscal mechanisms but take effect as soon as the economy takes a downturn: spending on unemployment benefits automatically increases when unemployment rises and, in a progressive income tax system, the effective tax rate automatically falls when incomes decline.
Economists usually favor monetary over fiscal policy because it has two major advantages. First, monetary policy is generally implemented by independent central banks instead of the political institutions that control fiscal policy. Independent central banks are less likely to make decisions based on political motives. Second, monetary policy suffers shorter inside lags and outside lags than fiscal policy. Central banks can quickly make and implement decisions while the discretionary fiscal policy may take time to pass and even longer to carry out.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18820
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Mary Pickford
Gladys Louise Smith (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979), known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born American film actress and producer with a career spanning 50 years. She was a co-founder of the Pickford–Fairbanks Studios with Douglas Fairbanks and the United Artists studio with Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith, and she was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presents the yearly Oscar Awards ceremony.
Pickford was known in her prime as "America's Sweetheart" and the "girl with the curls". She was one of the Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and a significant figure in the development of film acting. She was one of the earliest stars to be billed under her own name, and was one of the most popular actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, earning the nickname "Queen of the Movies". She is credited with having defined the type in cinema.
She was awarded the second Academy Award for Best Actress for her first sound film role in "Coquette" (1929), and she also received an Academy Honorary Award in 1976 in consideration of her contributions to American cinema. The American Film Institute ranked her as 24th in its 1999 list of greatest female stars of classic Hollywood Cinema.
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892 (although she later claimed 1893 or 1894 as her year of birth) at 211 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of English Methodist immigrants, and worked a variety of odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessey, was of Irish Catholic descent and worked for a time as a seamstress. She had two younger siblings, Charlotte, called "Lottie" (born 1893), and John Charles, called "Jack" (born 1896), who also became actors. To please her husband's relatives, Pickford's mother baptized her children as Methodists, the religion of their father. John Charles Smith was an alcoholic; he abandoned the family and died on February 11, 1898, from a fatal blood clot caused by a workplace accident when he was a purser with Niagara Steamship.
When Gladys was four years old, her household was under infectious quarantine as a public health measure. Their devoutly Catholic maternal grandmother (Catherine Faeley Hennessey) asked a visiting Roman Catholic priest to baptize the children. Pickford was at this time baptized as Gladys Marie Smith.
After being widowed in 1899, Charlotte Smith began taking in boarders, one of whom was a Mr. Murphy, the theatrical stage manager for Cummings Stock Company, who soon suggested that Gladys, then age seven, and Lottie, then age six, be given two small theatrical roles – Gladys portrayed a girl and a boy, while Lottie was cast in a silent part in the company's production of "The Silver King" at Toronto's Princess Theatre (destroyed by fire in 1915, rebuilt, demolished in 1931), while their mother played the organ. Pickford subsequently acted in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company, finally playing the major child role in its version of "The Silver King". She capped her short career in Toronto with the starring role of Little Eva in the Valentine production of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", adapted from the 1852 novel.
By the early 1900s, theatre had become a family enterprise. Gladys, her mother and two younger siblings toured the United States by rail, performing in third-rate companies and plays. After six impoverished years, Pickford allowed one more summer to land a leading role on Broadway, planning to quit acting if she failed. In 1906 Gladys, Lottie and Jack Smith supported singer Chauncey Olcott on Broadway in "Edmund Burke". Gladys finally landed a supporting role in a 1907 Broadway play, "The Warrens of Virginia". The play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, Cecil, appeared in the cast. David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name Mary Pickford. After completing the Broadway run and touring the play, however, Pickford was again out of work.
On April 19, 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her at the company's New York studio for a role in the nickelodeon film "Pippa Passes". The role went to someone else but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford. She quickly grasped that movie acting was simpler than the stylized stage acting of the day. Most Biograph actors earned $5 a day but, after Pickford's single day in the studio, Griffith agreed to pay her $10 a day against a guarantee of $40 a week.
Pickford, like all actors at Biograph, played both bit parts and leading roles, including mothers, ingenues, charwomen, spitfires, slaves, Native Americans, spurned women, and a prostitute. As Pickford said of her success at Biograph:I played scrubwomen and secretaries and women of all nationalities ... I decided that if I could get into as many pictures as possible, I'd become known, and there would be a demand for my work. She appeared in 51 films in 1909 – almost one a week - with her first starring role being in "The Violin Maker of Cremona" opposite future husband Owen Moore. While at Biograph, she suggested to Florence La Badie to "try pictures", invited her to the studio and later introduced her to D. W. Griffith, who launched La Badie's career.
In January 1910, Pickford traveled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles. Many other film companies wintered on the West Coast, escaping the weak light and short days that hampered winter shooting in the East. Pickford added to her 1909 Biographs ("Sweet and Twenty", "They Would Elope," and "To Save Her Soul", to name a few) with films made in California.
Actors were not listed in the credits in Griffith's company. Audiences noticed and identified Pickford within weeks of her first film appearance. Exhibitors, in turn, capitalized on her popularity by advertising on sandwich boards that a film featuring "The Girl with the Golden Curls", "Blondilocks", or "The Biograph Girl" was inside.
Pickford left Biograph in December 1910. The following year, she starred in films at Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). IMP was absorbed into Universal Pictures in 1912, along with Majestic. Unhappy with their creative standards, Pickford returned to work with Griffith in 1912. Some of her best performances were in his films, such as "Friends", "The Mender of Nets", "Just Like a Woman", and "The Female of the Species". That year, Pickford also introduced Dorothy and Lillian Gish– whom she had befriended as new neighbors from Ohio –to Griffith, and each became major silent film stars, in comedy and tragedy, respectively. Pickford made her last Biograph picture, "The New York Hat", in late 1912.
She returned to Broadway in the David Belasco production of "A Good Little Devil" (1912). This was a major turning point in her career. Pickford, who had always hoped to conquer the Broadway stage, discovered how deeply she missed film acting. In 1913, she decided to work exclusively in film. The previous year, Adolph Zukor had formed Famous Players in Famous Plays. It was later known as Famous Players-Lasky and then Paramount Pictures, one of the first American feature film companies.
Pickford left the stage to join Zukor's roster of stars. Zukor believed film's potential lay in recording theatrical players in replicas of their most famous stage roles and productions. Zukor first filmed Pickford in a silent version of "A Good Little Devil". The film, produced in 1913, showed the play's Broadway actors reciting every line of dialogue, resulting in a stiff film that Pickford later called "one of the worst [features] I ever made ... it was deadly". Zukor agreed; he held the film back from distribution for a year.
Pickford's work in material written for the camera by that time had attracted a strong following. Comedy-dramas, such as "In the Bishop's Carriage" (1913), "Caprice" (1913), and especially "Hearts Adrift" (1914), made her irresistible to moviegoers. "Hearts Adrift" was so popular that Pickford asked for the first of her many publicized pay raises based on the profits and reviews. The film marked the first time Pickford's name was featured above the title on movie marquees. "Tess of the Storm Country" was released five weeks later. Biographer Kevin Brownlow observed that the film "sent her career into orbit and made her the most popular actress in America, if not the world".
Her appeal was summed up two years later by the February 1916 issue of "Photoplay" as "luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity". Only Charlie Chaplin, who slightly surpassed Pickford's popularity in 1916, had a similarly spellbinding pull with critics and the audience. Each enjoyed a level of fame far exceeding that of other actors. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Pickford was believed to be the most famous woman in the world, or, as a silent-film journalist described her, "the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history".
Pickford starred in 52 features throughout her career. On June 24, 1916, Pickford signed a new contract with Zukor that granted her full authority over production of the films in which she starred, and a record-breaking salary of $10,000 a week. In addition, Pickford's compensation was half of a film's profits, with a guarantee of $1,040,000 (US$ in 2020), making her the first actress to sign a million dollar contract. She also became vice-president of Pickford Film Corporation.
Occasionally, she played a child, in films such as "The Poor Little Rich Girl" (1917), "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" (1917), "Daddy-Long-Legs" (1919) and "Pollyanna" (1920). Pickford's fans were devoted to these "little girl" roles, but they were not typical of her career. Due to her lack of a normal childhood, she enjoyed making these pictures. Given how small she was at under five feet, and her naturalistic acting abilities, she was very successful in these roles. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., when he first met her in person as a boy, assumed she was a new playmate for him, and asked her to come and play trains with him, which she obligingly did.
In August 1918, Pickford's contract expired and, when refusing Zukor's terms for a renewal, she was offered $250,000 to leave the motion picture business. She declined, and went to First National Pictures, which agreed to her terms. In 1919, Pickford, along with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, formed the independent film production company United Artists. Through United Artists, Pickford continued to produce and perform in her own movies; she could also distribute them as she chose. In 1920, Pickford's film "Pollyanna" grossed around $1,100,000. The following year, Pickford's film "Little Lord Fauntleroy" was also a success, and in 1923, "Rosita" grossed over $1,000,000 as well. During this period, she also made "Little Annie Rooney" (1925), another film in which Pickford played a child, "Sparrows" (1926), which blended the Dickensian with newly minted German expressionist style, and "My Best Girl" (1927), a romantic comedy featuring her future husband Buddy Rogers.
The arrival of sound was her undoing. Pickford underestimated the value of adding sound to movies, claiming that "adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo".
She played a reckless socialite in "Coquette" (1929), her first talkie, a role for which her famous ringlets were cut into a 1920s' bob. Pickford had already cut her hair in the wake of her mother's death in 1928. Fans were shocked at the transformation. Pickford's hair had become a symbol of female virtue, and when she cut it, the act made front-page news in "The New York Times" and other papers. "Coquette" was a success and won her an Academy Award for Best Actress, although this was highly controversial. The public failed to respond to her in the more sophisticated roles. Like most movie stars of the silent era, Pickford found her career fading as talkies became more popular among audiences.
Her next film, "The Taming of The Shrew", made with husband Douglas Fairbanks, was not well received at the box office. Established Hollywood actors were panicked by the impending arrival of the talkies. On March 29, 1928, "The Dodge Brothers Hour" was broadcast from Pickford's bungalow, featuring Fairbanks, Chaplin, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, John Barrymore, D.W. Griffith, and Dolores del Río, among others. They spoke on the radio show to prove that they could meet the challenge of talking movies.
A transition in the roles Pickford selected came when she was in her late 30s, no longer able to play the children, teenage spitfires, and feisty young women so adored by her fans, and was not suited for the glamorous and vampish heroines of early sound. In 1933, she underwent a Technicolor screen test for an animated/live action film version of "Alice in Wonderland", but Walt Disney discarded the project when Paramount released its own version of the book. Only one Technicolor still of her screen test still exists.
She retired from film acting in 1933 following three costly failures with her last film appearance being "Secrets". She appeared on stage in Chicago in 1934 in the play "The Church Mouse" and went on tour in 1935, starting in Seattle with the stage version of "Coquette". She also appeared in a season of radio plays for NBC in 1935 and CBS in 1936. In 1936 she became vice-president of United Artists and continued to produce films for others, including "One Rainy Afternoon" (1936), "The Gay Desperado" (1936), "Sleep, My Love" (1948; with Claudette Colbert) and "Love Happy" (1949), with the Marx Brothers.
Pickford used her stature in the movie industry to promote a variety of causes. Although her image depicted fragility and innocence, she proved to be a strong businesswoman who took control of her career in a cutthroat industry.
During World War I she promoted the sale of Liberty Bonds, making an intensive series of fund-raising speeches, beginning in Washington, D.C., where she sold bonds alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, and Marie Dressler. Five days later she spoke on Wall Street to an estimated 50,000 people. Though Canadian-born, she was a powerful symbol of Americana, kissing the American flag for cameras and auctioning one of her world-famous curls for $15,000. In a single speech in Chicago she sold an estimated five million dollars' worth of bonds. She was christened the U.S. Navy's official "Little Sister"; the Army named two cannons after her and made her an honorary colonel.
In 1916, Pickford and Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille helped found the Hollywood Studio Club, a dormitory for young women involved in the motion picture business. At the end of World War I, Pickford conceived of the Motion Picture Relief Fund, an organization to help financially needy actors. Leftover funds from her work selling Liberty Bonds were put toward its creation, and in 1921, the Motion Picture Relief Fund (MPRF) was officially incorporated, with Joseph Schenck voted its first president and Pickford its vice president. In 1932, Pickford spearheaded the "Payroll Pledge Program", a payroll-deduction plan for studio workers who gave one half of one percent of their earnings to the MPRF. As a result, in 1940, the Fund was able to purchase land and build the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, in Woodland Hills, California.
An astute businesswoman, Pickford became her own producer within three years of her start in features. According to her Foundation, "she oversaw every aspect of the making of her films, from hiring talent and crew to overseeing the script, the shooting, the editing, to the final release and promotion of each project". She demanded (and received) these powers in 1916, when she was under contract to Zukor's Famous Players in Famous Plays (later Paramount). Zukor acquiesced to her refusal to participate in block-booking, the widespread practice of forcing an exhibitor to show a bad film of the studio's choosing to also be able to show a Pickford film. In 1916, Pickford's films were distributed, singly, through a special distribution unit called Artcraft. The Mary Pickford Corporation was briefly Pickford's motion-picture production company.
In 1919, she increased her power by co-founding United Artists (UA) with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and her soon-to-be husband, Douglas Fairbanks. Before UA's creation, Hollywood studios were vertically integrated, not only producing films but forming chains of theaters. Distributors (also part of the studios) arranged for company productions to be shown in the company's movie venues. Filmmakers relied on the studios for bookings; in return they put up with what many considered creative interference.
United Artists broke from this tradition. It was solely a distribution company, offering independent film producers access to its own screens as well as the rental of temporarily unbooked cinemas owned by other companies. Pickford and Fairbanks produced and shot their films after 1920 at the jointly owned Pickford-Fairbanks studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. The producers who signed with UA were true independents, producing, creating and controlling their work to an unprecedented degree. As a co-founder, as well as the producer and star of her own films, Pickford became the most powerful woman who has ever worked in Hollywood. By 1930, Pickford's acting career had largely faded. After retiring three years later, however, she continued to produce films for United Artists. She and Chaplin remained partners in the company for decades. Chaplin left the company in 1955, and Pickford followed suit in 1956, selling her remaining shares for $3 million.
She had bought the rights to many of her early silent films with the intention of burning them on her death, but in 1970 she agreed to donate 50 of her Biograph films to the American Film Institute. In 1976, she received an Academy Honorary Award for her contribution to American film.
Pickford was married three times. She married Owen Moore, an Irish-born silent film actor, on January 7, 1911. It is rumored she became pregnant by Moore in the early 1910s and had a miscarriage or an abortion. Some accounts suggest this resulted in her later inability to have children. The couple's marriage was strained by Moore's alcoholism, insecurity about living in the shadow of Pickford's fame, and bouts of domestic violence. The couple lived together on-and-off for several years.
Pickford became secretly involved in a relationship with Douglas Fairbanks. They toured the U.S. together in 1918 to promote Liberty Bond sales for the World War I effort. Around this time, Pickford also suffered from the flu during the 1918 flu pandemic. Pickford divorced Moore on March 2, 1920, after she agreed to his $100,000 demand for a settlement. She married Fairbanks just days later on March 28, 1920 in what was described as the "marriage of the century" and they were referred to as the King and Queen of Hollywood. They went to Europe for their honeymoon; fans in London and in Paris caused riots trying to get to the famous couple. The couple's triumphant return to Hollywood was witnessed by vast crowds who turned out to hail them at railway stations across the United States.
"The Mark of Zorro" (1920) and a series of other swashbucklers gave the popular Fairbanks a more romantic, heroic image. Pickford continued to epitomize the virtuous but fiery girl next door. Even at private parties, people instinctively stood up when Pickford entered a room; she and her husband were often referred to as "Hollywood royalty." Their international reputations were broad. Foreign heads of state and dignitaries who visited the White House often asked if they could also visit Pickfair, the couple's mansion in Beverly Hills.
Dinners at Pickfair became celebrity events. Charlie Chaplin, Fairbanks' best friend, was often present. Other guests included George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Elinor Glyn, Helen Keller, H. G. Wells, Lord Mountbatten, Fritz Kreisler, Amelia Earhart, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Noël Coward, Max Reinhardt, Baron Nishi, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Austen Chamberlain, Sir Harry Lauder, and Meher Baba, among others. The public nature of Pickford's second marriage strained it to the breaking point. Both she and Fairbanks had little time off from producing and acting in their films. They were also constantly on display as America's unofficial ambassadors to the world, leading parades, cutting ribbons, and making speeches. When their film careers both began to flounder at the end of the silent era, Fairbanks' restless nature prompted him to overseas travel (something which Pickford did not enjoy). When Fairbanks' romance with Sylvia, Lady Ashley became public in the early 1930s, he and Pickford separated. They divorced January 10, 1936. Fairbanks' son by his first wife, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., claimed his father and Pickford long regretted their inability to reconcile.
On June 24, 1937, Pickford married her third and last husband, actor and band leader Buddy Rogers. They adopted two children: Roxanne (born 1944, adopted 1944) and Ronald Charles (born 1937, adopted 1943, a.k.a. Ronnie Pickford Rogers). A PBS "American Experience" documentary described Pickford's relationship with her children as tense. She criticized their physical imperfections, including Ronnie's small stature and Roxanne's crooked teeth. Both children later said their mother was too self-absorbed to provide real maternal love. In 2003, Ronnie recalled that "Things didn't work out that much, you know. But I'll never forget her. I think that she was a good woman."
Pickford supported Thomas Dewey in the 1944 United States presidential election, Barry Goldwater in the 1964 United States presidential election and Ronald Reagan in his race for governor in 1966.
After retiring from the screen, Pickford became an alcoholic, as her father had been. Her mother Charlotte died of breast cancer in March 1928. Her siblings, Lottie and Jack, both died of alcohol-related causes. These deaths, her divorce from Fairbanks, and the end of silent films left Pickford deeply depressed. Her relationship with her adopted children, Roxanne and Ronald, was turbulent at best. Pickford withdrew and gradually became a recluse, remaining almost entirely at Pickfair and allowing visits only from Lillian Gish, her stepson Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and few other people.
In 1955, she published her memoirs, "Sunshine and Shadows". She had previously published "Why Not Try God" in 1934, an essay on spirituality and personal growth, "My Rendevouz of Life" (1935), an essay on death and her belief in an afterlife and also a novel in 1935, "The Demi-Widow". She appeared in court in 1959, in a matter pertaining to her co-ownership of North Carolina TV station WSJS-TV. The court date coincided with the date of her 67th birthday; under oath, when asked to give her age, Pickford replied: "I'm 21, going on 20."
In the mid-1960s, Pickford often received visitors only by telephone, speaking to them from her bedroom. Buddy Rogers often gave guests tours of Pickfair, including views of a genuine western bar Pickford had bought for Douglas Fairbanks, and a portrait of Pickford in the drawing room. A print of this image now hangs in the Library of Congress. When Pickford received an Academy Honorary Award in 1976, the Academy sent a TV crew to her house to record her short statement of thanks – offering the public a very rare glimpse into Pickfair Manor. Charitable events continued to be held at Pickfair, including an annual Christmas party for blind war veterans, mostly from World War I.
Pickford believed that she had ceased to be a British subject when she married an American citizen upon her marriage to Fairbanks in 1920. Thus, she never acquired Canadian citizenship when it was first created in 1947. However, Pickford held and traveled under a British/Canadian passport which she renewed regularly at the British/Canadian consulates in Los Angeles, and she did not take out papers for American citizenship. She also owned a house in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Toward the end of her life, Pickford made arrangements with the Canadian Department of Citizenship to officially acquire Canadian citizenship because she wished to "die as a Canadian". Canadian authorities were not sure that she had ever lost her Canadian citizenship, given her passport status, but her request was approved and she officially became a Canadian citizen.
On May 29, 1979, Pickford died at a Santa Monica, California, hospital of complications from a cerebral hemorrhage she had suffered the week before. She was interred in the Garden of Memory of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Glendale, California.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18823
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Mack Sennett
Mack Sennett (born Michael Sinnott; January 17, 1880 – November 5, 1960) was a Canadian-American film actor, director, and producer, and studio head, known as the 'King of Comedy'.
Born in Melbourne, Quebec, in 1880, he started in films in the Biograph Company of New York, and later opened Keystone Studios in Edendale, California in 1912. Keystone possessed the first fully enclosed film stage, and Sennett became famous as the originator of slapstick routines such as pie-throwing and car-chases, as seen in the Keystone Cops films. He also produced short features that displayed his Bathing Beauties, many of whom went on to develop successful acting careers.
Sennett's work in sound movies was less successful, and he was bankrupted in 1933. He was presented with an honorary Academy Award for his contribution to film comedy.
Born Michael Sinnott in Richmond Ste-Bibiane Parish, Quebec, he was the son of Irish Catholic John Sinnott and Catherine Foy. His parents married in 1879 in Tingwick, Québec and moved the same year to Richmond, where John Sinnott was hired as a laborer. By 1883, when Michael's brother George was born, John Sinnott was working in Richmond as an innkeeper, a position he held for many years. His parents had all their children and raised their family in Richmond, then a small Eastern Townships village. At that time, Michael's grandparents were living in Danville, Québec. Michael Sinnott moved to Connecticut when he was 17 years old.
He lived for a while in Northampton, Massachusetts, where, according to his autobiography, he first got the idea to become an opera singer after seeing a vaudeville show. He claimed that the most respected lawyer in town, Northampton mayor (and future President of the United States) Calvin Coolidge, as well as Sennett's mother, tried to talk him out of his musical ambitions.
In New York City, Sennett became an actor, singer, dancer, clown, set designer, and director for the Biograph Company. A distinction in his acting career, often overlooked, is that he played Sherlock Holmes 11 times, albeit as a parody, between 1911 and 1913.
With financial backing from Adam Kessel and Charles O. Bauman of the New York Motion Picture Company, Sennett founded Keystone Studios in Edendale, California in 1912 (which is now a part of Echo Park). The original main building which was the first totally enclosed film stage and studio ever constructed, is still there today. Many important actors cemented their film careers with Sennett, including Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, Charles Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Roscoe Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd, Raymond Griffith, Gloria Swanson, Ford Sterling, Andy Clyde, Chester Conklin, Polly Moran, Louise Fazenda, The Keystone Cops, Bing Crosby, and W. C. Fields.
Sennett's slapstick comedies were noted for their wild car chases and custard pie warfare, especially in the "Keystone Cops "series. Sennett's first female comedian was Mabel Normand, who became a major star under his direction and with whom he embarked on a tumultuous romantic relationship. Sennett also developed the "Kid Comedies", a forerunner of the "Our Gang" films, and in a short time, his name became synonymous with screen comedy which were called "flickers" at the time. In 1915, Keystone Studios became an autonomous production unit of the ambitious Triangle Film Corporation, as Sennett joined forces with D. W. Griffith and Thomas Ince, both powerful figures in the film industry.
Also beginning in 1915, Sennett assembled a bevy of women known as the Sennett Bathing Beauties to appear in provocative bathing costumes in comedy short subjects, in promotional material, and in promotional events such as Venice Beach beauty contests. The Sennett Bathing Beauties continued to appear through 1928.
In 1917, Sennett gave up the Keystone trademark and organized his own company, Mack Sennett Comedies Corporation. (Sennett's bosses retained the Keystone trademark and produced a cheap series of comedy shorts that were "Keystones" in name only: they were unsuccessful, and Sennett had no connection with them.) Sennett went on to produce more ambitious comedy short films and a few feature-length films. During the 1920s his short subjects were in much demand; they featured stars such as Louise Fazenda, Billy Bevan, Andy Clyde, Harry Gribbon, Vernon Dent, Alice Day, Ralph Graves, Charlie Murray, and Harry Langdon. He produced several features with his brightest stars such as Ben Turpin and Mabel Normand.
Many of Sennett's films of the early 1920s were inherited by Warner Bros. Studio. Warner Bros. merged with the original distributor, First National, and added music and commentary to several of these short subjects. Unfortunately, many of the films of this period physically deteriorated to the point of destruction, due to inadequate storage. As a result, many of Sennett's films from his most productive and creative period no longer exist.
In the mid-1920s, Sennett moved to Pathé Exchange distribution. Pathé had a huge market share, but made bad corporate decisions, such as attempting to sell too many comedies at once (including those of Sennett's main competitor, Hal Roach). In 1927, Hollywood's two most successful studios Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount Pictures, took note of the profits being made by smaller companies such as Pathé Exchange and Educational Pictures. MGM and Paramount resumed the production and distribution of short subjects. Hal Roach signed with MGM, but Mack Sennett remained with Pathé Exchange even during hard times, which were brought on by the competition. Hundreds of other independent exhibitors and movie houses of this period had switched from Pathe' to the new MGM or Paramount films and short subjects.
Sennett made a reasonably smooth transition to sound films, releasing them through Earle Hammons's Educational Pictures. Sennett occasionally experimented with color. Plus, he was the first to get a talkie short subject on the market in 1928. In 1932, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in the comedy division for producing "The Loud Mouth" (with Matt McHugh, in the sports-heckler role later taken in Columbia Pictures remakes by Charley Chase and Shemp Howard). Sennett also won an Academy Award in the novelty division for his film "Wrestling Swordfish" also in 1932. On March 25, 1932, he became a United States citizen.
Sennett often clung to outmoded techniques, making his early-1930s films seem dated and quaint. This doomed his attempt to re-enter the feature-film market with "Hypnotized" (starring blackface comedians Moran and Mack, "The Two Black Crows"). However, Sennett enjoyed great success with short comedies starring Bing Crosby, which were more than likely instrumental in Sennett's product being picked up by a major studio, Paramount Pictures. W. C. Fields conceived and starred in four famous Sennett-Paramount comedies. Fields himself recalled that he "made seven comedies for the Irishman", his original deal called for one film and an option for six more, but ultimately only four were made with Fields as star. Two other Sennett shorts were made with Fields scripts: The Singing Boxer (1933) with Donald Novis and Too Many Highballs (1933) with Lloyd Hamilton.
Sennett's studio did not survive the Great Depression. His partnership with Paramount lasted only one year and he was forced into bankruptcy in November 1933.
On January 12, 1934, Sennett was injured in an automobile accident that killed blackface performer Charles Mack in Mesa, Arizona.
His last work, in 1935, was as a producer-director for Educational Pictures, in which he directed Buster Keaton in "The Timid Young Man" and Joan Davis in "Way Up Thar". (The 1935 Vitaphone short subject "Keystone Hotel" is not a Sennett production, although it featured several alumni from the Mack Sennett Studios. Actually, Sennett was not involved in the making of this film.)
Mack Sennett went into semiretirement at the age of 55, having produced more than 1,000 silent films and several dozen talkies during a 25-year career. His studio property was purchased by Mascot Pictures (later part of Republic Pictures), and many of his former staffers found work at Columbia Pictures.
In March 1938, Sennett was presented with an honorary Academy Award: "for his lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen, the basic principles of which are as important today as when they were first put into practice, the Academy presents a Special Award to that master of fun, discoverer of stars, sympathetic, kindly, understanding comedy genius – Mack Sennett."
Rumors abounded that Sennett would be returning to film production (a 1938 publicity release indicated that he would be working with Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy), but apart from Sennett reissuing a couple of his Bing Crosby two-reelers to theaters, nothing happened. Sennett did appear in front of the camera, however, in "Hollywood Cavalcade" (1939), itself a thinly disguised version of the Mack Sennett-Mabel Normand romance. In 1949, he provided film footage for and also appeared in the first full-length comedy compilation called "Down Memory Lane" (1949), which was written and narrated by Steve Allen. Sennett was profiled in the television series "This is Your Life" in 1954. and made a cameo appearance (for $1,000) in "Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops" (1955). His last contribution worth noting was to the NBC radio program "Biography in Sound" relating memories of working with W.C. Fields, which was broadcast February 28, 1956.
Sennett died on November 5, 1960, in Woodland Hills, California, aged 80. He was interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Sennett was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard. He was also inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2014.
A line in a Henry Kuttner science-fiction short story "Piggy Bank" reads, "Within seconds the scene resembled a Mack Sennett pie-throwing comedy."
In "A Story of Water", a 1961 short film by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, the directors dedicate the film to Mack Sennett.
In 1974, Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman wrote the musical "Mack & Mabel", chronicling the romance between Sennett and Mabel Normand.
Sennett also was a leading character in "The Biograph Girl", a 1980 musical about the silent film era.
Peter Lovesey's 1983 novel "Keystone" is a whodunnit set in the Keystone Studios and involving (among others), Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle, and the Keystone Cops.
Dan Aykroyd portrayed Mack Sennett in the 1992 movie "Chaplin". Marisa Tomei played Mabel Normand and Robert Downey, Jr. starred as Charlie Chaplin.
Joseph Beattie and Andrea Deck portrayed Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, respectively, in episode eight of series two of ITV's "Mr. Selfridge".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18824
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Motion Picture Patents Company
The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC, also known as the Edison Trust), founded in December 1908 and terminated seven years later in 1915 after conflicts within the industry, was a trust of all the major US film companies and local foreign-branches (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig Polyscope, Lubin Manufacturing, Kalem Company, Star Film Paris, American Pathé), the leading film distributor (George Kleine) and the biggest supplier of raw film stock, Eastman Kodak. The MPPC ended the domination of foreign films on US screens, standardized the manner in which films were distributed and exhibited within the US, and improved the quality of US motion pictures by internal competition. But it also discouraged its members' entry into feature film production, and the use of outside financing, both to its members' eventual detriment.
The MPPC was preceded by the Edison licensing system, in effect in 1907–1908, on which the MPPC was modeled. During the 1890s, Thomas Edison owned most of the major US patents relating to motion picture cameras. The Edison Manufacturing Company's patent lawsuits against each of its domestic competitors crippled the US film industry, reducing production mainly to two companies: Edison and Biograph, which used a different camera design. This left Edison's other rivals with little recourse but to import French and British films.
Since 1902, Edison had also been notifying distributors and exhibitors that if they did not use Edison machines and films exclusively, they would be subject to litigation for supporting filmmaking that infringed Edison's patents. Exhausted by the lawsuits, Edison's competitors — Essanay, Kalem, Pathé Frères, Selig, and Vitagraph — approached him in 1907 to negotiate a licensing agreement, which Lubin was also invited to join. The one notable filmmaker excluded from the licensing agreement was Biograph, which Edison hoped to squeeze out of the market. No further applicants could become licensees. The purpose of the licensing agreement, according to an Edison lawyer, was to "preserve the business of present manufacturers and not to throw the field open to all competitors."
In February 1909, major European producers held the Paris Film Congress in an attempt to create a similar European organisation. This group also included MPPC members Pathé and Vitagraph, which had extensive European production and distribution interests. This proposed European cartel ultimately failed when Pathé, then still the largest company in the world, withdrew in April.
Biograph retaliated for being frozen out of the trust agreement by purchasing the patent to the Latham film loop, a key feature of virtually all motion picture cameras then in use. Edison sued to gain control of the patent; however, after a federal court upheld the validity of the patent in 1907, Edison began negotiation with Biograph in May 1908 to reorganize the Edison licensing system. The resulting trust pooled 16 motion picture patents. Ten were considered of minor importance; the remaining key six pertained one each to films, cameras, and the Latham loop, and three to projectors.
The MPPC eliminated the outright sale of films to distributors and exhibitors, replacing it with rentals, which allowed quality control over prints that had formerly been exhibited long past their prime. The trust also established a uniform rental rate for all licensed films, thereby removing price as a factor for the exhibitor in film selection, in favor of selection made on quality, which in turn encouraged the upgrading of production values.
However, the MPPC also established a monopoly on all aspects of filmmaking. Eastman Kodak, which owned the patent on raw film stock, was a member of the trust and thus agreed to sell stock only to other members. Likewise, the trust's control of patents on motion picture cameras ensured that only MPPC studios were able to film, and the projector patents allowed the trust to make licensing agreements with distributors and theaters – and thus determine who screened their films and where.
The patents owned by the MPPC allowed them to use federal law enforcement officials to enforce their licensing agreements and to prevent unauthorized use of their cameras, films, projectors, and other equipment. In some cases, however, the MPPC made use of hired thugs and mob connections to violently disrupt productions that were not licensed by the trust.
The MPPC also strictly regulated the production content of their films, primarily as a means of cost control. Films were initially limited to one reel in length (13–17 minutes), although competition by independent and foreign producers by 1912 led to the introduction of two-reelers, and by 1913, three- and four-reelers.
Many independent filmmakers, who controlled from one-quarter to one-third of the domestic marketplace, responded to the creation of the MPPC by moving their operations to Hollywood, whose distance from Edison's home base of New Jersey made it more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and covers the area, was averse to enforcing patent claims. Southern California was also chosen because of its beautiful year-round weather and varied countryside; its topography, semi-arid climate and widespread irrigation gave its landscapes the ability to offer motion picture shooting scenes set in deserts, jungles and great mountains. Hollywood had one additional advantage: if a non-licensed studio was sued, it was only a hundred miles to "run for the border" and get out of the US to Mexico, where the trust's patents were not in effect and thus equipment could not be seized.
The reasons for the MPPC's decline are manifold. The first blow came in 1911 when Eastman Kodak modified its exclusive contract with the MPPC to allow Kodak, which led the industry in quality and price, to sell its raw film stock to unlicensed independents. The number of theaters exhibiting independent films grew by 33 percent within twelve months, to half of all houses.
Another reason was the MPPC's overestimation of the efficiency of controlling the motion picture industry through patent litigation and the exclusion of independents from licensing. The slow process of using detectives to investigate patent infringements, and of obtaining injunctions against the infringers, was outpaced by the dynamic rise of new companies in diverse locations.
Despite the rise in popularity of feature films in 1912–1913 from independent producers and foreign imports, the MPPC was very reluctant to make the changes necessary to distribute such longer films. Edison, Biograph, Essanay, and Vitagraph did not release their first features until 1914, after dozens, if not hundreds, of feature films, had been released by independents.
Patent royalties to the MPPC ended in September 1913 with the expiration of the last of the patents filed in the mid-1890s at the dawn of commercial film production and exhibition. Thus the MPPC lost the ability to control the American film industry through patent licensing and had to rely instead on its subsidiary, the General Film Company, formed in 1910, which monopolized film distribution in US.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 cut off most of the European market, which played a much more significant part of the revenue and profit for MPPC members than for the independents, which concentrated on Westerns produced for a primarily US market.
The end came with a federal court decision in "United States v. Motion Picture Patents Co." on October 1, 1915, which ruled that the MPPC's acts went "far beyond what was necessary to protect the use of patents or the monopoly which went with them" and was, therefore, an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act. An appellate court dismissed the MPPC's appeal, and officially terminated the company in 1918.
This issue is seen in the 1976 motion picture comedy Nickelodeon, which shows the work of such film makers from 1910 to 1915.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18825
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MD5
The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. Although MD5 was initially designed to be used as a cryptographic hash function, it has been found to suffer from extensive vulnerabilities. It can still be used as a checksum to verify data integrity, but only against unintentional corruption. It remains suitable for other non-cryptographic purposes, for example for determining the partition for a particular key in a partitioned database.
MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as RFC 1321.
One basic requirement of any cryptographic hash function is that it should be computationally infeasible to find two distinct messages that hash to the same value. MD5 fails this requirement catastrophically; such collisions can be found in seconds on an ordinary home computer.
The weaknesses of MD5 have been exploited in the field, most infamously by the Flame malware in 2012. The CMU Software Engineering Institute considers MD5 essentially "cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use".
, MD5 continues to be widely used, in spite of its well-documented weaknesses and deprecation by security experts.
MD5 is one in a series of message digest algorithms designed by Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT (Rivest, 1992). When analytic work indicated that MD5's predecessor MD4 was likely to be insecure, Rivest designed MD5 in 1991 as a secure replacement. (Hans Dobbertin did indeed later find weaknesses in MD4.)
In 1993, Den Boer and Bosselaers gave an early, although limited, result of finding a "pseudo-collision" of the MD5 compression function; that is, two different initialization vectors that produce an identical digest.
In 1996, Dobbertin announced a collision of the compression function of MD5 (Dobbertin, 1996). While this was not an attack on the full MD5 hash function, it was close enough for cryptographers to recommend switching to a replacement, such as SHA-1 or RIPEMD-160.
The size of the hash value (128 bits) is small enough to contemplate a birthday attack. MD5CRK was a distributed project started in March 2004 with the aim of demonstrating that MD5 is practically insecure by finding a collision using a birthday attack.
MD5CRK ended shortly after 17 August 2004, when collisions for the full MD5 were announced by Xiaoyun Wang, Dengguo Feng, Xuejia Lai, and Hongbo Yu. Their analytical attack was reported to take only one hour on an IBM p690 cluster.
On 1 March 2005, Arjen Lenstra, Xiaoyun Wang, and Benne de Weger demonstrated construction of two X.509 certificates with different public keys and the same MD5 hash value, a demonstrably practical collision. The construction included private keys for both public keys. A few days later, Vlastimil Klima described an improved algorithm, able to construct MD5 collisions in a few hours on a single notebook computer. On 18 March 2006, Klima published an algorithm that could find a collision within one minute on a single notebook computer, using a method he calls tunneling.
Various MD5-related RFC errata have been published.
In 2009, the United States Cyber Command used an MD5 hash value of their mission statement as a part of their official emblem.
On 24 December 2010, Tao Xie and Dengguo Feng announced the first published single-block (512-bit) MD5 collision. (Previous collision discoveries had relied on multi-block attacks.) For "security reasons", Xie and Feng did not disclose the new attack method. They issued a challenge to the cryptographic community, offering a US$10,000 reward to the first finder of a different 64-byte collision before 1 January 2013. Marc Stevens responded to the challenge and published colliding single-block messages as well as the construction algorithm and sources.
In 2011 an informational RFC 6151 was approved to update the security considerations in MD5 and HMAC-MD5.
The security of the MD5 hash function is severely compromised. A collision attack exists that can find collisions within seconds on a computer with a 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor (complexity of 224.1). Further, there is also a chosen-prefix collision attack that can produce a collision for two inputs with specified prefixes within seconds, using off-the-shelf computing hardware (complexity 239).
The ability to find collisions has been greatly aided by the use of off-the-shelf GPUs. On an NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS graphics processor, 16–18 million hashes per second can be computed. An NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra can calculate more than 200 million hashes per second.
These hash and collision attacks have been demonstrated in the public in various situations, including colliding document files and digital certificates. As of 2015, MD5 was demonstrated to be still quite widely used, most notably by security research and antivirus companies.
As of 2019, one quarter of widely used content management systems were reported to still use MD5 for password hashing.
In 1996, a flaw was found in the design of MD5. While it was not deemed a fatal weakness at the time, cryptographers began recommending the use of other algorithms, such as SHA-1, which has since been found to be vulnerable as well.
In 2004 it was shown that MD5 is not collision-resistant. As such, MD5 is not suitable for applications like SSL certificates or digital signatures that rely on this property for digital security. Also in 2004 more serious flaws were discovered in MD5, making further use of the algorithm for security purposes questionable; specifically, a group of researchers described how to create a pair of files that share the same MD5 checksum. Further advances were made in breaking MD5 in 2005, 2006, and 2007. In December 2008, a group of researchers used this technique to fake SSL certificate validity.
As of 2010, the CMU Software Engineering Institute considers MD5 "cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use", and most U.S. government applications now require the SHA-2 family of hash functions. In 2012, the Flame malware exploited the weaknesses in MD5 to fake a Microsoft digital signature.
In 1996, collisions were found in the compression function of MD5, and Hans Dobbertin wrote in the RSA Laboratories technical newsletter, "The presented attack does not yet threaten practical applications of MD5, but it comes rather close ... in the future MD5 should no longer be implemented ... where a collision-resistant hash function is required."
In 2005, researchers were able to create pairs of PostScript documents and X.509 certificates with the same hash. Later that year, MD5's designer Ron Rivest wrote that "md5 and sha1 are both clearly broken (in terms of collision-resistance)".
On 30 December 2008, a group of researchers announced at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress how they had used MD5 collisions to create an intermediate certificate authority certificate that appeared to be legitimate when checked by its MD5 hash. The researchers used a cluster of Sony PlayStation 3 units at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland to change a normal SSL certificate issued by RapidSSL into a working CA certificate for that issuer, which could then be used to create other certificates that would appear to be legitimate and issued by RapidSSL. VeriSign, the issuers of RapidSSL certificates, said they stopped issuing new certificates using MD5 as their checksum algorithm for RapidSSL once the vulnerability was announced. Although Verisign declined to revoke existing certificates signed using MD5, their response was considered adequate by the authors of the exploit (Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, and Benne de Weger). Bruce Schneier wrote of the attack that "we already knew that MD5 is a broken hash function" and that "no one should be using MD5 anymore". The SSL researchers wrote, "Our desired impact is that Certification Authorities will stop using MD5 in issuing new certificates. We also hope that use of MD5 in other applications will be reconsidered as well."
In 2012, according to Microsoft, the authors of the Flame malware used an MD5 collision to forge a Windows code-signing certificate.
MD5 uses the Merkle–Damgård construction, so if two prefixes with the same hash can be constructed, a common suffix can be added to both to make the collision more likely to be accepted as valid data by the application using it. Furthermore, current collision-finding techniques allow to specify an arbitrary "prefix": an attacker can create two colliding files that both begin with the same content. All the attacker needs to generate two colliding files is a template file with a 128-byte block of data, aligned on a 64-byte boundary that can be changed freely by the collision-finding algorithm. An example MD5 collision, with the two messages differing in 6 bits, is:
Both produce the MD5 hash codice_1.
The difference between the two samples is that the leading bit in each nibble has been flipped. For example, the 20th byte (offset 0x13) in the top sample, 0x87, is 10000111 in binary. The leading bit in the byte (also the leading bit in the first nibble) is flipped to make 00000111, which is 0x07, as shown in the lower sample.
Later it was also found to be possible to construct collisions between two files with separately chosen prefixes. This technique was used in the creation of the rogue CA certificate in 2008. A new variant of parallelized collision searching using MPI was proposed by Anton Kuznetsov in 2014, which allowed to find a collision in 11 hours on a computing cluster.
In April 2009, an attack against MD5 was published that breaks MD5's preimage resistance. This attack is only theoretical, with a computational complexity of 2123.4 for full preimage.
MD5 digests have been widely used in the software world to provide some assurance that a transferred file has arrived intact. For example, file servers often provide a pre-computed MD5 (known as md5sum) checksum for the files, so that a user can compare the checksum of the downloaded file to it. Most unix-based operating systems include MD5 sum utilities in their distribution packages; Windows users may use the included PowerShell function "Get-FileHash", install a Microsoft utility, or use third-party applications. Android ROMs also use this type of checksum.
As it is easy to generate MD5 collisions, it is possible for the person who created the file to create a second file with the same checksum, so this technique cannot protect against some forms of malicious tampering. In some cases, the checksum cannot be trusted (for example, if it was obtained over the same channel as the downloaded file), in which case MD5 can only provide error-checking functionality: it will recognize a corrupt or incomplete download, which becomes more likely when downloading larger files.
Historically, MD5 has been used to store a one-way hash of a password, often with key stretching. NIST does not include MD5 in their list of recommended hashes for password storage.
MD5 is also used in the field of electronic discovery, in order to provide a unique identifier for each document that is exchanged during the legal discovery process. This method can be used to replace the Bates stamp numbering system that has been used for decades during the exchange of paper documents. As above, this usage should be discouraged due to the ease of collision attacks.
MD5 processes a variable-length message into a fixed-length output of 128 bits. The input message is broken up into chunks of 512-bit blocks (sixteen 32-bit words); the message is padded so that its length is divisible by 512. The padding works as follows: first a single bit, 1, is appended to the end of the message. This is followed by as many zeros as are required to bring the length of the message up to 64 bits fewer than a multiple of 512. The remaining bits are filled up with 64 bits representing the length of the original message, modulo 264.
The main MD5 algorithm operates on a 128-bit state, divided into four 32-bit words, denoted , , , and . These are initialized to certain fixed constants. The main algorithm then uses each 512-bit message block in turn to modify the state. The processing of a message block consists of four similar stages, termed "rounds"; each round is composed of 16 similar operations based on a non-linear function , modular addition, and left rotation. Figure 1 illustrates one operation within a round. There are four possible functions; a different one is used in each round:
formula_2 denote the XOR, AND, OR and NOT operations respectively.
The MD5 hash is calculated according to this algorithm. All values are in little-endian.
"Note: Instead of the formulation from the original RFC 1321 shown, the following may be used for improved efficiency (useful if assembly language is being used – otherwise, the compiler will generally optimize the above code. Since each computation is dependent on another in these formulations, this is often slower than the above method where the nand/and can be parallelised):"
The 128-bit (16-byte) MD5 hashes (also termed "message digests") are typically represented as a sequence of 32 hexadecimal digits. The following demonstrates a 43-byte ASCII input and the corresponding MD5 hash:
Even a small change in the message will (with overwhelming probability) result in a mostly different hash, due to the avalanche effect. For example, adding a period to the end of the sentence:
The hash of the zero-length string is:
The MD5 algorithm is specified for messages consisting of any number of bits; it is not limited to multiples of eight bits (octets, bytes). Some MD5 implementations such as md5sum might be limited to octets, or they might not support "streaming" for messages of an initially undetermined length.
Below is a list of cryptography libraries that support MD5:
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Magic: The Gathering
Magic: The Gathering (colloquially known as Magic" cards, Magic or just MTG") is a collectible and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield. Released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro), "Magic" was the first trading card game and has approximately twenty million players , and over twenty billion "Magic" cards produced in the period from 2008 to 2016, during which time it grew in popularity.
Each game of "Magic" represents a battle between wizards known as "planeswalkers" who cast spells, use artifacts, and summon creatures as depicted on individual cards in order to defeat their opponents, typically, but not always, by draining them of their 20 starting "life points" in the standard format. Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as "Dungeons & Dragons", the gameplay bears little similarity to pencil-and-paper adventure games, while simultaneously having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games.
"Magic" can be played by two or more players, either in person with printed cards or on a computer, smartphone or tablet with virtual cards through the Internet-based software "" or such as "". It can be played in various rule formats, which fall into two categories: "constructed" and "limited". Limited formats involve players building a deck spontaneously out of a pool of random cards with a minimum deck size of 40 cards; in constructed formats, players create decks from cards they own, usually with a minimum of 60 cards per deck.
New cards are released on a regular basis through . An organized tournament system (the DCI) played at the international level and a worldwide community of has developed, as well as a substantial resale market for "Magic" cards. Certain cards can be monetarily valuable due to their rarity in production and utility in gameplay, with prices ranging from a few cents to thousands of dollars.
A game of "Magic" involves two or more players who are engaged in a battle acting as powerful wizards called "planeswalkers". Each player has their own deck, either one previously constructed or made from a limited pool of cards for the event. A player starts the game with twenty "life points" and loses the game when their life total is reduced to zero. A player can also lose if they must draw from an empty deck. In addition, some cards specify other ways to win or lose the game. Garfield has stated that two major influences in his creation of "Magic: the Gathering" were the games "Cosmic Encounter", which first used the concept that normal rules could sometimes be overridden, and "Dungeons & Dragons". The "Golden Rule of "Magic"" states that "Whenever a card's text directly contradicts the rules, the card takes precedence." The "Comprehensive Rules", a detailed rulebook, exists to clarify conflicts.
Cards in "Magic: The Gathering" fall into generally two classes: lands and spells. Lands provide mana, or magical energy, which is used as magical fuel when the player attempts to cast spells. Players can only play one land card per turn, with most land providing a specific color of mana when they are "tapped" (usually by rotating the card 90 degrees to show it has been used that turn), with each land only able to be tapped for mana once per turn. Spells consume mana, typically with at least one or more mana of a specific color. More powerful spells cost more mana, so as the game progresses, more land will be in play, more mana will be available, and the quantity and relative power of the spells played tends to increase. Spells come in several varieties: non-permanents like "sorceries" and "instants" have a single, one-time effect before they go to the "graveyard" (discard pile); "enchantments" and "artifacts" that remain in play after being cast to provide a lasting magical effect; "creature" spells summon creatures that can attack and damage an opponent as well as used to defend from the opponent's creature attacks. Land, enchantments, artifacts, and creature cards are considered permanents as they remain in play until removed by other spell, ability, or combat effects. The set "Lorwyn" introduced the new "planeswalker" card type, which represents powerful allies who fight with their own magic abilities. Additionally, cards are printed and available within certain rarities, known as Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic rare, with generally more powerful cards having higher rarities.
Players begin the game by shuffling their decks and then drawing seven cards. On each player's turn, following a set phase order, they draw a card, tap their lands turning them sideways and other permanents as necessary to gain mana as to cast spells, engage their creatures in a single attack round against their opponent who may use their own creatures to block the attack, and then complete other actions with any remaining mana. Tapped resources remain tapped until the start of the player's next turn, which may leave them without land to draw for mana to cast spells in reaction to their opponent, or without creatures to block attacks, so the player must also plan ahead for their opponent's turn. Most actions that a player can perform enter the "Stack", a concept similar to the stack in computer programming, as either player can react to these actions with other actions, such as counter-spells; the stack provides a method of resolve complex interactions that may result in certain scenarios.
Deck building requires strategy as players must choose among thousands of cards which they want to play. This requires players to evaluate the power of their cards, as well as the possible synergies between them, and their possible interactions with the cards they expect to play against (this "metagame" can vary in different locations or time periods). The choice of cards is usually narrowed by the player deciding which colors they want to include in the deck. This decision is a key part of creating a deck. In general, reducing the number of colors used increases the consistency of play and the probability of drawing the lands needed to cast one's spells, at the expense of restricting the range of tactics available to the player. Part of the "Magic" product line has been starter decks which are aimed to provide novice players with ideas for deck building.
Most sanctioned games for "Magic: The Gathering" under the DCI use the based Constructed format that require players to build their decks from their own library of cards. In general, this requires a minimum of sixty cards in the deck, and, except for basic land cards, no more than four cards of the same named card. The pool of cards is also typically limited to the Standard rotation, which consists of the base sets and expansions that have been released in the last two years. The Standard format helps to prevent "power creep" that can be difficult to predict with the size of the "Magic" card library and help give newer players a fair advantage with long-term players. Other Constructed formats exist that allow for use of older expansions to give more variety for decks. A large variety of formats have been defined by DCI that allow different pools of expansions to be used or alter deck construction rules for special events.
Individual cards may be listed as "restricted", where only one copy can be included in a deck, or simply "banned", at the DCI's discretion. These limitations are usually for balance of power reasons, but have been occasionally made because of gameplay mechanics, for example, with the elimination of the "play for ante" mechanics in all formal formats, all such cards with this feature are banned. More recently, older cards have been banned from all formal play by Wizards due to inappropriate racial or cultural depictions in their illustrations in the wake of the George Floyd protests, and their images removed from the various online "Magic" databases explaining this. This included the Invoke Prejudice card which was displayed on the official card index site Gatherer "at a web URL ending in '1488,' numbers that are synonymous with white supremacy".
In the format, a small number of cards are opened for play from booster packs or tournament packs, and a minimum deck size of forty cards is enforced. The most popular limited format is Booster Draft, in which players open a booster pack, choose a card from it, and pass it to the player seated next to them. This continues until all the cards have been picked, and then a new pack is opened. Three packs are opened altogether, and the direction of passing alternates left-right-left. Once the draft is done, players create 40-card decks out of the cards they picked, basic land cards being provided for free, and play games with the players they drafted with.
Most cards in "Magic" are based on one of five colors that make up the game's "Color Wheel" or "Color Pie", shown on the back of each card, and each representing a school or realm of magic: white, blue, black, red, and green. The arrangement of these colors on the wheel describe relationships between the schools, which can broadly affect deck construction and game execution. For a given color such as white, the two colors immediate adjacent to it, green and blue, are considered complementary, while the two colors on the opposite side, black and red, are its opposing schools. The Research and Development (R&D) team at Wizards of the Coast aimed to balance power and abilities among the five colors by using the Color Pie to differentiate the strengths and weaknesses of each. This guideline lays out the capabilities, themes, and mechanics of each color and allows for every color to have its own distinct attributes and gameplay. The Color Pie is used to ensure new cards are thematically in the correct color and do not infringe on the territory of other colors.
The concepts behind each of the colors on the Color Wheel, based on a series of articles written by Mark Rosewater, are as follows:
Most cards in "Magic: The Gathering" are based on a single color, shown along the card's border. The cost to play them requires some mana of that color and potentially any amount of mana from any other color. Multicolored cards were introduced in the "" and typically use a gold border. Their casting cost includes mana from at least two different colors plus additional mana from any color. Hybrid cards, included with "", use a two-color gradient border. These cards can be cast using mana from either color shown, in addition to other mana costs. Finally, colorless cards, such as some artifacts, do not have any colored mana requirements but still require a general amount of mana to be spent to play.
The color wheel can influence deck construction choices. Cards from colors that are aligned such as red and green often provide synergistic effects, either due to the core nature of the schools or through designs of cards, but may leave the deck vulnerable to the magic of the common color in conflict, blue in the case of red and green. Alternatively, decks constructed with opposing colors like green and blue may not have many favorable combinations but will be capable of dealing with decks based on any other colors. There are no limits to how many colors can be in a deck, but the more colors in a deck, the more difficult it may be to provide mana of the right color.
"Magic", like many other games, combines chance and skill. One frequent complaint about the game involves the notion that there is too much luck involved, especially concerning possessing too many or too few lands. Early in the game especially, too many or too few lands could ruin a player's chance at victory without the player having made a mistake. This in-game statistical variance can be minimized by proper deck construction, as an appropriate land count can reduce mana problems. In "Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012", the land count is automatically adjusted to 40% of the total deck size.
A "mulligan" rule was introduced into the game, first informally in casual play and then in the official game rules. The most current mulligan rule allows players to shuffle an unsatisfactory opening hand back into the deck at the start of the game, draw a new hand with the same number of cards, and repeat until satisfied, after which any player who has mulliganed, will put cards from the hand they kept on the bottom of their deck equal to the number of times they mulliganed. In multiplayer, a player may take one mulligan without penalty, while subsequent mulligans will still cost one card (a rule known as "Partial Paris mulligan"). The original mulligan allowed a player a single redraw of seven new cards if that player's initial hand contained seven or zero lands. A variation of this rule called a "forced mulligan" is still used in some casual play circles and in multiplayer formats on "Magic Online", and allows a single "free" redraw of seven new cards if a player's initial hand contains seven, six, one or zero lands. With the release of the Core Set 2020 a new mulligan system was introduced for competitive play known as the London Mulligan.
Confessing his love for games combining both luck and skill, "Magic" creator Richard Garfield admitted its influence in his design of "Magic". In addressing the complaint about luck influencing a game, Garfield states that new and casual players tend to appreciate luck as a leveling effect, since randomness can increase their chances of winning against a more skilled player. Meanwhile, a player with higher skills appreciates a game with less chance, as the higher degree of control increases their chances of winning. According to Garfield, "Magic" has and would likely continue decreasing its degree of luck as the game matured. The "Mulligan rule", as well as card design, past vs. present, are good examples of this trend. He feels that this is a universal trend for maturing games. Garfield explained using chess as an example, that unlike modern chess, in predecessors, players would use dice to determine which chess piece to move.
The original set of rules prescribed that all games were to be played for ante. Garfield was partly inspired by the game of marbles and wanted folks to play with the cards rather than collect them. For Magic, each player removed a card at random from the deck they wished to play with and the two cards would be set aside as the ante. At the end of the match, the winner would take and keep both cards. Early sets included a few cards with rules designed to interact with this gambling aspect, allowing replacements of cards up for ante, adding more cards to the ante, or even permanently trading ownership of cards in play.
The ante concept became controversial because many regions had restrictions on games of chance. The rule was later made optional because of these restrictions and because of players' reluctance to possibly lose a card that they owned. The gambling rule is forbidden at sanctioned events and is now mostly a relic of the past, though it still sees occasional usage in friendly games as well as the format. The last card to mention ante was printed in the 1995 expansion set "".
"Magic" tournaments regularly occur in gaming stores and other venues. Larger tournaments with hundreds of competitors from around the globe sponsored by Wizards of the Coast are arranged many times every year, with substantial cash prizes for the top finishers. A number of websites report on tournament news, give complete lists for the most currently popular decks, and feature articles on current issues of debate about the game. The DCI, which is owned and operated by Wizards of the Coast, is the organizing body for sanctioned "Magic" events. The DCI established the set allowances and card restrictions for the Constructed and Limited formats for regulation play for tournaments as well as for other events.
Additionally, the DCI maintains a set of rules for being able to sanction tournaments, as well as runs its own circuit. Local shops often offer "Friday Night Magic" tournaments as a stepping-stone to more competitive play. The DCI runs the as a series of major tournaments to attract interest. The right to compete in a Pro Tour has to be earned by either winning a Pro Tour Qualifier Tournament or being successful in a previous tournament on a similar level. A Pro Tour is usually structured into two days of individual competition played in the Swiss format. On the final day, the top eight players compete with each other in an elimination format to select the winner.
At the end of the competition in a Pro Tour, players are awarded depending on their finishing place. If the player finishes high enough, they will also be awarded prize money. Frequent winners of these events have made names for themselves in the "Magic" community, such as Gabriel Nassif, Kai Budde and Jon Finkel. As a promotional tool, the DCI launched the in 2005 to honor selected players.
At the end of the year the is held. The World Championship functions like a Pro Tour, except that competitors have to present their skill in three different formats (usually Standard, booster draft and a second constructed format) rather than one. Another difference is that invitation to the World Championship can be gained not through Pro Tour Qualifiers, but via the national championship of a country. Most countries send their top four players of the tournament as representatives, though nations with minor "Magic" playing communities may send just one player. The World Championship also has a team-based competition, where the national teams compete with each other.
At the beginning of the World Championship, new members are inducted into the Hall of Fame. The tournament also concludes the current season of tournament play and at the end of the event, the player who earned the most Pro Points during the year is awarded the title "". The player who earned the most Pro Points and did not compete in any previous season is awarded the title "".
Invitation to a Pro Tour, Pro Points and prize money can also be earned in lesser tournaments called that are open to the general public and are held more frequently throughout the year. Grand Prix events are usually the largest "Magic" tournaments, sometimes drawing more than 2,000 players. The largest "Magic" tournament ever held was Grand Prix: Las Vegas in June 2013 with a total of 4,500 players.
Richard Garfield had an early attachment to games during his youth: before settling down in Oregon, his father, an architect, had brought his family to Bangladesh and Nepal during his work projects. Garfield did not speak the native languages, but was able to make friends with the local youth with playing cards or marbles. Once back in the United States, he had heard of "Dungeons & Dragons" but neither his local game store nor his friends had a copy, so he developed his own version of what he though the game would be based on the descriptions he had read, which considered closer to "Clue", with players moving from room to room fighting monsters with a fixed end-goal. When Garfield eventually got copies of the "Dungeon & Dragons" rulesets, he was surprised that it was a more open-ended game but was "dreadfully written". "Dungeon & Dragons"s open-endedness inspired him, like many others, to develop their own game ideas from it. For Garfield, this was a game he called "Five Magics", based on five elemental magics that were drawn from geographically-diverse areas. While this remained the core concept of "Five Magics", Garfield continued to refine the game while growing up, often drastically changing the base type of game, though never planned to publish this game.
In 1991, Garfield was a doctoral candidate in combinatorial mathematics at University of Pennsylvania and had been brought on as an adjunct professor at Whitman College. During his candidacy, he developed his ideas and had playtested "RoboRally", a board game based on moving robots through a factory filled with hazards. Garfield had been seeking publishers for the title, and his colleague, Mike Davis, suggested the newly formed Wizards of the Coast, a small outfit established by Peter Adkison, a systems analyst for Boeing in Seattle. In mid-1991, the three arranged to meet in Oregon near Garfield's parents' home. Adkison was impressed by "RoboRally" but considered that it had too many logistics and would be too risky for him to publish. He told Garfield and Davis that he liked Garfield's ideas and that he was looking for a portable game that could be played in the downtime that frequently occurs at gaming conventions.
After the meeting, Garfield remained in Oregon to contemplate Adkison's advice. While hiking near Multnomah Falls, he was inspired to take his "Five Magics" concept but apply it to collectible color-themed cards, so that each player could make a customizable deck, something each player could consider part of their identity. Garfield arranged to meet with Adkison back in Seattle within the week, and when Adkison heard the idea, he recognized the potential that this would be a game that could be expanded on indefinitely with new cards in contrast to most typical tabletop games; Adkison later wrote on the idea on a USENET post "If executed properly, [the cards] would make us millions." Adkison immediately agreed to produce it.
Garfield returned to Pennsylvania and set off designing the game's core rules and initial cards, with about 150 completed in the few months after his return. The type of gameplay centered on each color remained consistent with how "Five Magics" had been and with how "Magic: The Gathering" would stay in the future, such as red representing aggressive attacks. Other games also influenced the design at this point, with Garfield citing games like "Cosmic Encounter" and "Strat-o-matic Baseball" as games that differ each time they are played because of different sets of cards being in play. Initial "cards" were based on using available copyrighted art, and copied to paper to be tested by groups of volunteers at the university. About six months after the meeting with Adkison, Garfield had refined the first complete version of his game. Garfield also began to establish the narrative of the game around "Dominia", a of infinite "planes" from which players, as wizards, can draw power from, which would allow for the vast array of creatures and magics that he was planning for the cards.
Simultaneously, Adkison sought investment into Wizards of the Coast to prepare to publish the game. The company had already committed to completing "The Primal Order" rulebook, aimed to be compatible with most other role-playing systems on the market, which most investment was drawn to. He had to bring in a number of local Cornish artists to create the fantasy art for Garfield's cards, offering them shares in Wizards of the Coast in payment. After "The Primal Order" was published in 1992, Wizards of the Coast was sued by Palladium for copyright infringement, a case that was settled out of court and with the result that a second printing of "The Primal Order" removed the rules relevant to Palladium's system, but this case also financially harmed Wizards of the Coast. Adkison decided to create a separate company, Garfield Games, for publishing the card game.
While the game was simply called "Magic" through most of playtesting, when the game had to be officially named a lawyer informed them that the name "Magic" was too generic to be trademarked. "Mana Clash" was instead chosen to be the name used in the first solicitation of the game. However, everybody involved with the game continued to refer to it simply as "Magic". After further legal consultation, it was decided to rename the game "Magic: The Gathering", thus enabling the name to be trademarked.
By 1993, Garfield and Adkison had gotten everything ready to premiere "Magic: The Gathering" at that year's Gen Con in Milwaukee that August, but did not have the funds for a production run to have shipped to game stores in time. Adkison took a single box of cards with a handful of complete decks to the Wizards booth at Origins Game Fair hoping to secure the funds by demonstrating the game. Among those he demonstrated to were representatives of Wargames West, manufacturers of historical tactics games; the representatives eventually brought their CEO over, and after seeing the game, took Adkison to dinner and negotiated funding terms. Adkison returned with , enough to make the necessary orders.
"Magic: The Gathering" underwent a general release on August 5, 1993. After shipping the orders, Adkison and his wife drove towards Milwaukee while making stops at game stores and demonstrate the game to drum up support for Gen Con. Their initial stops were quiet, but word of mouth from previous stops spread, and as they traveled south and west, they found larger and larger crowds anxiously awaiting their arrival. Garfield met up with Adkison at Gen Con, where their shipment of 2.5 million cards had been delayed a day. Despite this, by the end of the convention, they had completely sold out.
"Magic" was an immediate success for Wizards of the Coast. By October 1993, they had sold out their supply of 10 million cards. Wizards was even reluctant to advertise the game because they were unable to keep pace with existing demand. Initially "Magic" attracted many "Dungeons & Dragons" players, but the following included all types of other people as well.
The success of the initial edition prompted a reissue later in 1993, along with expansions to the game. "" was released as the first in December 1993. New expansions and revisions of the base game ("Core Sets") have since been released on a regular basis, amounting to four releases a year. By the end of 1994, the game had printed over a billion cards. Until the release of "" in 1996, expansions were released on an irregular basis. Beginning in 2009 one revision of the core set and a set of three related expansions called a "block" were released every year. This system was revised in 2015, with the Core Set being eliminated and blocks now consisting of two sets, released biannually. A further revision occurred in 2018, reversing the elimination of the core sets and no longer constraining sets to blocks. While the essence of the game has always stayed the same, the rules of "Magic" have undergone three major revisions with the release of the "" in 1994, in 1999, and "Magic 2010" in July 2009. With the release of the "" in 2003, "Magic" also received a major visual redesign.
In 1996, Wizards of the Coast established the "", a circuit of tournaments where players can compete for sizeable cash prizes over the course of a single weekend-long tournament. In 2009 the top prize at a single tournament was US$40,000. Sanctioned through the DCI, the tournaments added an element of prestige to the game by virtue of the cash payouts and media coverage from within the community. For a brief period of time, ESPN2 televised the tournaments.
By April 1997, cards had been sold. In 1999, Wizards of The Coast was acquired by Hasbro for $325 million, making "Magic" a Hasbro game.
A patent was granted to Wizards of the Coast in 1997 for "a novel method of game play and game components that in one embodiment are in the form of trading cards" that includes claims covering games whose rules include many of "Magic"'s elements in combination, including concepts such as changing orientation of a game component to indicate use (referred to in the rules of "Magic" and later of Garfield's games such as "" as "tapping") and constructing a deck by selecting cards from a larger pool. The patent has aroused criticism from some observers, who believe some of its claims to be invalid. In 2003, the patent was an element of a larger legal dispute between Wizards of the Coast and Nintendo, regarding trade secrets related to Nintendo's "Pokémon Trading Card Game". The legal action was settled out of court, and its terms were not disclosed.
While unofficial methods of online play existed previously, "" (often shortened to "MTGO" or "Modo"), an official online version of the game, was released in 2002. A new, updated version of "Magic Online" was released in April 2008.
In February 2018, Wizards noted that between the years of 2008 and 2016 they had printed over 20 billion "Magic: the Gathering" cards.
"Magic: The Gathering" cards are produced in much the same way as normal playing cards. Each "Magic" card, approximately 63 × 88 mm in size (2.5 by 3.5 inches), has a face which displays the card's name and rules text as well as an illustration appropriate to the card's concept. 18,970 unique cards have been produced for the game ,
many of them with variant editions, artwork, or layouts, and 600–1000 new ones are added each year. The first "Magic" cards were printed exclusively in English, but current sets are also printed in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
The overwhelming majority of "Magic" cards are issued and marketed in the form of sets. For the majority of its history there were two types: the Core Set and the themed expansion sets. Under Wizards of the Coast's current production and marketing scheme, a new set is released quarterly. Various products are released with each set to appeal to different segments of the "Magic" playing community:
"Shards of Alara" also debuted mythic rares (red-orange), which replace one in eight rare cards on average. There are also premium versions of every card with holographic foil, randomly inserted into some boosters in place of a common, which replace about one in seventy cards.
As of 2018, the number of consecutive sets set on the same world varies. For example, although "Dominaria" takes place in one set, the "Guilds of Ravnica" block will take place over three sets. In addition, small sets have been removed due to developmental problems and all sets are now large. Prior to this change, sets were put into two-set blocks, starting with a large set and ending with a smaller one three months later. Prior to 2016, expansion sets were released in a three-set block (again, beginning with a larger set followed by two smaller sets). These sets consist almost exclusively of newly designed cards. Contrasting with the wide-ranging Core Set, each expansion is focused around a subset of mechanics and ties into a set storyline. Expansions also dedicate several cards to a handful of particular, often newly introduced, game mechanics.
The Core Sets began to be released annually (previously biennially) in July 2009 coinciding with the name change from to "Magic 2010". This shift also introduced new, never before printed cards into the core set, something that previously had never been done. However, core sets were discontinued following the release of "Magic Origins", on July 17, 2015, at the same time that two-set blocks were introduced. Wizards of Coast announced on June 12, 2017 that they plan on revamping and reintroducing a revamped core set, and Core Set 2019 was released on July 13, 2018.
In addition to the quarterly set releases, "Magic" cards are released in other products as well, such as the "Planechase" and "" spin-off games. These combine reprinted "Magic" cards with new, oversized cards with new functionality. "Magic" cards are also printed specifically for collectors, such as the "From the Vault" and "Premium Deck Series" sets, which contain exclusively premium foil cards.
In 2003, starting with the "" Core Set, the game went through its biggest visual change since its creation—a new card frame layout was developed to allow more rules text and larger art on the cards, while reducing the thick, colored border to a minimum. The new frame design aimed to improve contrast and readability using black type instead of the previous white, a new font, and partitioned areas for the name, card type, and power and toughness. The card frame was changed once again in Core Set 2015, which maintained the same templating, but made the card sleeker and added a holo-foil stamp to every rare and mythic card to curtail counterfeiting.
For the first few years of its production, "Magic: The Gathering" featured a small number of cards with names or artwork with demonic or occultist themes, in 1995 the company elected to remove such references from the game. In 2002, believing that the depiction of demons was becoming less controversial and that the game had established itself sufficiently, Wizards of the Coast reversed this policy and resumed printing cards with "demon" in their names.
In 2019, starting with "Throne of Eldraine", booster packs have a chance of containing an alternate art "showcase card". This is to increase the reward of buying boosters and making it more exciting.
The way "Magic" storylines are conceived and deployed has changed considerably over the years. The main premise of "Magic" is that countless possible worlds (planes) exist in the , and only unique and rare beings called Planeswalkers are capable of traversing the Multiverse. This allows the game to frequently change worlds so as to renew its mechanical inspiration, while maintaining planeswalkers as recurrent, common elements across worlds. Players represent planeswalkers able to draw on the magics and entities of these planes to do battle with others.
Garfield established enough of this story for the game when it was first published. With the first sets, most of this story was told through the cards flavor text, and because most of the creatures and the keywords were based on common fantasy tropes (dragons with flying, for example), there was no significant driver for a backing narrative. In some cases, narrative was demanded to help with new gameplay mechanics and keywords that did not fit standard fantasy tropes, but these were still limited to flavor text. The first expansion "Arabian Nights" designed by Garfield was based on "One Thousand and One Nights" folklore and include figures from that like Aladdin.
With demand for more expansions, several different teams within Wizards' research and development separately worked on these upcoming sets, with the card designers taking the lead in creating their narratives. Each of these teams had different approaches for implementing that in the cards. For example, the next expansion was "Antiquities", its design led by Skaff Elias. Elias' team wanted this set to focus on the use of colorless artifacts, and came up with the narrative idea of a battle between two brothers skilled in artifact use at a point in time before the other realms of magic had established themselves. This would tie into both their planned cards as well as help define the differences between the color mana schools better. Elias' planned out elaborate timelines, but as the set was only 100 cards, most of this was left on paper, giving players only glimpses of the larger picture through flavor text. In the case of "Homelands" the designs had two writers craft a story first and then worked alongside them to implement that into the cards for that set. Still, few elements of any of these sets were shared save for the common connection to the plane of Dominaria.
Separately to Wizards of the Coast's own attempts at storytelling, in 1994, Wizards gave exclusive licenses to Harper Prism to publish novels, and to Armada, an imprint of Acclaim Entertainment, to publish comic books. Neither of these were developed in concert with the game and created divergent ideas to the game.
Wizards wanted to try to create a more cohesive universe with the next major expansion, "Weatherlight", comparable to other works like "Star Wars". Mark Rosewater and Michael G. Ryan developed a long-term story arc that would cross through several expansions as well as into the comics, magazines, and novels. With the cards, a small team of dedicated writers were used to make sure there were a consistent voice to the flavor text to help emphasize the story elements. This saga was intended to last the next five years, but several factors came into play by the time the Urza block was released: there was a change in leadership in oversight of "Magic: The Gathering" and the direction it was heading, players were not interested in the lead characters of the saga, and players had found it difficult to follow the a narrative from the cards alone. Around the same time, Wizards had regained control on the license to publish novels and comics, and it was decided to now make the novels the primary route for the story of "Magic: The Gathering", to tie in closely with the cards designed for the expansion. This approach was used through the "" block in 2003, after which Wizards had found that novels were not a sufficient means to build out the details for cards; novels would be focused on how characters change over events, while the game presented a character at a single moment, and a novel could not flesh out all the other supporting elements that the card designers needed to build their sets without weighing down the readers.
Following "Onslaught", the narrative of "Magic: The Gathering" took a more distanced approach. Once an idea for an expansion is presented, preliminary work is done simultaneously by the research and development team and by the creative staff to build out the basic gameplay concepts and the setting of that expansion, respectively. Once both sides agree to that, the two teams then proceed primarily on individual routes towards their end production. Brady Dommermuth, the creative director in 2006, said that "generally the cards provide the world in which the novels are set, and the novels sometimes provide characters represented on cards. But cards also introduce their own characters that might not appear in the novels. In short, the Magic creative team and the novelists work largely in parallel and inform each other as much as possible." Wizards further transitions to ebooks as well as having their creative staff write more in "Uncharted Realms", a weekly column on the company's website. In 2013, the company saw that even with continued growth in player numbers, printed novel sales had fallen greatly and ebook sales remained flat, and made the decision to discontinue the larger narrative works in favor of having the creative team provide story coverage and shipments as of the "Uncharted Realms" column.
This approach continued through 2017. Then, Wizards hired novelist and scriptwriter Nic Kelman as their Head of Story and Entertainment. Kelman's task was to assemble all of the lore established from previous card sets and the published novels, comics, and other materials as to create the game's "cosmology" or the story bible that established all the known planes and elements of those planes, the individual Planeswalkers and their connections to others, and other details that then could be passed not only to the teams developing new cards but also to those expanding the franchise with new novels and other content. This allows for highly connected events between the external media and the game; one example established the death of a major Planeswalker in the novel "War of the Spark: Ravnica" that was published just prior to the release of the new set "War of the Spark", the first novel published by Wizards in several years, with the set containing cards referencing that death.
Each card has an illustration to represent the flavor of the card, often reflecting the setting of the expansion for which it was designed. Much of "Magic"'s early artwork was commissioned with little specific direction or concern for visual cohesion. One infamous example was the printing of the creature Whippoorwill without the "flying" ability even though its art showed a bird in flight. The art direction team later decided to impose a few constraints so that the artistic vision more closely aligned with the design and development of the cards. Each block of cards now has its own style guide with sketches and descriptions of the various races and places featured in the setting.
A few early sets experimented with alternate art for cards. However, Wizards came to believe that this impeded easy recognition of a card and that having multiple versions caused confusion when identifying a card at a glance. Consequently, alternate art is now only used sparingly and mostly for promotional cards. When older cards are reprinted in new sets, however, Wizards of the Coast usually prints them with new art to make the older cards more collectible, though they sometimes reuse well-received artwork if it makes sense thematically.
As "Magic" has expanded across the globe, its artwork has had to change for its international audience. Artwork has been edited or given alternate art to comply with the governmental standards. For example, the portrayal of skeletons and most undead in artwork was prohibited by the Chinese government until 2008.
Wizards of the Coast has introduces specials cards and sets that include cross-promotional elements with other brands typically as promotional cards, not legal for Standard play and may be unplayable even in eternal formats. A special three-card set based on characters from "" (another Hasbro brand) was sold as both physical product and digital items within "MTG Arena" to support the Extra Life charity. The "Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths" set released in April 2020 included 16 kaiju monsters from Toho as promotional cards, such as Godzilla.
Separately, elements of "Magic" have been brought into "Dungeons & Dragons" (D&D). The first such crossover was a D&D ruleset for the plane of Ravnica, a "Magic" expansion introduced in 2005 and 2006 and later revisited in a 2018 expansion. The rulebook was published also in 2018 to correspond with the newer expansion's release.
Scott Haring reviewed "Magic: The Gathering" in "Pyramid" #4 (Nov./Dec., 1993), and stated that "Not only is "Magic" the best gaming bargain to come down the pike in memory; not only is it the most original idea in years; it's also a delightfully addictive game that you and your friends will find impossible to put down."
A 2004 article in "USA Today" suggested that playing "Magic" might help improve the social and mental skills of some of the players. The article interviewed players' parents who believe that the game, similar to sports, teaches children how to more gracefully win and lose. "Magic" also contains a great amount of strategy and vocabulary that children may not be exposed to on a regular basis. Parents also claimed that playing "Magic" helped keep their children out of trouble, such as using illegal drugs or joining criminal gangs. On the other hand, the article also briefly mentions that "Magic" can be highly addictive, leading to parents worried about their children's "Magic" obsession. In addition, until 2007, some of the better players had opportunities to compete for a small number of scholarships.
Jordan Weisman, an American game designer and entrepreneur, commented, "I love games that challenge and change our definition of adventure gaming, and "Magic: The Gathering" is definitely one of a very short list of titles that has accomplished that elusive goal. By combining the collecting and trading elements of baseball cards with the fantasy play dynamics of role-playing games, "Magic" created a whole new genre of product that changed our industry forever."In 2015, "The Guardian" reported that an estimated 20 million people played "Magic" around the world and that the game had a thriving tournament scene, a professional league and a weekly organized game program called Friday Night Magic.
A July 2019 article in "Bloomberg" reported that ""Magic" is part of the [Hasbro’s] 'franchise brands,' a segment that accounted for $2.45 billion in net revenue for the company last year, bigger than its emerging, partner and gaming brand units combined. [Chris] Cocks said "Magic" accounts for a 'meaningful portion' of that, with KeyBanc estimating the game’s contribution is already more than $500 million—including both the physical cards and the nascent digital version. Of the franchise brands, only "Magic" and Monopoly logged revenue gains last year". "", in open beta testing since September 2018, is a free-to-play digital collectible card game with microtransaction purchases based on "Magic". Brett Andress, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, predicts "Magic: The Gathering Arena" adding as much as 98 cents a share in incremental earnings to results by 2021 (which is at least a 20% boost). Joe Deaux, for "Bloomberg", wrote that "nearly 3 million active users will be playing Arena by the end of this year, KeyBanc estimates, and that could swell to nearly 11 million by 2021 according to its bull case scenario—especially if it expands from PCs to mobile. That’s just active users, and registered users could be higher by the millions. Already, according to Hasbro, a billion games have been played online".
In addition, several individuals including Richard Garfield and Donato Giancola won personal awards for their contributions to "Magic".
The success of "Magic: The Gathering" led to the creation of similar games by other companies as well as Wizards of the Coast themselves. Companion Games produced the Galactic Empires CCG (the first science fiction trading card game), which allowed players to pay for and design their own promotional cards, while TSR created the "Spellfire" game, which eventually included five editions in six languages, plus twelve expansion sets. Wizards of the Coast produced "" (now called "Vampire: The Eternal Struggle"), a game about modern-day vampires. Other similar games included trading card games based on "Star Trek" and "Star Wars". "Magic" is often cited as an example of a 1990s collecting fad, though the game's makers were able to overcome the bubble traditionally associated with collecting fads.
There is an active secondary market in individual cards among players and game shops. This market arose from two different facets: players seeking specific cards to help complete or enhance their existing decks and thus were less concerned on the value of the cards themselves, and from collectors seeking the rarer cards for their monetary value to complete collections. Many physical and online stores sell single cards or "playsets" of four of a card. Common cards rarely sell for more than a few cents and are usually sold in bulk. Uncommon cards and weak rare cards typically sell from 10¢ up to $1. The more expensive cards in Standard tournament play - a rotating format featuring the newest cards designed to be fairer and more accessible to newer players - are typically priced between $1 to $25. A second format, Modern, comprising an intermediate level of power and allowing most cards released since roughly 2003, has staple cards that often value between $5 and $100, with higher rarity and demand but reprints every few years intended to keep the format affordable. Foil versions of rare and mythic rare cards are typically priced at about twice as much as the regular versions. Some of the more sought-after rare and mythic rare cards can have foil versions that cost up to three or four times more than the non-foil versions.
A few of the oldest cards, due to smaller printings and limited distribution, are highly valued and rare. This is partly due to the Reserved List, a list of cards from the sets "Alpha" to "Urza's Destiny" (1994–1999) that Wizards has promised never to reprint. Legacy-only cards on the Reserved List, which are barred from reprint under a voluntary but genuine legal obligation, are in short supply due to smaller print runs of the game in its oldest days, and may be worth $200 to $1,000 or higher. And certain Vintage cards - the oldest cards in Magic, with most on the Reserved List, such as the so-called "Power Nine" - can easily cost more than $1,000 apiece.
The most expensive card that was in regular print (as opposed to being a promotional or special printing) is the "Black Lotus", copies of which are worth thousands of dollars at minimum. In 2019, a "Pristine 9.5 grade" Beckett Grading Services graded Alpha Black Lotus was bought by an anonymous buyer, for a record $166,100.
The secondary market started with comic book stores, and hobby shops displaying and selling cards, with the cards' values determined somewhat arbitrarily by the employees of the store. Hobbyist magazines, already tracking prices of sports trading cards, engaged with the "Magic" secondary market by surveying the stores to inquire on current prices to cards, which they then published. With the expansion of the Internet, prices of cards were determined by the number of tournament deck lists a given card would appear in. If a card was played in a tournament more frequently, the cost of the card would be higher (in addition to the market availability of the card). When eBay, Amazon, and other large online markets started to gain popularity, the "Magic" secondary market evolved substantially, with the site TCGPlayer.com launched in 2008 being the first that not only complied the pricing data but allowed for players to buy and sell cards for "Magic" and other CCGs directly via the site. TCGPlayer developed a metric called the TCG Market Price for each card that was based on the most recent sales, allowing for near real-time valuation of a card in the same manner as a stock market. Buying and selling "Magic" cards online became a source of income for people who learned how to manipulate the market.
Today, the secondary market is so large and complex, it has become an area of study for consumer research called . Some people make a career out of market manipulation, creating mathematical models to analyze the growth of cards' worth, and predict the market value of both individual cards, and entire sets of cards. "Magic"s economy has also been tied to the introduction of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as "Magic" cards represent a physical asset that can be converted back and forth into the virtual currency. Nearly all of "Magic"s trading market is unregulated, and issues related to insider trading based on planned changes to the game have occurred. Active "Magic" financial traders have gained a sour reputation with more casual "Magic" players due to the lack of regulations, and that the market manipulations makes it costly for casual players to buy single cards simply for purposes for improving decks.
As of late 2013, Wizards of the Coast has expressed concern over the increasing number of counterfeit cards in the secondary market. Wizards of the Coast has since made an effort to counteract the rise of counterfeits by introducing a new holofoil stamp on all rare and mythic rare cards as of Magic 2015.
There are several examples of academic, peer-reviewed research concerning different aspects of "Magic: The Gathering". One study examined how players use their imaginations when playing. This research studied hobby players and showed how players sought to create and participate in an epic fantasy narrative. Another example used online auctions for "Magic" cards to test revenue outcomes for various auction types. A third example uses probability to examine "Magic" card-collecting strategies. Using a specific set of cards in a specialized manner has shown "Magic: The Gathering" to be Turing complete. Further, by proving this, the researchers assert that "Magic: The Gathering" is so complex as to be Turing complete and capable of being "programmed" to perform any task, that in terms of playing an actual game of "Magic", "the winning strategy is non-computable", making it an improbable challenge to device computer opponents that can play "Magic".
"Magic: The Gathering" video games, comics, and books have been produced under licensing or directly by Wizards of the Coast.
In 2015 Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro published "Magic: The Gathering – Arena of the Planeswalkers". Arena of the Planeswalkers is a tactical boardgame where the players maneuver miniatures over a customizable board game, and the ruleset and terrain is based on Heroscape, but with an addition of spell cards and summoning. The original master set includes miniatures that represent the five Planeswalkers Gideon, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, and Nissa as well as select creatures from the Magic: The Gathering universe. They later released an expansion "Battle for Zendikar" featuring multi-color Planeswalkers Kiora and Ob Nixilis and a colorless Eldrazi Ruiner, and a second master set Shadows Over Innistrad which has 4 new Planeswalkers and also includes the addition of cryptoliths.
There are currently two official video game adaptions of "Magic: The Gathering" for online play. "", first introduced in 2002, allows for players to buy cards and boosters and play against others including in officially-sanctioned tournaments for prize money. "", introduced in 2019, is fashioned after the free-to-play "Hearthstone", with players able to acquire new cards for free or through spending real-world funds. "Arena" currently limited online events with in-game prizes, but is currently being positioned by Wizards of the Coast to also serve as a means for official tournament play, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic. Both "Online" and "Arena" are regularly updated with new Core and Expansion cards as well as all rule changes made by Wizards.
In addition, Wizards of the Coast has worked with other developers for various iterations of "Magic: The Gathering" as a card game in a single-player game format. Microprose developed 1997 "" and its expansions, which had the player travel the world of Shandalar to challenge computer opponents, earn cards to customize their decks, improve their own Planeswalker attributes and ultimately defeat a powerful Planeswalker. Stainless Games developed a series of titles starting with 2009's "" and culminating with 2015's "Magic Duels", a free-to-play title. The "Duels" series did not feature full sets of "Magic" cards but selected subsets, and were initially designed around a challenging single-player experience coupled with an advanced artificial-intelligence computer opponent. Later games in the series added in more deck-building options and multiplayer support.
Additional games have tried other variations of the "Magic: The Gathering" gameplay in other genres. Acclaim developed a real-time strategy game "" in 2003, in which the player's abilities were inspired by the various cards. Acclaim also had made a 1997 arcade game "Magic: The Gathering — Armageddon", a "Breakout"-style trackball-based game, but only as many as six cabinets were known to have been made. Hiberium and D3 Publisher developed "", combining deck building with match-3-style casual gaming. This was released in December 2015 as a freemium game and continues to be updated with new card sets from the physical game. Cryptic Studios and Perfect World Entertainment have announced plans to create a "Magic: The Gathering" massively multiplayer online role-playing game, to be released for personal computers and consoles.
In addition to official programs, a number of unofficial programs were developed to help user to track their "Magic: The Gathering" library and allow for rudimentary play between online players. Examples of such programs included "Apprentice", "Magic Workstation", "XMage", and "Cockatrice". These programs are not endorsed by Wizards of the Coast.
Harper Prism originally had an exclusive license to produce novels for "Magic: The Gathering", and published ten books between 1994 and 1996. Around 1997, the license reverted to Wizards, and the company published its own novels to better tie these works to the expansion sets from 1998 to about 2011.
In September 2011, Hasbro and IDW Publishing accorded to make a four-issue mini-series about "Magic: The Gathering" with a new story but heavily based on MTG elements and with a new Planeswalker called "Dack Fayden", the story of which mainly developed in the planes of Ravnica and Innistrad. The ongoing series started in February 2012.
In January 2014, 20th Century Fox acquired the rights to produce a "Magic: The Gathering" film with Simon Kinberg as producer and TSG Entertainment (its co-financing partner), and Allspark Pictures as co-financers, after Universal Pictures allegedly dropped the film from their schedule (Both Universal and Hasbro had been developing the original "Magic: The Gathering" film since 2009). In June 2014, Fox hired screenwriter Bryan Cogman to write the script for the film. In 2019 following Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox's assets, the film along with numerous other properties in development at Fox were cancelled.
In April 2016, "Enter the Battlefield", a documentary about life on the Magic Pro Tour was released. The film was written by Greg Collins, Nathan Holt, and Shawn Kornhauser.
The production team behind "The Toys That Made Us" will produce a documentary "Igniting the Spark, The Story of Magic: The Gathering".
In June 2019, Variety reported that Joe and Anthony Russo, Wizards of the Coast, and Hasbro's Allspark Animation have teamed with Netflix for an animated "Magic: The Gathering" television series. In July 2019 at the San Diego Comic Con, the Russos revealed the logo of the animated series and spoke about doing an live action series.
In 1998, PGI Limited created "", which was a parody of "Magic: The Gathering". Wizards of the Coast, which owned the rights to "Magic: The Gathering", took active steps to hinder the distribution of the game and successfully shut out PGI Limited from attending GenCon in July 1998. In an attempt to avoid breaching copyright and Richard Garfield's patent, each starter deck of "Havic" had printed on the back side, "This is a Parody", and on the bottom of the rule card was printed, ""Do not have each player": construct their own library of predetermined number of game components by examining and selecting [the] game components from [a] reservoir of game components or you may infringe on U.S. Patent No. 5,662,332 to Garfield."
Four official parody expansions of "Magic" exist: "", "", "", and "" (2020). Most of the cards in these sets feature silver borders and humorous themes. The silver-bordered cards are not legal for play in DCI-sanctioned tournaments.
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Mathematics
Mathematics (from Greek: ) includes the study of such topics as quantity (number theory), structure (algebra), space (geometry), and change (mathematical analysis). It has no generally accepted definition.
Mathematicians seek and use patterns to formulate new conjectures; they resolve the truth or falsity of such by mathematical proof. When mathematical structures are good models of real phenomena, mathematical reasoning can be used to provide insight or predictions about nature. Through the use of abstraction and logic, mathematics developed from counting, calculation, measurement, and the systematic study of the shapes and motions of physical objects. Practical mathematics has been a human activity from as far back as written records exist. The research required to solve mathematical problems can take years or even centuries of sustained inquiry.
Rigorous arguments first appeared in Greek mathematics, most notably in Euclid's "Elements". Since the pioneering work of Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), David Hilbert (1862–1943), and others on axiomatic systems in the late 19th century, it has become customary to view mathematical research as establishing truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions. Mathematics developed at a relatively slow pace until the Renaissance, when mathematical innovations interacting with new scientific discoveries led to a rapid increase in the rate of mathematical discovery that has continued to the present day.
Mathematics is essential in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine, finance, and the social sciences. Applied mathematics has led to entirely new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics and game theory. Mathematicians engage in pure mathematics (mathematics for its own sake) without having any application in mind, but practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are often discovered later.
The history of mathematics can be seen as an ever-increasing series of abstractions. The first abstraction, which is shared by many animals, was probably that of numbers: the realization that a collection of two apples and a collection of two oranges (for example) have something in common, namely quantity of their members.
As evidenced by tallies found on bone, in addition to recognizing how to count physical objects, prehistoric peoples may have also recognized how to count abstract quantities, like time—days, seasons, or years.
Evidence for more complex mathematics does not appear until around 3000 BC, when the Babylonians and Egyptians began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for taxation and other financial calculations, for building and construction, and for astronomy. The most ancient mathematical texts from Mesopotamia and Egypt are from 2000–1800 BC. Many early texts mention Pythagorean triples and so, by inference, the Pythagorean theorem seems to be the most ancient and widespread mathematical development after basic arithmetic and geometry. It is in Babylonian mathematics that elementary arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) first appear in the archaeological record. The Babylonians also possessed a place-value system, and used a sexagesimal numeral system which is still in use today for measuring angles and time.
Beginning in the 6th century BC with the Pythagoreans, the Ancient Greeks began a systematic study of mathematics as a subject in its own right with Greek mathematics. Around 300 BC, Euclid introduced the axiomatic method still used in mathematics today, consisting of definition, axiom, theorem, and proof. His textbook "Elements" is widely considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time. The greatest mathematician of antiquity is often held to be Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) of Syracuse. He developed formulas for calculating the surface area and volume of solids of revolution and used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, in a manner not too dissimilar from modern calculus. Other notable achievements of Greek mathematics are conic sections (Apollonius of Perga, 3rd century BC), trigonometry (Hipparchus of Nicaea (2nd century BC), and the beginnings of algebra (Diophantus, 3rd century AD).
The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today, evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via Islamic mathematics. Other notable developments of Indian mathematics include the modern definition and approximation of sine and cosine, and an early form of infinite series.
During the Golden Age of Islam, especially during the 9th and 10th centuries, mathematics saw many important innovations building on Greek mathematics. The most notable achievement of Islamic mathematics was the development of algebra. Other notable achievements of the Islamic period are advances in spherical trigonometry and the addition of the decimal point to the Arabic numeral system. Many notable mathematicians from this period were Persian, such as Al-Khwarismi, Omar Khayyam and Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī.
During the early modern period, mathematics began to develop at an accelerating pace in Western Europe. The development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz in the 17th century revolutionized mathematics. Leonhard Euler was the most notable mathematician of the 18th century, contributing numerous theorems and discoveries. Perhaps the foremost mathematician of the 19th century was the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who made numerous contributions to fields such as algebra, analysis, differential geometry, matrix theory, number theory, and statistics. In the early 20th century, Kurt Gödel transformed mathematics by publishing his incompleteness theorems, which show in part that any consistent axiomatic system—if powerful enough to describe arithmetic—will contain true propositions that cannot be proved.
Mathematics has since been greatly extended, and there has been a fruitful interaction between mathematics and science, to the benefit of both. Mathematical discoveries continue to be made today. According to Mikhail B. Sevryuk, in the January 2006 issue of the "Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society", "The number of papers and books included in the "Mathematical Reviews" database since 1940 (the first year of operation of MR) is now more than 1.9 million, and more than 75 thousand items are added to the database each year. The overwhelming majority of works in this ocean contain new mathematical theorems and their proofs."
The word "mathematics" comes from Ancient Greek "máthēma" (""), meaning "that which is learnt," "what one gets to know," hence also "study" and "science". The word for "mathematics" came to have the narrower and more technical meaning "mathematical study" even in Classical times. Its adjective is "mathēmatikós" (), meaning "related to learning" or "studious," which likewise further came to mean "mathematical." In particular, "mathēmatikḗ tékhnē" (; ) meant "the mathematical art."
Similarly, one of the two main schools of thought in Pythagoreanism was known as the "mathēmatikoi" (μαθηματικοί)—which at the time meant "learners" rather than "mathematicians" in the modern sense.
In Latin, and in English until around 1700, the term "mathematics" more commonly meant "astrology" (or sometimes "astronomy") rather than "mathematics"; the meaning gradually changed to its present one from about 1500 to 1800. This has resulted in several mistranslations. For example, Saint Augustine's warning that Christians should beware of "mathematici", meaning astrologers, is sometimes mistranslated as a condemnation of mathematicians.
The apparent plural form in English, like the French plural form (and the less commonly used singular derivative ), goes back to the Latin neuter plural (Cicero), based on the Greek plural "ta mathēmatiká" (), used by Aristotle (384–322 BC), and meaning roughly "all things mathematical", although it is plausible that English borrowed only the adjective "mathematic(al)" and formed the noun "mathematics" anew, after the pattern of "physics" and "metaphysics", which were inherited from Greek. In English, the noun "mathematics" takes a singular verb. It is often shortened to "maths" or, in North America, "math".
Mathematics has no generally accepted definition. Aristotle defined mathematics as "the science of quantity" and this definition prevailed until the 18th century. In the 19th century, when the study of mathematics increased in rigor and began to address abstract topics such as group theory and projective geometry, which have no clear-cut relation to quantity and measurement, mathematicians and philosophers began to propose a variety of new definitions.
A great many professional mathematicians take no interest in a definition of mathematics, or consider it undefinable. There is not even consensus on whether mathematics is an art or a science. Some just say, "Mathematics is what mathematicians do."
Three leading types of definition of mathematics today are called logicist, intuitionist, and formalist, each reflecting a different philosophical school of thought. All have severe flaws, none has widespread acceptance, and no reconciliation seems possible.
An early definition of mathematics in terms of logic was that of Benjamin Peirce (1870): "the science that draws necessary conclusions." In the "Principia Mathematica", Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead advanced the philosophical program known as logicism, and attempted to prove that all mathematical concepts, statements, and principles can be defined and proved entirely in terms of symbolic logic. A logicist definition of mathematics is Russell's (1903) "All Mathematics is Symbolic Logic."
Intuitionist definitions, developing from the philosophy of mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer, identify mathematics with certain mental phenomena. An example of an intuitionist definition is "Mathematics is the mental activity which consists in carrying out constructs one after the other." A peculiarity of intuitionism is that it rejects some mathematical ideas considered valid according to other definitions. In particular, while other philosophies of mathematics allow objects that can be proved to exist even though they cannot be constructed, intuitionism allows only mathematical objects that one can actually construct. Intuitionists also reject the law of excluded middle—a stance which forces them to reject proof by contradiction as a viable proof method as well.
Formalist definitions identify mathematics with its symbols and the rules for operating on them. Haskell Curry defined mathematics simply as "the science of formal systems". A formal system is a set of symbols, or "tokens", and some "rules" on how the tokens are to be combined into "formulas". In formal systems, the word "axiom" has a special meaning different from the ordinary meaning of "a self-evident truth", and is used to refer to a combination of tokens that is included in a given formal system without needing to be derived using the rules of the system.
The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss referred to mathematics as "the Queen of the Sciences". More recently, Marcus du Sautoy has called mathematics "the Queen of Science ... the main driving force behind scientific discovery". The philosopher Karl Popper observed that "most mathematical theories are, like those of physics and biology, hypothetico-deductive: pure mathematics therefore turns out to be much closer to the natural sciences whose hypotheses are conjectures, than it seemed even recently." Popper also noted that "I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience."
Several authors consider that mathematics is not a science because it does not rely on empirical evidence.
Mathematics shares much in common with many fields in the physical sciences, notably the exploration of the logical consequences of assumptions. Intuition and experimentation also play a role in the formulation of conjectures in both mathematics and the (other) sciences. Experimental mathematics continues to grow in importance within mathematics, and computation and simulation are playing an increasing role in both the sciences and mathematics.
The opinions of mathematicians on this matter are varied. Many mathematicians feel that to call their area a science is to downplay the importance of its aesthetic side, and its history in the traditional seven liberal arts; others feel that to ignore its connection to the sciences is to turn a blind eye to the fact that the interface between mathematics and its applications in science and engineering has driven much development in mathematics. One way this difference of viewpoint plays out is in the philosophical debate as to whether mathematics is "created" (as in art) or "discovered" (as in science). In practice, mathematicians are typically grouped with scientists at the gross level but separated at finer levels. This is one of many issues considered in the philosophy of mathematics.
Mathematics arises from many different kinds of problems. At first these were found in commerce, land measurement, architecture and later astronomy; today, all sciences suggest problems studied by mathematicians, and many problems arise within mathematics itself. For example, the physicist Richard Feynman invented the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics using a combination of mathematical reasoning and physical insight, and today's string theory, a still-developing scientific theory which attempts to unify the four fundamental forces of nature, continues to inspire new mathematics.
Some mathematics is relevant only in the area that inspired it, and is applied to solve further problems in that area. But often mathematics inspired by one area proves useful in many areas, and joins the general stock of mathematical concepts. A distinction is often made between pure mathematics and applied mathematics. However pure mathematics topics often turn out to have applications, e.g. number theory in cryptography. This remarkable fact, that even the "purest" mathematics often turns out to have practical applications, is what Eugene Wigner has called "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics". As in most areas of study, the explosion of knowledge in the scientific age has led to specialization: there are now hundreds of specialized areas in mathematics and the latest Mathematics Subject Classification runs to 46 pages. Several areas of applied mathematics have merged with related traditions outside of mathematics and become disciplines in their own right, including statistics, operations research, and computer science.
For those who are mathematically inclined, there is often a definite aesthetic aspect to much of mathematics. Many mathematicians talk about the "elegance" of mathematics, its intrinsic aesthetics and inner beauty. Simplicity and generality are valued. There is beauty in a simple and elegant proof, such as Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers, and in an elegant numerical method that speeds calculation, such as the fast Fourier transform. G. H. Hardy in "A Mathematician's Apology" expressed the belief that these aesthetic considerations are, in themselves, sufficient to justify the study of pure mathematics. He identified criteria such as significance, unexpectedness, inevitability, and economy as factors that contribute to a mathematical aesthetic. Mathematical research often seeks critical features of a mathematical object. A theorem expressed as a characterization of the object by these features is the prize. Examples of particularly succinct and revelatory mathematical arguments has been published in "Proofs from THE BOOK".
The popularity of recreational mathematics is another sign of the pleasure many find in solving mathematical questions. And at the other social extreme, philosophers continue to find problems in philosophy of mathematics, such as the nature of mathematical proof.
Most of the mathematical notation in use today was not invented until the 16th century. Before that, mathematics was written out in words, limiting mathematical discovery. Euler (1707–1783) was responsible for many of the notations in use today. Modern notation makes mathematics much easier for the professional, but beginners often find it daunting. According to Barbara Oakley, this can be attributed to the fact that mathematical ideas are both more "abstract" and more "encrypted" than those of natural language. Unlike natural language, where people can often equate a word (such as "cow") with the physical object it corresponds to, mathematical symbols are abstract, lacking any physical analog. Mathematical symbols are also more highly encrypted than regular words, meaning a single symbol can encode a number of different operations or ideas.
Mathematical language can be difficult to understand for beginners because even common terms, such as "or" and "only", have a more precise meaning than they have in everyday speech, and other terms such as "open" and "field" refer to specific mathematical ideas, not covered by their laymen's meanings. Mathematical language also includes many technical terms such as "homeomorphism" and "integrable" that have no meaning outside of mathematics. Additionally, shorthand phrases such as "iff" for "if and only if" belong to mathematical jargon. There is a reason for special notation and technical vocabulary: mathematics requires more precision than everyday speech. Mathematicians refer to this precision of language and logic as "rigor".
Mathematical proof is fundamentally a matter of rigor. Mathematicians want their theorems to follow from axioms by means of systematic reasoning. This is to avoid mistaken "theorems", based on fallible intuitions, of which many instances have occurred in the history of the subject. The level of rigor expected in mathematics has varied over time: the Greeks expected detailed arguments, but at the time of Isaac Newton the methods employed were less rigorous. Problems inherent in the definitions used by Newton would lead to a resurgence of careful analysis and formal proof in the 19th century. Misunderstanding the rigor is a cause for some of the common misconceptions of mathematics. Today, mathematicians continue to argue among themselves about computer-assisted proofs. Since large computations are hard to verify, such proofs may be erroneous if the used computer program is erroneous. On the other hand, proof assistants allow verifying all details that cannot be given in a hand-written proof, and provide certainty of the correctness of long proofs such as that of the Feit–Thompson theorem.
Axioms in traditional thought were "self-evident truths", but that conception is problematic. At a formal level, an axiom is just a string of symbols, which has an intrinsic meaning only in the context of all derivable formulas of an axiomatic system. It was the goal of Hilbert's program to put all of mathematics on a firm axiomatic basis, but according to Gödel's incompleteness theorem every (sufficiently powerful) axiomatic system has undecidable formulas; and so a final axiomatization of mathematics is impossible. Nonetheless mathematics is often imagined to be (as far as its formal content) nothing but set theory in some axiomatization, in the sense that every mathematical statement or proof could be cast into formulas within set theory.
Mathematics can, broadly speaking, be subdivided into the study of quantity, structure, space, and change (i.e. arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and analysis). In addition to these main concerns, there are also subdivisions dedicated to exploring links from the heart of mathematics to other fields: to logic, to set theory (foundations), to the empirical mathematics of the various sciences (applied mathematics), and more recently to the rigorous study of uncertainty. While some areas might seem unrelated, the Langlands program has found connections between areas previously thought unconnected, such as Galois groups, Riemann surfaces and number theory.
Discrete mathematics conventionally groups together the fields of mathematics which study mathematical structures that are fundamentally discrete rather than continuous.
In order to clarify the foundations of mathematics, the fields of mathematical logic and set theory were developed. Mathematical logic includes the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics; set theory is the branch of mathematics that studies sets or collections of objects. The phrase "crisis of foundations" describes the search for a rigorous foundation for mathematics that took place from approximately 1900 to 1930. Some disagreement about the foundations of mathematics continues to the present day. The crisis of foundations was stimulated by a number of controversies at the time, including the controversy over Cantor's set theory and the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy.
Mathematical logic is concerned with setting mathematics within a rigorous axiomatic framework, and studying the implications of such a framework. As such, it is home to Gödel's incompleteness theorems which (informally) imply that any effective formal system that contains basic arithmetic, if "sound" (meaning that all theorems that can be proved are true), is necessarily "incomplete" (meaning that there are true theorems which cannot be proved "in that system"). Whatever finite collection of number-theoretical axioms is taken as a foundation, Gödel showed how to construct a formal statement that is a true number-theoretical fact, but which does not follow from those axioms. Therefore, no formal system is a complete axiomatization of full number theory. Modern logic is divided into recursion theory, model theory, and proof theory, and is closely linked to theoretical computer science, as well as to category theory. In the context of recursion theory, the impossibility of a full axiomatization of number theory can also be formally demonstrated as a consequence of the MRDP theorem.
Theoretical computer science includes computability theory, computational complexity theory, and information theory. Computability theory examines the limitations of various theoretical models of the computer, including the most well-known model—the Turing machine. Complexity theory is the study of tractability by computer; some problems, although theoretically solvable by computer, are so expensive in terms of time or space that solving them is likely to remain practically unfeasible, even with the rapid advancement of computer hardware. A famous problem is the "" problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems. Finally, information theory is concerned with the amount of data that can be stored on a given medium, and hence deals with concepts such as compression and entropy.
The study of quantity starts with numbers, first the familiar natural numbers and integers ("whole numbers") and arithmetical operations on them, which are characterized in arithmetic. The deeper properties of integers are studied in number theory, from which come such popular results as Fermat's Last Theorem. The twin prime conjecture and Goldbach's conjecture are two unsolved problems in number theory.
As the number system is further developed, the integers are recognized as a subset of the rational numbers ("fractions"). These, in turn, are contained within the real numbers, which are used to represent continuous quantities. Real numbers are generalized to complex numbers. These are the first steps of a hierarchy of numbers that goes on to include quaternions and octonions. Consideration of the natural numbers also leads to the transfinite numbers, which formalize the concept of "infinity". According to the fundamental theorem of algebra all solutions of equations in one unknown with complex coefficients are complex numbers, regardless of degree. Another area of study is the size of sets, which is described with the cardinal numbers. These include the aleph numbers, which allow meaningful comparison of the size of infinitely large sets.
Many mathematical objects, such as sets of numbers and functions, exhibit internal structure as a consequence of operations or relations that are defined on the set. Mathematics then studies properties of those sets that can be expressed in terms of that structure; for instance number theory studies properties of the set of integers that can be expressed in terms of arithmetic operations. Moreover, it frequently happens that different such structured sets (or structures) exhibit similar properties, which makes it possible, by a further step of abstraction, to state axioms for a class of structures, and then study at once the whole class of structures satisfying these axioms. Thus one can study groups, rings, fields and other abstract systems; together such studies (for structures defined by algebraic operations) constitute the domain of abstract algebra.
By its great generality, abstract algebra can often be applied to seemingly unrelated problems; for instance a number of ancient problems concerning compass and straightedge constructions were finally solved using Galois theory, which involves field theory and group theory. Another example of an algebraic theory is linear algebra, which is the general study of vector spaces, whose elements called vectors have both quantity and direction, and can be used to model (relations between) points in space. This is one example of the phenomenon that the originally unrelated areas of geometry and algebra have very strong interactions in modern mathematics. Combinatorics studies ways of enumerating the number of objects that fit a given structure.
The study of space originates with geometry—in particular, Euclidean geometry, which combines space and numbers, and encompasses the well-known Pythagorean theorem. Trigonometry is the branch of mathematics that deals with relationships between the sides and the angles of triangles and with the trigonometric functions. The modern study of space generalizes these ideas to include higher-dimensional geometry, non-Euclidean geometries (which play a central role in general relativity) and topology. Quantity and space both play a role in analytic geometry, differential geometry, and algebraic geometry. Convex and discrete geometry were developed to solve problems in number theory and functional analysis but now are pursued with an eye on applications in optimization and computer science. Within differential geometry are the concepts of fiber bundles and calculus on manifolds, in particular, vector and tensor calculus. Within algebraic geometry is the description of geometric objects as solution sets of polynomial equations, combining the concepts of quantity and space, and also the study of topological groups, which combine structure and space. Lie groups are used to study space, structure, and change. Topology in all its many ramifications may have been the greatest growth area in 20th-century mathematics; it includes point-set topology, set-theoretic topology, algebraic topology and differential topology. In particular, instances of modern-day topology are metrizability theory, axiomatic set theory, homotopy theory, and Morse theory. Topology also includes the now solved Poincaré conjecture, and the still unsolved areas of the Hodge conjecture. Other results in geometry and topology, including the four color theorem and Kepler conjecture, have been proven only with the help of computers.
Understanding and describing change is a common theme in the natural sciences, and calculus was developed as a tool to investigate it. Functions arise here, as a central concept describing a changing quantity. The rigorous study of real numbers and functions of a real variable is known as real analysis, with complex analysis the equivalent field for the complex numbers. Functional analysis focuses attention on (typically infinite-dimensional) spaces of functions. One of many applications of functional analysis is quantum mechanics. Many problems lead naturally to relationships between a quantity and its rate of change, and these are studied as differential equations. Many phenomena in nature can be described by dynamical systems; chaos theory makes precise the ways in which many of these systems exhibit unpredictable yet still deterministic behavior.
Applied mathematics concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge. The term "applied mathematics" also describes the professional specialty in which mathematicians work on practical problems; as a profession focused on practical problems, "applied mathematics" focuses on the "formulation, study, and use of mathematical models" in science, engineering, and other areas of mathematical practice.
In the past, practical applications have motivated the development of mathematical theories, which then became the subject of study in pure mathematics, where mathematics is developed primarily for its own sake. Thus, the activity of applied mathematics is vitally connected with research in pure mathematics.
Applied mathematics has significant overlap with the discipline of statistics, whose theory is formulated mathematically, especially with probability theory. Statisticians (working as part of a research project) "create data that makes sense" with random sampling and with randomized experiments; the design of a statistical sample or experiment specifies the analysis of the data (before the data be available). When reconsidering data from experiments and samples or when analyzing data from observational studies, statisticians "make sense of the data" using the art of modelling and the theory of inference—with model selection and estimation; the estimated models and consequential predictions should be tested on new data.
Statistical theory studies decision problems such as minimizing the risk (expected loss) of a statistical action, such as using a procedure in, for example, parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, and selecting the best. In these traditional areas of mathematical statistics, a statistical-decision problem is formulated by minimizing an objective function, like expected loss or cost, under specific constraints: For example, designing a survey often involves minimizing the cost of estimating a population mean with a given level of confidence. Because of its use of optimization, the mathematical theory of statistics shares concerns with other decision sciences, such as operations research, control theory, and mathematical economics.
Computational mathematics proposes and studies methods for solving mathematical problems that are typically too large for human numerical capacity. Numerical analysis studies methods for problems in analysis using functional analysis and approximation theory; numerical analysis includes the study of approximation and discretisation broadly with special concern for rounding errors. Numerical analysis and, more broadly, scientific computing also study non-analytic topics of mathematical science, especially algorithmic matrix and graph theory. Other areas of computational mathematics include computer algebra and symbolic computation.
Arguably the most prestigious award in mathematics is the Fields Medal, established in 1936 and awarded every four years (except around World War II) to as many as four individuals. The Fields Medal is often considered a mathematical equivalent to the Nobel Prize.
The Wolf Prize in Mathematics, instituted in 1978, recognizes lifetime achievement, and another major international award, the Abel Prize, was instituted in 2003. The Chern Medal was introduced in 2010 to recognize lifetime achievement. These accolades are awarded in recognition of a particular body of work, which may be innovational, or provide a solution to an outstanding problem in an established field.
A famous list of 23 open problems, called "Hilbert's problems", was compiled in 1900 by German mathematician David Hilbert. This list achieved great celebrity among mathematicians, and at least nine of the problems have now been solved. A new list of seven important problems, titled the "Millennium Prize Problems", was published in 2000. Only one of them, the Riemann hypothesis, duplicates one of Hilbert's problems. A solution to any of these problems carries a 1 million dollar reward. Currently, only one of these problems, the Poincaré Conjecture, has been solved.
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Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.
Population decline, counterurbanisation, collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire, Rome's direct continuation, survived in the Eastern Mediterranean and remained a major power. The empire's law code, the "Corpus Juris Civilis" or "Code of Justinian", was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th centuries. It covered much of Western Europe but later succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions: Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, and Saracens from the south.
During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and labour services to the nobles, and feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organised in the High Middle Ages. The Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation-states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, and the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements toward the end of this period and into the Late Middle Ages.
The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine, plague, and war, which significantly diminished the population of Europe; between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed about a third of Europeans. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, and peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.
The Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history: classical civilisation or Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Period. The "Middle Ages" first appears in Latin in 1469 as "media tempestas" or "middle season". In early usage, there were many variants, including "medium aevum", or "middle age", first recorded in 1604, and "media saecula", or "middle centuries", first recorded in 1625. The adjective "medieval" (or sometimes "mediaeval" or "mediæval"), meaning pertaining to the Middle Ages, derives from "medium aevum".
Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the "Six Ages" or the "Four Empires", and considered their time to be the last before the end of the world. When referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being "modern". In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as "antiqua" (or "ancient") and to the Christian period as "nova" (or "new"). Leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his "History of the Florentine People" (1442), with a middle period "between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of city life sometime in late eleventh and twelfth centuries". Tripartite periodisation became standard after the 17th-century German historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods: ancient, medieval, and modern.
The most commonly given starting point for the Middle Ages is around 500, with the date of 476 first used by Bruni. Later starting dates are sometimes used in the outer parts of Europe. For Europe as a whole, 1500 is often considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. Depending on the context, events such as the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in 1492, or the Protestant Reformation in 1517 are sometimes used. English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period. For Spain, dates commonly used are the death of King Ferdinand II in 1516, the death of Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1504, or the conquest of Granada in 1492.
Historians from Romance-speaking countries tend to divide the Middle Ages into two parts: an earlier "High" and later "Low" period. English-speaking historians, following their German counterparts, generally subdivide the Middle Ages into three intervals: "Early", "High", and "Late". In the 19th century, the entire Middle Ages were often referred to as the "Dark Ages", but with the adoption of these subdivisions, use of this term was restricted to the Early Middle Ages, at least among historians.
The Roman Empire reached its greatest territorial extent during the 2nd century AD; the following two centuries witnessed the slow decline of Roman control over its outlying territories. Economic issues, including inflation, and external pressure on the frontiers combined to create the Crisis of the Third Century, with emperors coming to the throne only to be rapidly replaced by new usurpers. Military expenses increased steadily during the 3rd century, mainly in response to the war with the Sasanian Empire, which revived in the middle of the 3rd century. The army doubled in size, and cavalry and smaller units replaced the Roman legion as the main tactical unit. The need for revenue led to increased taxes and a decline in numbers of the curial, or landowning, class, and decreasing numbers of them willing to shoulder the burdens of holding office in their native towns. More bureaucrats were needed in the central administration to deal with the needs of the army, which led to complaints from civilians that there were more tax-collectors in the empire than tax-payers.
The Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305) split the empire into separately administered eastern and western halves in 286; the empire was not considered divided by its inhabitants or rulers, as legal and administrative promulgations in one division were considered valid in the other. In 330, after a period of civil war, Constantine the Great (r. 306–337) refounded the city of Byzantium as the newly renamed eastern capital, Constantinople. Diocletian's reforms strengthened the governmental bureaucracy, reformed taxation, and strengthened the army, which bought the empire time but did not resolve the problems it was facing: excessive taxation, a declining birthrate, and pressures on its frontiers, among others. Civil war between rival emperors became common in the middle of the 4th century, diverting soldiers from the empire's frontier forces and allowing invaders to encroach. For much of the 4th century, Roman society stabilised in a new form that differed from the earlier classical period, with a widening gulf between the rich and poor, and a decline in the vitality of the smaller towns. Another change was the Christianisation, or conversion of the empire to Christianity, a gradual process that lasted from the 2nd to the 5th centuries.
In 376, the Goths, fleeing from the Huns, received permission from Emperor Valens (r. 364–378) to settle in the Roman province of Thracia in the Balkans. The settlement did not go smoothly, and when Roman officials mishandled the situation, the Goths began to raid and plunder. Valens, attempting to put down the disorder, was killed fighting the Goths at the Battle of Adrianople on 9 August 378. As well as the threat from such tribal confederacies from the north, internal divisions within the empire, especially within the Christian Church, caused problems. In 400, the Visigoths invaded the Western Roman Empire and, although briefly forced back from Italy, in 410 sacked the city of Rome. In 406 the Alans, Vandals, and Suevi crossed into Gaul; over the next three years they spread across Gaul and in 409 crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into modern-day Spain. The Migration Period began, when various peoples, initially largely Germanic peoples, moved across Europe. The Franks, Alemanni, and the Burgundians all ended up in northern Gaul while the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes settled in Britain, and the Vandals went on to cross the strait of Gibraltar after which they conquered the province of Africa. In the 430s the Huns began invading the empire; their king Attila (r. 434–453) led invasions into the Balkans in 442 and 447, Gaul in 451, and Italy in 452. The Hunnic threat remained until Attila's death in 453, when the Hunnic confederation he led fell apart. These invasions by the tribes completely changed the political and demographic nature of what had been the Western Roman Empire.
By the end of the 5th century the western section of the empire was divided into smaller political units, ruled by the tribes that had invaded in the early part of the century. The deposition of the last emperor of the west, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 has traditionally marked the end of the Western Roman Empire. By 493 the Italian peninsula was conquered by the Ostrogoths. The Eastern Roman Empire, often referred to as the Byzantine Empire after the fall of its western counterpart, had little ability to assert control over the lost western territories. The Byzantine emperors maintained a claim over the territory, but while none of the new kings in the west dared to elevate himself to the position of emperor of the west, Byzantine control of most of the Western Empire could not be sustained; the reconquest of the Mediterranean periphery and the Italian Peninsula (Gothic War) in the reign of Justinian (r. 527–565) was the sole, and temporary, exception.
The political structure of Western Europe changed with the end of the united Roman Empire. Although the movements of peoples during this period are usually described as "invasions", they were not just military expeditions but migrations of entire peoples into the empire. Such movements were aided by the refusal of the Western Roman elites to support the army or pay the taxes that would have allowed the military to suppress the migration. The emperors of the 5th century were often controlled by military strongmen such as Stilicho (d. 408), Aetius (d. 454), Aspar (d. 471), Ricimer (d. 472), or Gundobad (d. 516), who were partly or fully of non-Roman background. When the line of Western emperors ceased, many of the kings who replaced them were from the same background. Intermarriage between the new kings and the Roman elites was common. This led to a fusion of Roman culture with the customs of the invading tribes, including the popular assemblies that allowed free male tribal members more say in political matters than was common in the Roman state. Material artefacts left by the Romans and the invaders are often similar, and tribal items were often modelled on Roman objects. Much of the scholarly and written culture of the new kingdoms was also based on Roman intellectual traditions. An important difference was the gradual loss of tax revenue by the new polities. Many of the new political entities no longer supported their armies through taxes, instead relying on granting them land or rents. This meant there was less need for large tax revenues and so the taxation systems decayed. Warfare was common between and within the kingdoms. Slavery declined as the supply weakened, and society became more rural.
Between the 5th and 8th centuries, new peoples and individuals filled the political void left by Roman centralised government. The Ostrogoths, a Gothic tribe, settled in Roman Italy in the late fifth century under Theoderic the Great (d. 526) and set up a kingdom marked by its co-operation between the Italians and the Ostrogoths, at least until the last years of Theodoric's reign. The Burgundians settled in Gaul, and after an earlier realm was destroyed by the Huns in 436 formed a new kingdom in the 440s. Between today's Geneva and Lyon, it grew to become the realm of Burgundy in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. Elsewhere in Gaul, the Franks and Celtic Britons set up small polities. Francia was centred in northern Gaul, and the first king of whom much is known is Childeric I (d. 481). His grave was discovered in 1653 and is remarkable for its grave goods, which included weapons and a large quantity of gold.
Under Childeric's son Clovis I (r. 509–511), the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, the Frankish kingdom expanded and converted to Christianity. The Britons, related to the natives of Britannia – modern-day Great Britain – settled in what is now Brittany. Other monarchies were established by the Visigothic Kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula, the Suebi in northwestern Iberia, and the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa. In the sixth century, the Lombards settled in Northern Italy, replacing the Ostrogothic kingdom with a grouping of duchies that occasionally selected a king to rule over them all. By the late sixth century, this arrangement had been replaced by a permanent monarchy, the Kingdom of the Lombards.
The invasions brought new ethnic groups to Europe, although some regions received a larger influx of new peoples than others. In Gaul for instance, the invaders settled much more extensively in the north-east than in the south-west. Slavs settled in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula. The settlement of peoples was accompanied by changes in languages. Latin, the literary language of the Western Roman Empire, was gradually replaced by vernacular languages which evolved from Latin, but were distinct from it, collectively known as Romance languages. These changes from Latin to the new languages took many centuries. Greek remained the language of the Byzantine Empire, but the migrations of the Slavs added Slavic languages to Eastern Europe.
As Western Europe witnessed the formation of new kingdoms, the Eastern Roman Empire remained intact and experienced an economic revival that lasted into the early 7th century. There were fewer invasions of the eastern section of the empire; most occurred in the Balkans. Peace with the Sasanian Empire, the traditional enemy of Rome, lasted throughout most of the 5th century. The Eastern Empire was marked by closer relations between the political state and Christian Church, with doctrinal matters assuming an importance in Eastern politics that they did not have in Western Europe. Legal developments included the codification of Roman law; the first effort—the "Codex Theodosianus"—was completed in 438. Under Emperor Justinian (r. 527–565), another compilation took place—the "Corpus Juris Civilis". Justinian also oversaw the construction of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the Ostrogoths, under Belisarius (d. 565). The conquest of Italy was not complete, as a deadly outbreak of plague in 542 led to the rest of Justinian's reign concentrating on defensive measures rather than further conquests.
At the Emperor's death, the Byzantines had control of most of Italy, North Africa, and a small foothold in southern Spain. Justinian's reconquests have been criticised by historians for overextending his realm and setting the stage for the early Muslim conquests, but many of the difficulties faced by Justinian's successors were due not just to over-taxation to pay for his wars but to the essentially civilian nature of the empire, which made raising troops difficult.
In the Eastern Empire the slow infiltration of the Balkans by the Slavs added a further difficulty for Justinian's successors. It began gradually, but by the late 540s Slavic tribes were in Thrace and Illyrium, and had defeated an imperial army near Adrianople in 551. In the 560s the Avars began to expand from their base on the north bank of the Danube; by the end of the 6th-century, they were the dominant power in Central Europe and routinely able to force the Eastern emperors to pay tribute. They remained a strong power until 796.
An additional problem to face the empire came as a result of the involvement of Emperor Maurice (r. 582–602) in Persian politics when he intervened in a succession dispute. This led to a period of peace, but when Maurice was overthrown, the Persians invaded and during the reign of Emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641) controlled large chunks of the empire, including Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia until Heraclius' successful counterattack. In 628 the empire secured a peace treaty and recovered all of its lost territories.
In Western Europe, some of the older Roman elite families died out while others became more involved with ecclesiastical than secular affairs. Values attached to Latin scholarship and education mostly disappeared, and while literacy remained important, it became a practical skill rather than a sign of elite status. In the 4th century, Jerome (d. 420) dreamed that God rebuked him for spending more time reading Cicero than the Bible. By the 6th century, Gregory of Tours (d. 594) had a similar dream, but instead of being chastised for reading Cicero, he was chastised for learning shorthand. By the late 6th century, the principal means of religious instruction in the Church had become music and art rather than the book. Most intellectual efforts went towards imitating classical scholarship, but some original works were created, along with now-lost oral compositions. The writings of Sidonius Apollinaris (d. 489), Cassiodorus (d. c. 585), and Boethius (d. c. 525) were typical of the age.
Changes also took place among laymen, as aristocratic culture focused on great feasts held in halls rather than on literary pursuits. Clothing for the elites was richly embellished with jewels and gold. Lords and kings supported entourages of fighters who formed the backbone of the military forces. Family ties within the elites were important, as were the virtues of loyalty, courage, and honour. These ties led to the prevalence of the feud in aristocratic society, examples of which included those related by Gregory of Tours that took place in Merovingian Gaul. Most feuds seem to have ended quickly with the payment of some sort of compensation. Women took part in aristocratic society mainly in their roles as wives and mothers of men, with the role of mother of a ruler being especially prominent in Merovingian Gaul. In Anglo-Saxon society the lack of many child rulers meant a lesser role for women as queen mothers, but this was compensated for by the increased role played by abbesses of monasteries. Only in Italy does it appear that women were always considered under the protection and control of a male relative.
Peasant society is much less documented than the nobility. Most of the surviving information available to historians comes from archaeology; few detailed written records documenting peasant life remain from before the 9th century. Most of the descriptions of the lower classes come from either law codes or writers from the upper classes. Landholding patterns in the West were not uniform; some areas had greatly fragmented landholding patterns, but in other areas large contiguous blocks of land were the norm. These differences allowed for a wide variety of peasant societies, some dominated by aristocratic landholders and others having a great deal of autonomy. Land settlement also varied greatly. Some peasants lived in large settlements that numbered as many as 700 inhabitants. Others lived in small groups of a few families and still others lived on isolated farms spread over the countryside. There were also areas where the pattern was a mix of two or more of those systems. Unlike in the late Roman period, there was no sharp break between the legal status of the free peasant and the aristocrat, and it was possible for a free peasant's family to rise into the aristocracy over several generations through military service to a powerful lord.
Roman city life and culture changed greatly in the early Middle Ages. Although Italian cities remained inhabited, they contracted significantly in size. Rome, for instance, shrank from a population of hundreds of thousands to around 30,000 by the end of the 6th century. Roman temples were converted into Christian churches and city walls remained in use. In Northern Europe, cities also shrank, while civic monuments and other public buildings were raided for building materials. The establishment of new kingdoms often meant some growth for the towns chosen as capitals. Although there had been Jewish communities in many Roman cities, the Jews suffered periods of persecution after the conversion of the empire to Christianity. Officially they were tolerated, if subject to conversion efforts, and at times were even encouraged to settle in new areas.
Religious beliefs in the Eastern Empire and Iran were in flux during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Judaism was an active proselytising faith, and at least one Arab political leader converted to it. Christianity had active missions competing with the Persians' Zoroastrianism in seeking converts, especially among residents of the Arabian Peninsula. All these strands came together with the emergence of Islam in Arabia during the lifetime of Muhammad (d. 632). After his death, Islamic forces conquered much of the Eastern Empire and Persia, starting with Syria in 634–635, continuing with Persia between 637 and 642, reaching Egypt in 640–641, North Africa in the later seventh century, and the Iberian Peninsula in 711. By 714, Islamic forces controlled much of the peninsula in a region they called Al-Andalus.
The Islamic conquests reached their peak in the mid-eighth century. The defeat of Muslim forces at the Battle of Tours in 732 led to the reconquest of southern France by the Franks, but the main reason for the halt of Islamic growth in Europe was the overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate and its replacement by the Abbasid Caliphate. The Abbasids moved their capital to Baghdad and were more concerned with the Middle East than Europe, losing control of sections of the Muslim lands. Umayyad descendants took over the Iberian Peninsula, the Aghlabids controlled North Africa, and the Tulunids became rulers of Egypt. By the middle of the 8th century, new trading patterns were emerging in the Mediterranean; trade between the Franks and the Arabs replaced the old Roman economy. Franks traded timber, furs, swords and slaves in return for silks and other fabrics, spices, and precious metals from the Arabs.
The migrations and invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries disrupted trade networks around the Mediterranean. African goods stopped being imported into Europe, first disappearing from the interior and by the 7th century found only in a few cities such as Rome or Naples. By the end of the 7th century, under the impact of the Muslim conquests, African products were no longer found in Western Europe. The replacement of goods from long-range trade with local products was a trend throughout the old Roman lands that happened in the Early Middle Ages. This was especially marked in the lands that did not lie on the Mediterranean, such as northern Gaul or Britain. Non-local goods appearing in the archaeological record are usually luxury goods. In the northern parts of Europe, not only were the trade networks local, but the goods carried were simple, with little pottery or other complex products. Around the Mediterranean, pottery remained prevalent and appears to have been traded over medium-range networks, not just produced locally.
The various Germanic states in the west all had coinages that imitated existing Roman and Byzantine forms. Gold continued to be minted until the end of the 7th century in 693-94 when it was replaced by silver in the Merovingian kindgon. The basic Frankish silver coin was the denarius or denier, while the Anglo-Saxon version was called a penny. From these areas, the denier or penny spread throughout Europe from 700 to 1000 AD. Copper or bronze coins were not struck, nor were gold except in Southern Europe. No silver coins denominated in multiple units were minted.
Christianity was a major unifying factor between Eastern and Western Europe before the Arab conquests, but the conquest of North Africa sundered maritime connections between those areas. Increasingly, the Byzantine Church differed in language, practices, and liturgy from the Western Church. The Eastern Church used Greek instead of the Western Latin. Theological and political differences emerged, and by the early and middle 8th century issues such as iconoclasm, clerical marriage, and state control of the Church had widened to the extent that the cultural and religious differences were greater than the similarities. The formal break, known as the East–West Schism, came in 1054, when the papacy and the patriarchy of Constantinople clashed over papal supremacy and excommunicated each other, which led to the division of Christianity into two Churches—the Western branch became the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern branch the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Empire survived the movements and invasions in the west mostly intact, but the papacy was little regarded, and few of the Western bishops looked to the bishop of Rome for religious or political leadership. Many of the popes prior to 750 were more concerned with Byzantine affairs and Eastern theological controversies. The register, or archived copies of the letters, of Pope Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) survived, and of those more than 850 letters, the vast majority were concerned with affairs in Italy or Constantinople. The only part of Western Europe where the papacy had influence was Britain, where Gregory had sent the Gregorian mission in 597 to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Irish missionaries were most active in Western Europe between the 5th and the 7th centuries, going first to England and Scotland and then on to the continent. Under such monks as Columba (d. 597) and Columbanus (d. 615), they founded monasteries, taught in Latin and Greek, and authored secular and religious works.
The Early Middle Ages witnessed the rise of monasticism in the West. The shape of European monasticism was determined by traditions and ideas that originated with the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria. Most European monasteries were of the type that focuses on community experience of the spiritual life, called cenobitism, which was pioneered by Pachomius (d. 348) in the 4th century. Monastic ideals spread from Egypt to Western Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries through hagiographical literature such as the "Life of Anthony". Benedict of Nursia (d. 547) wrote the Benedictine Rule for Western monasticism during the 6th century, detailing the administrative and spiritual responsibilities of a community of monks led by an abbot. Monks and monasteries had a deep effect on the religious and political life of the Early Middle Ages, in various cases acting as land trusts for powerful families, centres of propaganda and royal support in newly conquered regions, and bases for missions and proselytisation. They were the main and sometimes only outposts of education and literacy in a region. Many of the surviving manuscripts of the Latin classics were copied in monasteries in the Early Middle Ages. Monks were also the authors of new works, including history, theology, and other subjects, written by authors such as Bede (d. 735), a native of northern England who wrote in the late 7th and early 8th centuries.
The Frankish kingdom in northern Gaul split into kingdoms called Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy during the 6th and 7th centuries, all of them ruled by the Merovingian dynasty, who were descended from Clovis. The 7th century was a tumultuous period of wars between Austrasia and Neustria. Such warfare was exploited by Pippin (d. 640), the Mayor of the Palace for Austrasia who became the power behind the Austrasian throne. Later members of his family inherited the office, acting as advisers and regents. One of his descendants, Charles Martel (d. 741), won the Battle of Poitiers in 732, halting the advance of Muslim armies across the Pyrenees. Great Britain was divided into small states dominated by the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, and East Anglia which descended from the Anglo-Saxon invaders. Smaller kingdoms in present-day Wales and Scotland were still under the control of the native Britons and Picts. Ireland was divided into even smaller political units, usually known as tribal kingdoms, under the control of kings. There were perhaps as many as 150 local kings in Ireland, of varying importance.
The Carolingian dynasty, as the successors to Charles Martel are known, officially took control of the kingdoms of Austrasia and Neustria in a coup of 753 led by (r. 752–768). A contemporary chronicle claims that Pippin sought, and gained, authority for this coup from Pope (pope 752–757). Pippin's takeover was reinforced with propaganda that portrayed the Merovingians as inept or cruel rulers, exalted the accomplishments of Charles Martel, and circulated stories of the family's great piety. At the time of his death in 768, Pippin left his kingdom in the hands of his two sons, Charles (r. 768–814) and Carloman (r. 768–771). When Carloman died of natural causes, Charles blocked the succession of Carloman's young son and installed himself as the king of the united Austrasia and Neustria. Charles, more often known as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, embarked upon a programme of systematic expansion in 774 that unified a large portion of Europe, eventually controlling modern-day France, northern Italy, and Saxony. In the wars that lasted beyond 800, he rewarded allies with war booty and command over parcels of land. In 774, Charlemagne conquered the Lombards, which freed the papacy from the fear of Lombard conquest and marked the beginnings of the Papal States.
The coronation of Charlemagne as emperor on Christmas Day 800 is regarded as a turning point in medieval history, marking a return of the Western Roman Empire, since the new emperor ruled over much of the area previously controlled by the Western emperors. It also marks a change in Charlemagne's relationship with the Byzantine Empire, as the assumption of the imperial title by the Carolingians asserted their equivalence to the Byzantine state. There were several differences between the newly established Carolingian Empire and both the older Western Roman Empire and the concurrent Byzantine Empire. The Frankish lands were rural in character, with only a few small cities. Most of the people were peasants settled on small farms. Little trade existed and much of that was with the British Isles and Scandinavia, in contrast to the older Roman Empire with its trading networks centred on the Mediterranean. The empire was administered by an itinerant court that travelled with the emperor, as well as approximately 300 imperial officials called counts, who administered the counties the empire had been divided into. Clergy and local bishops served as officials, as well as the imperial officials called "missi dominici", who served as roving inspectors and troubleshooters.
Charlemagne's court in Aachen was the centre of the cultural revival sometimes referred to as the "Carolingian Renaissance". Literacy increased, as did development in the arts, architecture and jurisprudence, as well as liturgical and scriptural studies. The English monk Alcuin (d. 804) was invited to Aachen and brought the education available in the monasteries of Northumbria. Charlemagne's chancery—or writing office—made use of a new script today known as Carolingian minuscule, allowing a common writing style that advanced communication across much of Europe. Charlemagne sponsored changes in church liturgy, imposing the Roman form of church service on his domains, as well as the Gregorian chant in liturgical music for the churches. An important activity for scholars during this period was the copying, correcting, and dissemination of basic works on religious and secular topics, with the aim of encouraging learning. New works on religious topics and schoolbooks were also produced. Grammarians of the period modified the Latin language, changing it from the Classical Latin of the Roman Empire into a more flexible form to fit the needs of the Church and government. By the reign of Charlemagne, the language had so diverged from the classical Latin that it was later called Medieval Latin.
Charlemagne planned to continue the Frankish tradition of dividing his kingdom between all his heirs, but was unable to do so as only one son, Louis the Pious (r. 814–840), was still alive by 813. Just before Charlemagne died in 814, he crowned Louis as his successor. Louis's reign of 26 years was marked by numerous divisions of the empire among his sons and, after 829, civil wars between various alliances of father and sons over the control of various parts of the empire. Eventually, Louis recognised his eldest son (d. 855) as emperor and gave him Italy. Louis divided the rest of the empire between Lothair and Charles the Bald (d. 877), his youngest son. Lothair took East Francia, comprising both banks of the Rhine and eastwards, leaving Charles West Francia with the empire to the west of the Rhineland and the Alps. Louis the German (d. 876), the middle child, who had been rebellious to the last, was allowed to keep Bavaria under the suzerainty of his elder brother. The division was disputed. of Aquitaine (d. after 864), the emperor's grandson, rebelled in a contest for Aquitaine, while Louis the German tried to annex all of East Francia. Louis the Pious died in 840, with the empire still in chaos.
A three-year civil war followed his death. By the Treaty of Verdun (843), a kingdom between the Rhine and Rhone rivers was created for Lothair to go with his lands in Italy, and his imperial title was recognised. Louis the German was in control of Bavaria and the eastern lands in modern-day Germany. Charles the Bald received the western Frankish lands, comprising most of modern-day France. Charlemagne's grandsons and great-grandsons divided their kingdoms between their descendants, eventually causing all internal cohesion to be lost. In 987 the Carolingian dynasty was replaced in the western lands, with the crowning of Hugh Capet (r. 987–996) as king. In the eastern lands the dynasty had died out earlier, in 911, with the death of Louis the Child, and the selection of the unrelated Conrad I (r. 911–918) as king.
The breakup of the Carolingian Empire was accompanied by invasions, migrations, and raids by external foes. The Atlantic and northern shores were harassed by the Vikings, who also raided the British Isles and settled there as well as in Iceland. In 911, the Viking chieftain Rollo (d. c. 931) received permission from the Frankish King Charles the Simple (r. 898–922) to settle in what became Normandy. The eastern parts of the Frankish kingdoms, especially Germany and Italy, were under continual Magyar assault until the invader's defeat at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955. The breakup of the Abbasid dynasty meant that the Islamic world fragmented into smaller political states, some of which began expanding into Italy and Sicily, as well as over the Pyrenees into the southern parts of the Frankish kingdoms.
Efforts by local kings to fight the invaders led to the formation of new political entities. In Anglo-Saxon England, King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) came to an agreement with the Viking invaders in the late 9th century, resulting in Danish settlements in Northumbria, Mercia, and parts of East Anglia. By the middle of the 10th century, Alfred's successors had conquered Northumbria, and restored English control over most of the southern part of Great Britain. In northern Britain, Kenneth MacAlpin (d. c. 860) united the Picts and the Scots into the Kingdom of Alba. In the early 10th century, the Ottonian dynasty had established itself in Germany, and was engaged in driving back the Magyars. Its efforts culminated in the coronation in 962 of (r. 936–973) as Holy Roman Emperor. In 972, he secured recognition of his title by the Byzantine Empire, which he sealed with the marriage of his son Otto II (r. 967–983) to Theophanu (d. 991), daughter of an earlier Byzantine Emperor Romanos II (r. 959–963). By the late 10th century Italy had been drawn into the Ottonian sphere after a period of instability; Otto III (r. 996–1002) spent much of his later reign in the kingdom. The western Frankish kingdom was more fragmented, and although kings remained nominally in charge, much of the political power devolved to the local lords.
Missionary efforts to Scandinavia during the 9th and 10th centuries helped strengthen the growth of kingdoms such as Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, which gained power and territory. Some kings converted to Christianity, although not all by 1000. Scandinavians also expanded and colonised throughout Europe. Besides the settlements in Ireland, England, and Normandy, further settlement took place in what became Russia and Iceland. Swedish traders and raiders ranged down the rivers of the Russian steppe, and even attempted to seize Constantinople in 860 and 907. Christian Spain, initially driven into a small section of the peninsula in the north, expanded slowly south during the 9th and 10th centuries, establishing the kingdoms of Asturias and León.
In Eastern Europe, Byzantium revived its fortunes under Emperor Basil I (r. 867–886) and his successors Leo VI (r. 886–912) and Constantine VII (r. 913–959), members of the Macedonian dynasty. Commerce revived and the emperors oversaw the extension of a uniform administration to all the provinces. The military was reorganised, which allowed the emperors John I (r. 969–976) and Basil II (r. 976–1025) to expand the frontiers of the empire on all fronts. The imperial court was the centre of a revival of classical learning, a process known as the Macedonian Renaissance. Writers such as John Geometres (fl. early 10th century) composed new hymns, poems, and other works. Missionary efforts by both Eastern and Western clergy resulted in the conversion of the Moravians, Bulgars, Bohemians, Poles, Magyars, and Slavic inhabitants of the Kievan Rus'. These conversions contributed to the founding of political states in the lands of those peoples—the states of Moravia, Bulgaria, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and the Kievan Rus'. Bulgaria, which was founded around 680, at its height reached from Budapest to the Black Sea and from the Dnieper River in modern Ukraine to the Adriatic Sea. By 1018, the last Bulgarian nobles had surrendered to the Byzantine Empire.
Few large stone buildings were constructed between the Constantinian basilicas of the 4th century and the 8th century, although many smaller ones were built during the 6th and 7th centuries. By the beginning of the 8th century, the Carolingian Empire revived the basilica form of architecture. One feature of the basilica is the use of a transept, or the "arms" of a cross-shaped building that are perpendicular to the long nave. Other new features of religious architecture include the crossing tower and a monumental entrance to the church, usually at the west end of the building.
Carolingian art was produced for a small group of figures around the court, and the monasteries and churches they supported. It was dominated by efforts to regain the dignity and classicism of imperial Roman and Byzantine art, but was also influenced by the Insular art of the British Isles. Insular art integrated the energy of Irish Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Germanic styles of ornament with Mediterranean forms such as the book, and established many characteristics of art for the rest of the medieval period. Surviving religious works from the Early Middle Ages are mostly illuminated manuscripts and carved ivories, originally made for metalwork that has since been melted down. Objects in precious metals were the most prestigious form of art, but almost all are lost except for a few crosses such as the Cross of Lothair, several reliquaries, and finds such as the Anglo-Saxon burial at Sutton Hoo and the hoards of Gourdon from Merovingian France, Guarrazar from Visigothic Spain and Nagyszentmiklós near Byzantine territory. There are survivals from the large brooches in fibula or penannular form that were a key piece of personal adornment for elites, including the Irish Tara Brooch. Highly decorated books were mostly Gospel Books and these have survived in larger numbers, including the Insular Book of Kells, the Book of Lindisfarne, and the imperial Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, which is one of the few to retain its "treasure binding" of gold encrusted with jewels. Charlemagne's court seems to have been responsible for the acceptance of figurative monumental sculpture in Christian art, and by the end of the period near life-sized figures such as the Gero Cross were common in important churches.
During the later Roman Empire, the principal military developments were attempts to create an effective cavalry force as well as the continued development of highly specialised types of troops. The creation of heavily armoured cataphract-type soldiers as cavalry was an important feature of the 5th-century Roman military. The various invading tribes had differing emphases on types of soldiers—ranging from the primarily infantry Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain to the Vandals and Visigoths who had a high proportion of cavalry in their armies. During the early invasion period, the stirrup had not been introduced into warfare, which limited the usefulness of cavalry as shock troops because it was not possible to put the full force of the horse and rider behind blows struck by the rider. The greatest change in military affairs during the invasion period was the adoption of the Hunnic composite bow in place of the earlier, and weaker, Scythian composite bow. Another development was the increasing use of longswords and the progressive replacement of scale armour by mail armour and lamellar armour.
The importance of infantry and light cavalry began to decline during the early Carolingian period, with a growing dominance of elite heavy cavalry. The use of militia-type levies of the free population declined over the Carolingian period. Although much of the Carolingian armies were mounted, a large proportion during the early period appear to have been mounted infantry, rather than true cavalry. One exception was Anglo-Saxon England, where the armies were still composed of regional levies, known as the "fyrd", which were led by the local elites. In military technology, one of the main changes was the return of the crossbow, which had been known in Roman times and reappeared as a military weapon during the last part of the Early Middle Ages. Another change was the introduction of the stirrup, which increased the effectiveness of cavalry as shock troops. A technological advance that had implications beyond the military was the horseshoe, which allowed horses to be used in rocky terrain.
The High Middle Ages was a period of tremendous expansion of population. The estimated population of Europe grew from 35 to 80 million between 1000 and 1347, although the exact causes remain unclear: improved agricultural techniques, the decline of slaveholding, a more clement climate and the lack of invasion have all been suggested. As much as 90 per cent of the European population remained rural peasants. Many were no longer settled in isolated farms but had gathered into small communities, usually known as manors or villages. These peasants were often subject to noble overlords and owed them rents and other services, in a system known as manorialism. There remained a few free peasants throughout this period and beyond, with more of them in the regions of Southern Europe than in the north. The practice of assarting, or bringing new lands into production by offering incentives to the peasants who settled them, also contributed to the expansion of population.
The open-field system of agriculture was commonly practiced in most of Europe, especially in "northwestern and central Europe". Such agricultural communities had three basic characteristics: individual peasant holdings in the form of strips of land were scattered among the different fields belonging to the manor; crops were rotated from year to year to preserve soil fertility; and common land was used for grazing livestock and other purposes. Some regions used a three-field system of crop rotation, others retained the older two-field system.
Other sections of society included the nobility, clergy, and townsmen. Nobles, both the titled nobility and simple knights, exploited the manors and the peasants, although they did not own lands outright but were granted rights to the income from a manor or other lands by an overlord through the system of feudalism. During the 11th and 12th centuries, these lands, or fiefs, came to be considered hereditary, and in most areas they were no longer divisible between all the heirs as had been the case in the early medieval period. Instead, most fiefs and lands went to the eldest son. The dominance of the nobility was built upon its control of the land, its military service as heavy cavalry, control of castles, and various immunities from taxes or other impositions. Castles, initially in wood but later in stone, began to be constructed in the 9th and 10th centuries in response to the disorder of the time, and provided protection from invaders as well as allowing lords defence from rivals. Control of castles allowed the nobles to defy kings or other overlords. Nobles were stratified; kings and the highest-ranking nobility controlled large numbers of commoners and large tracts of land, as well as other nobles. Beneath them, lesser nobles had authority over smaller areas of land and fewer people. Knights were the lowest level of nobility; they controlled but did not own land, and had to serve other nobles.
The clergy was divided into two types: the secular clergy, who lived out in the world, and the regular clergy, who lived isolated under a religious rule and usually consisted of monks. Throughout the period monks remained a very small proportion of the population, usually less than one percent. Most of the regular clergy were drawn from the nobility, the same social class that served as the recruiting ground for the upper levels of the secular clergy. The local parish priests were often drawn from the peasant class. Townsmen were in a somewhat unusual position, as they did not fit into the traditional three-fold division of society into nobles, clergy, and peasants. During the 12th and 13th centuries, the ranks of the townsmen expanded greatly as existing towns grew and new population centres were founded. But throughout the Middle Ages the population of the towns probably never exceeded 10 percent of the total population.
Jews also spread across Europe during the period. Communities were established in Germany and England in the 11th and 12th centuries, but Spanish Jews, long settled in Spain under the Muslims, came under Christian rule and increasing pressure to convert to Christianity. Most Jews were confined to the cities, as they were not allowed to own land or be peasants. Besides the Jews, there were other non-Christians on the edges of Europe—pagan Slavs in Eastern Europe and Muslims in Southern Europe.
Women in the Middle Ages were officially required to be subordinate to some male, whether their father, husband, or other kinsman. Widows, who were often allowed much control over their own lives, were still restricted legally. Women's work generally consisted of household or other domestically inclined tasks. Peasant women were usually responsible for taking care of the household, child-care, as well as gardening and animal husbandry near the house. They could supplement the household income by spinning or brewing at home. At harvest-time, they were also expected to help with field-work. Townswomen, like peasant women, were responsible for the household, and could also engage in trade. What trades were open to women varied by country and period. Noblewomen were responsible for running a household, and could occasionally be expected to handle estates in the absence of male relatives, but they were usually restricted from participation in military or government affairs. The only role open to women in the Church was that of nuns, as they were unable to become priests.
In central and northern Italy and in Flanders, the rise of towns that were to a degree self-governing stimulated economic growth and created an environment for new types of trade associations. Commercial cities on the shores of the Baltic entered into agreements known as the Hanseatic League, and the Italian Maritime republics such as Venice, Genoa, and Pisa expanded their trade throughout the Mediterranean. Great trading fairs were established and flourished in northern France during the period, allowing Italian and German merchants to trade with each other as well as local merchants. In the late 13th century new land and sea routes to the Far East were pioneered, famously described in "The Travels of Marco Polo" written by one of the traders, Marco Polo (d. 1324). Besides new trading opportunities, agricultural and technological improvements enabled an increase in crop yields, which in turn allowed the trade networks to expand. Rising trade brought new methods of dealing with money, and gold coinage was again minted in Europe, first in Italy and later in France and other countries. New forms of commercial contracts emerged, allowing risk to be shared among merchants. Accounting methods improved, partly through the use of double-entry bookkeeping; letters of credit also appeared, allowing easy transmission of money.
The High Middle Ages was the formative period in the history of the modern Western state. Kings in France, England, and Spain consolidated their power, and set up lasting governing institutions. New kingdoms such as Hungary and Poland, after their conversion to Christianity, became Central European powers. The Magyars settled Hungary around 900 under King Árpád (d. c. 907) after a series of invasions in the 9th century. The papacy, long attached to an ideology of independence from secular kings, first asserted its claim to temporal authority over the entire Christian world; the Papal Monarchy reached its apogee in the early 13th century under the pontificate of (pope 1198–1216). Northern Crusades and the advance of Christian kingdoms and military orders into previously pagan regions in the Baltic and Finnic north-east brought the forced assimilation of numerous native peoples into European culture.
During the early High Middle Ages, Germany was ruled by the Ottonian dynasty, which struggled to control the powerful dukes ruling over territorial duchies tracing back to the Migration period. In 1024, they were replaced by the Salian dynasty, who famously clashed with the papacy under Emperor (r. 1084–1105) over Church appointments as part of the Investiture Controversy. His successors continued to struggle against the papacy as well as the German nobility. A period of instability followed the death of Emperor (r. 1111–25), who died without heirs, until Barbarossa (r. 1155–90) took the imperial throne. Although he ruled effectively, the basic problems remained, and his successors continued to struggle into the 13th century. Barbarossa's grandson Frederick II (r. 1220–1250), who was also heir to the throne of Sicily through his mother, clashed repeatedly with the papacy. His court was famous for its scholars and he was often accused of heresy. He and his successors faced many difficulties, including the invasion of the Mongols into Europe in the mid-13th century. Mongols first shattered the Kievan Rus' principalities and then invaded Eastern Europe in 1241, 1259, and 1287.
Under the Capetian dynasty the French monarchy slowly began to expand its authority over the nobility, growing out of the Île-de-France to exert control over more of the country in the 11th and 12th centuries. They faced a powerful rival in the Dukes of Normandy, who in 1066 under William the Conqueror (duke 1035–1087), conquered England (r. 1066–87) and created a cross-channel empire that lasted, in various forms, throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. Normans also settled in Sicily and southern Italy, when Robert Guiscard (d. 1085) landed there in 1059 and established a duchy that later became the Kingdom of Sicily. Under the Angevin dynasty of (r. 1154–89) and his son Richard I (r. 1189–99), the kings of England ruled over England and large areas of France, brought to the family by Henry II's marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204), heiress to much of southern France. Richard's younger brother John (r. 1199–1216) lost Normandy and the rest of the northern French possessions in 1204 to the French King Philip II Augustus (r. 1180–1223). This led to dissension among the English nobility, while John's financial exactions to pay for his unsuccessful attempts to regain Normandy led in 1215 to "Magna Carta", a charter that confirmed the rights and privileges of free men in England. Under (r. 1216–72), John's son, further concessions were made to the nobility, and royal power was diminished. The French monarchy continued to make gains against the nobility during the late 12th and 13th centuries, bringing more territories within the kingdom under the king's personal rule and centralising the royal administration. Under Louis IX (r. 1226–70), royal prestige rose to new heights as Louis served as a mediator for most of Europe.
In Iberia, the Christian states, which had been confined to the north-western part of the peninsula, began to push back against the Islamic states in the south, a period known as the "Reconquista". By about 1150, the Christian north had coalesced into the five major kingdoms of León, Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal. Southern Iberia remained under control of Islamic states, initially under the Caliphate of Córdoba, which broke up in 1031 into a shifting number of petty states known as "taifas", who fought with the Christians until the Almohad Caliphate re-established centralised rule over Southern Iberia in the 1170s. Christian forces advanced again in the early 13th century, culminating in the capture of Seville in 1248.
In the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks took over much of the Middle East, occupying Persia during the 1040s, Armenia in the 1060s, and Jerusalem in 1070. In 1071, the Turkish army defeated the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert and captured the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV (r. 1068–71). The Turks were then free to invade Asia Minor, which dealt a dangerous blow to the Byzantine Empire by seizing a large part of its population and its economic heartland. Although the Byzantines regrouped and recovered somewhat, they never fully regained Asia Minor and were often on the defensive. The Turks also had difficulties, losing control of Jerusalem to the Fatimids of Egypt and suffering from a series of internal civil wars. The Byzantines also faced a revived Bulgaria, which in the late 12th and 13th centuries spread throughout the Balkans.
The crusades were intended to seize Jerusalem from Muslim control. The First Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Urban II (pope 1088–99) at the Council of Clermont in 1095 in response to a request from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081–1118) for aid against further Muslim advances. Urban promised indulgence to anyone who took part. Tens of thousands of people from all levels of society mobilised across Europe and captured Jerusalem in 1099. One feature of the crusades was the pogroms against local Jews that often took place as the crusaders left their countries for the East. These were especially brutal during the First Crusade, when the Jewish communities in Cologne, Mainz, and Worms were destroyed, as well as other communities in cities between the rivers Seine and the Rhine. Another outgrowth of the crusades was the foundation of a new type of monastic order, the military orders of the Templars and Hospitallers, which fused monastic life with military service.
The crusaders consolidated their conquests into crusader states. During the 12th and 13th centuries, there were a series of conflicts between them and the surrounding Islamic states. Appeals from the crusader states to the papacy led to further crusades, such as the Third Crusade, called to try to regain Jerusalem, which had been captured by Saladin (d. 1193) in 1187. In 1203, the Fourth Crusade was diverted from the Holy Land to Constantinople, and captured the city in 1204, setting up a Latin Empire of Constantinople and greatly weakening the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines recaptured the city in 1261, but never regained their former strength. By 1291 all the crusader states had been captured or forced from the mainland, although a titular Kingdom of Jerusalem survived on the island of Cyprus for several years afterwards.
Popes called for crusades to take place elsewhere besides the Holy Land: in Spain, southern France, and along the Baltic. The Spanish crusades became fused with the "Reconquista" of Spain from the Muslims. Although the Templars and Hospitallers took part in the Spanish crusades, similar Spanish military religious orders were founded, most of which had become part of the two main orders of Calatrava and Santiago by the beginning of the 12th century. Northern Europe also remained outside Christian influence until the 11th century or later, and became a crusading venue as part of the Northern Crusades of the 12th to 14th centuries. These crusades also spawned a military order, the Order of the Sword Brothers. Another order, the Teutonic Knights, although founded in the crusader states, focused much of its activity in the Baltic after 1225, and in 1309 moved its headquarters to Marienburg in Prussia.
During the 11th century, developments in philosophy and theology led to increased intellectual activity. There was debate between the realists and the nominalists over the concept of "universals". Philosophical discourse was stimulated by the rediscovery of Aristotle and his emphasis on empiricism and rationalism. Scholars such as Peter Abelard (d. 1142) and Peter Lombard (d. 1164) introduced Aristotelian logic into theology. In the late 11th and early 12th centuries cathedral schools spread throughout Western Europe, signalling the shift of learning from monasteries to cathedrals and towns. Cathedral schools were in turn replaced by the universities established in major European cities. Philosophy and theology fused in scholasticism, an attempt by 12th- and 13th-century scholars to reconcile authoritative texts, most notably Aristotle and the Bible. This movement tried to employ a systemic approach to truth and reason and culminated in the thought of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), who wrote the "Summa Theologica", or "Summary of Theology".
Chivalry and the ethos of courtly love developed in royal and noble courts. This culture was expressed in the vernacular languages rather than Latin, and comprised poems, stories, legends, and popular songs spread by troubadours, or wandering minstrels. Often the stories were written down in the "chansons de geste", or "songs of great deeds", such as "The Song of Roland" or "The Song of Hildebrand". Secular and religious histories were also produced. Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. c. 1155) composed his "Historia Regum Britanniae", a collection of stories and legends about Arthur. Other works were more clearly history, such as Otto von Freising's (d. 1158) "Gesta Friderici Imperatoris" detailing the deeds of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, or William of Malmesbury's (d. c. 1143) "Gesta Regum" on the kings of England.
Legal studies advanced during the 12th century. Both secular law and canon law, or ecclesiastical law, were studied in the High Middle Ages. Secular law, or Roman law, was advanced greatly by the discovery of the "Corpus Juris Civilis" in the 11th century, and by 1100 Roman law was being taught at Bologna. This led to the recording and standardisation of legal codes throughout Western Europe. Canon law was also studied, and around 1140 a monk named Gratian (fl. 12th century), a teacher at Bologna, wrote what became the standard text of canon law—the "Decretum".
Among the results of the Greek and Islamic influence on this period in European history was the replacement of Roman numerals with the decimal positional number system and the invention of algebra, which allowed more advanced mathematics. Astronomy advanced following the translation of Ptolemy's "Almagest" from Greek into Latin in the late 12th century. Medicine was also studied, especially in southern Italy, where Islamic medicine influenced the school at Salerno.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, Europe experienced economic growth and innovations in methods of production. Major technological advances included the invention of the windmill, the first mechanical clocks, the manufacture of distilled spirits, and the use of the astrolabe. Concave spectacles were invented around 1286 by an unknown Italian artisan, probably working in or near Pisa.
The development of a three-field rotation system for planting crops increased the usage of land from one half in use each year under the old two-field system to two-thirds under the new system, with a consequent increase in production. The development of the heavy plough allowed heavier soils to be farmed more efficiently, aided by the spread of the horse collar, which led to the use of draught horses in place of oxen. Horses are faster than oxen and require less pasture, factors that aided the implementation of the three-field system. Legumes – such as peas, beans, or lentils – were grown more widely as crops, in addition to the usual cereal crops of wheat, oats, barley, and rye.
The construction of cathedrals and castles advanced building technology, leading to the development of large stone buildings. Ancillary structures included new town halls, houses, bridges, and tithe barns. Shipbuilding improved with the use of the rib and plank method rather than the old Roman system of mortise and tenon. Other improvements to ships included the use of lateen sails and the stern-post rudder, both of which increased the speed at which ships could be sailed.
In military affairs, the use of infantry with specialised roles increased. Along with the still-dominant heavy cavalry, armies often included mounted and infantry crossbowmen, as well as sappers and engineers. Crossbows, which had been known in Late Antiquity, increased in use partly because of the increase in siege warfare in the 10th and 11th centuries. The increasing use of crossbows during the 12th and 13th centuries led to the use of closed-face helmets, heavy body armour, as well as horse armour. Gunpowder was known in Europe by the mid-13th century with a recorded use in European warfare by the English against the Scots in 1304, although it was merely used as an explosive and not as a weapon. Cannon were being used for sieges in the 1320s, and hand-held guns were in use by the 1360s.
In the 10th century the establishment of churches and monasteries led to the development of stone architecture that elaborated vernacular Roman forms, from which the term "Romanesque" is derived. Where available, Roman brick and stone buildings were recycled for their materials. From the tentative beginnings known as the First Romanesque, the style flourished and spread across Europe in a remarkably homogeneous form. Just before 1000 there was a great wave of building stone churches all over Europe. Romanesque buildings have massive stone walls, openings topped by semi-circular arches, small windows, and, particularly in France, arched stone vaults. The large portal with coloured sculpture in high relief became a central feature of façades, especially in France, and the capitals of columns were often carved with narrative scenes of imaginative monsters and animals. According to art historian C. R. Dodwell, "virtually all the churches in the West were decorated with wall-paintings", of which few survive. Simultaneous with the development in church architecture, the distinctive European form of the castle was developed and became crucial to politics and warfare.
Romanesque art, especially metalwork, was at its most sophisticated in Mosan art, in which distinct artistic personalities including Nicholas of Verdun (d. 1205) become apparent, and an almost classical style is seen in works such as a font at Liège, contrasting with the writhing animals of the exactly contemporary Gloucester Candlestick. Large illuminated bibles and psalters were the typical forms of luxury manuscripts, and wall-painting flourished in churches, often following a scheme with a "Last Judgement" on the west wall, a Christ in Majesty at the east end, and narrative biblical scenes down the nave, or in the best surviving example, at Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, on the barrel-vaulted roof.
From the early 12th century, French builders developed the Gothic style, marked by the use of rib vaults, pointed arches, flying buttresses, and large stained glass windows. It was used mainly in churches and cathedrals and continued in use until the 16th century in much of Europe. Classic examples of Gothic architecture include Chartres Cathedral and Reims Cathedral in France as well as Salisbury Cathedral in England. Stained glass became a crucial element in the design of churches, which continued to use extensive wall-paintings, now almost all lost.
During this period the practice of manuscript illumination gradually passed from monasteries to lay workshops, so that according to Janetta Benton "by 1300 most monks bought their books in shops", and the book of hours developed as a form of devotional book for lay-people. Metalwork continued to be the most prestigious form of art, with Limoges enamel a popular and relatively affordable option for objects such as reliquaries and crosses. In Italy the innovations of Cimabue and Duccio, followed by the Trecento master Giotto (d. 1337), greatly increased the sophistication and status of panel painting and fresco. Increasing prosperity during the 12th century resulted in greater production of secular art; many carved ivory objects such as gaming-pieces, combs, and small religious figures have survived.
Monastic reform became an important issue during the 11th century, as elites began to worry that monks were not adhering to the rules binding them to a strictly religious life. Cluny Abbey, founded in the Mâcon region of France in 909, was established as part of the Cluniac Reforms, a larger movement of monastic reform in response to this fear. Cluny quickly established a reputation for austerity and rigour. It sought to maintain a high quality of spiritual life by placing itself under the protection of the papacy and by electing its own abbot without interference from laymen, thus maintaining economic and political independence from local lords.
Monastic reform inspired change in the secular Church. The ideals upon which it was based were brought to the papacy by Pope Leo IX (pope 1049–1054), and provided the ideology of clerical independence that led to the Investiture Controversy in the late 11th century. This involved Pope Gregory VII (pope 1073–85) and Emperor Henry IV, who initially clashed over episcopal appointments, a dispute that turned into a battle over the ideas of investiture, clerical marriage, and simony. The emperor saw the protection of the Church as one of his responsibilities as well as wanting to preserve the right to appoint his own choices as bishops within his lands, but the papacy insisted on the Church's independence from secular lords. These issues remained unresolved after the compromise of 1122 known as the Concordat of Worms. The dispute represents a significant stage in the creation of a papal monarchy separate from and equal to lay authorities. It also had the permanent consequence of empowering German princes at the expense of the German emperors.
The High Middle Ages was a period of great religious movements. Besides the Crusades and monastic reforms, people sought to participate in new forms of religious life. New monastic orders were founded, including the Carthusians and the Cistercians. The latter, in particular, expanded rapidly in their early years under the guidance of Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153). These new orders were formed in response to the feeling of the laity that Benedictine monasticism no longer met the needs of the laymen, who along with those wishing to enter the religious life wanted a return to the simpler hermetical monasticism of early Christianity, or to live an Apostolic life. Religious pilgrimages were also encouraged. Old pilgrimage sites such as Rome, Jerusalem, and Compostela received increasing numbers of visitors, and new sites such as Monte Gargano and Bari rose to prominence.
In the 13th century mendicant orders—the Franciscans and the Dominicans—who swore vows of poverty and earned their living by begging, were approved by the papacy. Religious groups such as the Waldensians and the Humiliati also attempted to return to the life of early Christianity in the middle 12th and early 13th centuries, another heretical movement condemned by the papacy. Others joined the Cathars, another movement condemned as heretical by the papacy. In 1209, a crusade was preached against the Cathars, the Albigensian Crusade, which in combination with the medieval Inquisition, eliminated them.
The first years of the 14th century were marked by famines, culminating in the Great Famine of 1315–17. The causes of the Great Famine included the slow transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age, which left the population vulnerable when bad weather caused crop failures. The years 1313–14 and 1317–21 were excessively rainy throughout Europe, resulting in widespread crop failures. The climate change—which resulted in a declining average annual temperature for Europe during the 14th century—was accompanied by an economic downturn.
These troubles were followed in 1347 by the Black Death, a pandemic that spread throughout Europe during the following three years. The death toll was probably about 35 million people in Europe, about one-third of the population. Towns were especially hard-hit because of their crowded conditions. Large areas of land were left sparsely inhabited, and in some places fields were left unworked. Wages rose as landlords sought to entice the reduced number of available workers to their fields. Further problems were lower rents and lower demand for food, both of which cut into agricultural income. Urban workers also felt that they had a right to greater earnings, and popular uprisings broke out across Europe. Among the uprisings were the "jacquerie" in France, the Peasants' Revolt in England, and revolts in the cities of Florence in Italy and Ghent and Bruges in Flanders. The trauma of the plague led to an increased piety throughout Europe, manifested by the foundation of new charities, the self-mortification of the flagellants, and the scapegoating of Jews. Conditions were further unsettled by the return of the plague throughout the rest of the 14th century; it continued to strike Europe periodically during the rest of the Middle Ages.
Society throughout Europe was disturbed by the dislocations caused by the Black Death. Lands that had been marginally productive were abandoned, as the survivors were able to acquire more fertile areas. Although serfdom declined in Western Europe it became more common in Eastern Europe, as landlords imposed it on those of their tenants who had previously been free. Most peasants in Western Europe managed to change the work they had previously owed to their landlords into cash rents. The percentage of serfs amongst the peasantry declined from a high of 90 to closer to 50 percent by the end of the period. Landlords also became more conscious of common interests with other landholders, and they joined together to extort privileges from their governments. Partly at the urging of landlords, governments attempted to legislate a return to the economic conditions that existed before the Black Death. Non-clergy became increasingly literate, and urban populations began to imitate the nobility's interest in chivalry.
Jewish communities were expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. Although some were allowed back into France, most were not, and many Jews emigrated eastwards, and Hungary. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, and dispersed to Turkey, France, Italy, and Holland. The rise of banking in Italy during the 13th century continued throughout the 14th century, fuelled partly by the increasing warfare of the period and the needs of the papacy to move money between kingdoms. Many banking firms loaned money to royalty, at great risk, as some were bankrupted when kings defaulted on their loans.
Strong, royalty-based nation states rose throughout Europe in the Late Middle Ages, particularly in England, France, and the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula: Aragon, Castile, and Portugal. The long conflicts of the period strengthened royal control over their kingdoms and were extremely hard on the peasantry. Kings profited from warfare that extended royal legislation and increased the lands they directly controlled. Paying for the wars required that methods of taxation become more effective and efficient, and the rate of taxation often increased. The requirement to obtain the consent of taxpayers allowed representative bodies such as the English Parliament and the French Estates General to gain power and authority.
Throughout the 14th century, French kings sought to expand their influence at the expense of the territorial holdings of the nobility. They ran into difficulties when attempting to confiscate the holdings of the English kings in southern France, leading to the Hundred Years' War, waged from 1337 to 1453. Early in the war the English under Edward III (r. 1327–77) and his son Edward, the Black Prince (d. 1376), won the battles of Crécy and Poitiers, captured the city of Calais, and won control of much of France. The resulting stresses almost caused the disintegration of the French kingdom during the early years of the war. In the early 15th century, France again came close to dissolving, but in the late 1420s the military successes of Joan of Arc (d. 1431) led to the victory of the French and the capture of the last English possessions in southern France in 1453. The price was high, as the population of France at the end of the Wars was likely half what it had been at the start of the conflict. Conversely, the Wars had a positive effect on English national identity, doing much to fuse the various local identities into a national English ideal. The conflict with France also helped create a national culture in England separate from French culture, which had previously been the dominant influence. The dominance of the English longbow began during early stages of the Hundred Years' War, and cannon appeared on the battlefield at Crécy in 1346.
In modern-day Germany, the Holy Roman Empire continued to rule, but the elective nature of the imperial crown meant there was no enduring dynasty around which a strong state could form. Further east, the kingdoms of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia grew powerful. In Iberia, the Christian kingdoms continued to gain land from the Muslim kingdoms of the peninsula; Portugal concentrated on expanding overseas during the 15th century, while the other kingdoms were riven by difficulties over royal succession and other concerns. After losing the Hundred Years' War, England went on to suffer a long civil war known as the Wars of the Roses, which lasted into the 1490s and only ended when Henry Tudor (r. 1485–1509 as Henry VII) became king and consolidated power with his victory over Richard III (r. 1483–85) at Bosworth in 1485. In Scandinavia, Margaret I of Denmark (r. in Denmark 1387–1412) consolidated Norway, Denmark, and Sweden in the Union of Kalmar, which continued until 1523. The major power around the Baltic Sea was the Hanseatic League, a commercial confederation of city-states that traded from Western Europe to Russia. Scotland emerged from English domination under Robert the Bruce (r. 1306–29), who secured papal recognition of his kingship in 1328.
Although the Palaeologi emperors recaptured Constantinople from the Western Europeans in 1261, they were never able to regain control of much of the former imperial lands. They usually controlled only a small section of the Balkan Peninsula near Constantinople, the city itself, and some coastal lands on the Black Sea and around the Aegean Sea. The former Byzantine lands in the Balkans were divided between the new Kingdom of Serbia, the Second Bulgarian Empire and the city-state of Venice. The power of the Byzantine emperors was threatened by a new Turkish tribe, the Ottomans, who established themselves in Anatolia in the 13th century and steadily expanded throughout the 14th century. The Ottomans expanded into Europe, reducing Bulgaria to a vassal state by 1366 and taking over Serbia after its defeat at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Western Europeans rallied to the plight of the Christians in the Balkans and declared a new crusade in 1396; a great army was sent to the Balkans, where it was defeated at the Battle of Nicopolis. Constantinople was finally captured by the Ottomans in 1453.
During the tumultuous 14th century, disputes within the leadership of the Church led to the Avignon Papacy of 1309–76, also called the "Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy" (a reference to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews), and then to the Great Schism, lasting from 1378 to 1418, when there were two and later three rival popes, each supported by several states. Ecclesiastical officials convened at the Council of Constance in 1414, and in the following year the council deposed one of the rival popes, leaving only two claimants. Further depositions followed, and in November 1417, the council elected Martin V (pope 1417–31) as pope.
Besides the schism, the Western Church was riven by theological controversies, some of which turned into heresies. John Wycliffe (d. 1384), an English theologian, was condemned as a heretic in 1415 for teaching that the laity should have access to the text of the Bible as well as for holding views on the Eucharist that were contrary to Church doctrine. Wycliffe's teachings influenced two of the major heretical movements of the later Middle Ages: Lollardy in England and Hussitism in Bohemia. The Bohemian movement initiated with the teaching of Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake in 1415, after being condemned as a heretic by the Council of Constance. The Hussite Church, although the target of a crusade, survived beyond the Middle Ages. Other heresies were manufactured, such as the accusations against the Knights Templar that resulted in their suppression in 1312, and the division of their great wealth between the French King Philip IV (r. 1285–1314) and the Hospitallers.
The papacy further refined the practice in the Mass in the Late Middle Ages, holding that the clergy alone was allowed to partake of the wine in the Eucharist. This further distanced the secular laity from the clergy. The laity continued the practices of pilgrimages, veneration of relics, and belief in the power of the Devil. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) and Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471) wrote works that taught the laity to focus on their inner spiritual life, which laid the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. Besides mysticism, belief in witches and witchcraft became widespread, and by the late 15th century the Church had begun to lend credence to populist fears of witchcraft with its condemnation of witches in 1484, and the publication in 1486 of the "Malleus Maleficarum", the most popular handbook for witch-hunters.
During the Later Middle Ages, theologians such as John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and William of Ockham (d. c. 1348) led a reaction against intellectualist scholasticism, objecting to the application of reason to faith. Their efforts undermined the prevailing Platonic idea of universals. Ockham's insistence that reason operates independently of faith allowed science to be separated from theology and philosophy. Legal studies were marked by the steady advance of Roman law into areas of jurisprudence previously governed by customary law. The lone exception to this trend was in England, where the common law remained pre-eminent. Other countries codified their laws; legal codes were promulgated in Castile, Poland, and Lithuania.
Education remained mostly focused on the training of future clergy. The basic learning of the letters and numbers remained the province of the family or a village priest, but the secondary subjects of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, logic—were studied in cathedral schools or in schools provided by cities. Commercial secondary schools spread, and some Italian towns had more than one such enterprise. Universities also spread throughout Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. Lay literacy rates rose, but were still low; one estimate gave a literacy rate of 10 per cent of males and 1 per cent of females in 1500.
The publication of vernacular literature increased, with Dante (d. 1321), Petrarch (d. 1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (d. 1375) in 14th-century Italy, Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) and William Langland (d. c. 1386) in England, and François Villon (d. 1464) and Christine de Pizan (d. c. 1430) in France. Much literature remained religious in character, and although a great deal of it continued to be written in Latin, a new demand developed for saints' lives and other devotional tracts in the vernacular languages. This was fed by the growth of the "Devotio Moderna" movement, most prominently in the formation of the Brethren of the Common Life, but also in the works of German mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler (d. 1361). Theatre also developed in the guise of miracle plays put on by the Church. At the end of the period, the development of the printing press in about 1450 led to the establishment of publishing houses throughout Europe by 1500.
In the early 15th century, the countries of the Iberian Peninsula began to sponsor exploration beyond the boundaries of Europe. Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal (d. 1460) sent expeditions that discovered the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Cape Verde during his lifetime. After his death, exploration continued; Bartolomeu Dias (d. 1500) went around the Cape of Good Hope in 1486, and Vasco da Gama (d. 1524) sailed around Africa to India in 1498. The combined Spanish monarchies of Castile and Aragon sponsored the voyage of exploration by Christopher Columbus (d. 1506) in 1492 that discovered the Americas. The English crown under Henry VII sponsored the voyage of John Cabot (d. 1498) in 1497, which landed on Cape Breton Island.
One of the major developments in the military sphere during the Late Middle Ages was the increased use of infantry and light cavalry. The English also employed longbowmen, but other countries were unable to create similar forces with the same success. Armour continued to advance, spurred by the increasing power of crossbows, and plate armour was developed to protect soldiers from crossbows as well as the hand-held guns that were developed. Pole arms reached new prominence with the development of the Flemish and Swiss infantry armed with pikes and other long spears.
In agriculture, the increased usage of sheep with long-fibred wool allowed a stronger thread to be spun. In addition, the spinning wheel replaced the traditional distaff for spinning wool, tripling production. A less technological refinement that still greatly affected daily life was the use of buttons as closures for garments, which allowed for better fitting without having to lace clothing on the wearer. Windmills were refined with the creation of the tower mill, allowing the upper part of the windmill to be spun around to face the direction from which the wind was blowing. The blast furnace appeared around 1350 in Sweden, increasing the quantity of iron produced and improving its quality. The first patent law in 1447 in Venice protected the rights of inventors to their inventions.
The Late Middle Ages in Europe as a whole correspond to the Trecento and Early Renaissance cultural periods in Italy. Northern Europe and Spain continued to use Gothic styles, which became increasingly elaborate in the 15th century, until almost the end of the period. International Gothic was a courtly style that reached much of Europe in the decades around 1400, producing masterpieces such as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. All over Europe secular art continued to increase in quantity and quality, and in the 15th century the mercantile classes of Italy and Flanders became important patrons, commissioning small portraits of themselves in oils as well as a growing range of luxury items such as jewellery, ivory caskets, cassone chests, and maiolica pottery. These objects also included the Hispano-Moresque ware produced by mostly Mudéjar potters in Spain. Although royalty owned huge collections of plate, little survives except for the Royal Gold Cup. Italian silk manufacture developed, so that Western churches and elites no longer needed to rely on imports from Byzantium or the Islamic world. In France and Flanders tapestry weaving of sets like "The Lady and the Unicorn" became a major luxury industry.
The large external sculptural schemes of Early Gothic churches gave way to more sculpture inside the building, as tombs became more elaborate and other features such as pulpits were sometimes lavishly carved, as in the Pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in Sant'Andrea. Painted or carved wooden relief altarpieces became common, especially as churches created many side-chapels. Early Netherlandish painting by artists such as Jan van Eyck (d. 1441) and Rogier van der Weyden (d. 1464) rivalled that of Italy, as did northern illuminated manuscripts, which in the 15th century began to be collected on a large scale by secular elites, who also commissioned secular books, especially histories. From about 1450 printed books rapidly became popular, though still expensive. There were around 30,000 different editions of incunabula, or works printed before 1500, by which time illuminated manuscripts were commissioned only by royalty and a few others. Very small woodcuts, nearly all religious, were affordable even by peasants in parts of Northern Europe from the middle of the 15th century. More expensive engravings supplied a wealthier market with a variety of images.
The medieval period is frequently caricatured as a "time of ignorance and superstition" that placed "the word of religious authorities over personal experience and rational activity." This is a legacy from both the Renaissance and Enlightenment when scholars favourably contrasted their intellectual cultures with those of the medieval period. Renaissance scholars saw the Middle Ages as a period of decline from the high culture and civilisation of the Classical world. Enlightenment scholars saw reason as superior to faith, and thus viewed the Middle Ages as a time of ignorance and superstition.
Others argue that reason was generally held in high regard during the Middle Ages. Science historian Edward Grant writes, "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed [in the 18th century], they were only made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities". Also, contrary to common belief, David Lindberg writes, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the Church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led".
The caricature of the period is also reflected in some more specific notions. One misconception, first propagated in the 19th century and still very common, is that all people in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat. This is untrue, as lecturers in the medieval universities commonly argued that evidence showed the Earth was a sphere. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, another scholar of the period, state that there "was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference". Other misconceptions such as "the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages", "the rise of Christianity killed off ancient science", or "the medieval Christian Church suppressed the growth of natural philosophy", are all cited by Numbers as examples of widely popular myths that still pass as historical truth, although they are not supported by historical research.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18836
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Median
In statistics and probability theory, a median is a value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as "the middle" value. For example,
the basic advantage of the median in describing data compared to the mean (often simply described as the "average") is that it is not skewed so much by a small proportion of extremely large or small values, and so it may give a better idea of a "typical" value. For example, in understanding statistics like household income or assets, which vary greatly, the mean may be skewed by a small number of extremely high or low values. Median income, for example, may be a better way to suggest what a "typical" income is.
Because of this, the median is of central importance in robust statistics, as it is the most resistant statistic, having a breakdown point of 50%: so long as no more than half the data are contaminated, the median will not give an arbitrarily large or small result.
The median of a finite list of numbers is the "middle" number, when those numbers are listed in order from smallest to greatest.
If there is an odd number of numbers, the middle one is picked. For example, consider the list of numbers
This list contains seven numbers. The median is the fourth of them, which is 6.
If there is an even number of observations, then there is no single middle value; the median is then usually defined to be the mean of the two middle values. For example, in the data set
the median is the mean of the middle two numbers: this is formula_1, which is formula_2. (In more technical terms, this interprets the median as the fully trimmed mid-range). With this convention, the median can be described in a caseless formula, as follows:
where formula_4 is an ordered list of formula_5 numbers, and formula_6 and formula_7 denote the floor and ceiling functions, respectively.
Formally, a median of a population is any value such that at most half of the population is less than the proposed median and at most half is greater than the proposed median. As seen above, medians may not be unique. If each set contains less than half the population, then some of the population is exactly equal to the unique median.
The median is well-defined for any ordered (one-dimensional) data, and is independent of any distance metric. The median can thus be applied to ranked but not numerical classes (e.g. working out a median grade when students are graded from A to F), although the result might be halfway between classes if there is an even number of cases.
A geometric median, on the other hand, is defined in any number of dimensions. A related concept, in which the outcome is forced to correspond to a member of the sample, is the medoid.
There is no widely accepted standard notation for the median, but some authors represent the median of a variable "x" either as "x͂" or as "μ"1/2 sometimes also "M". In any of these cases, the use of these or other symbols for the median needs to be explicitly defined when they are introduced.
The median is a special case of other ways of summarising the typical values associated with a statistical distribution: it is the 2nd quartile, 5th decile, and 50th percentile.
The median can be used as a measure of location when one attaches reduced importance to extreme values, typically because a distribution is skewed, extreme values are not known, or outliers are untrustworthy, i.e., may be measurement/transcription errors.
For example, consider the multiset
The median is 2 in this case, (as is the mode), and it might be seen as a better indication of the center than the arithmetic mean of 4, which is larger than all-but-one of the values! However, the widely cited empirical relationship that the mean is shifted "further into the tail" of a distribution than the median is not generally true. At most, one can say that the two statistics cannot be "too far" apart; see below.
As a median is based on the middle data in a set, it is not necessary to know the value of extreme results in order to calculate it. For example, in a psychology test investigating the time needed to solve a problem, if a small number of people failed to solve the problem at all in the given time a median can still be calculated.
Because the median is simple to understand and easy to calculate, while also a robust approximation to the mean, the median is a popular summary statistic in descriptive statistics. In this context, there are several choices for a measure of variability: the range, the interquartile range, the mean absolute deviation, and the median absolute deviation.
For practical purposes, different measures of location and dispersion are often compared on the basis of how well the corresponding population values can be estimated from a sample of data. The median, estimated using the sample median, has good properties in this regard. While it is not usually optimal if a given population distribution is assumed, its properties are always reasonably good. For example, a comparison of the efficiency of candidate estimators shows that the sample mean is more statistically efficient when — and only when — data is uncontaminated by data from heavy-tailed distributions or from mixtures of distributions. Even then, the median has a 64% efficiency compared to the minimum-variance mean (for large normal samples), which is to say the variance of the median will be ~50% greater than the variance of the mean.
For any real-valued probability distribution with cumulative distribution function "F", a median is defined as any real number "m" that satisfies the inequalities
An equivalent phrasing uses a random variable "X" distributed according to "F":
Note that this definition does not require "X" to have an absolutely continuous distribution (which has a probability density function "ƒ"), nor does it require a discrete one. In the former case, the inequalities can be upgraded to equality: a median satisfies
Any probability distribution on R has at least one median, but in pathological cases there may be more than one median: if "F" is constant 1/2 on an interval (so that "ƒ"=0 there), then any value of that interval is a median.
The medians of certain types of distributions can be easily calculated from their parameters; furthermore, they exist even for some distributions lacking a well-defined mean, such as the Cauchy distribution:
The "mean absolute error" of a real variable "c" with respect to the random variable "X" is
Provided that the probability distribution of "X" is such that the above expectation exists, then "m" is a median of "X" if and only if "m" is a minimizer of the mean absolute error with respect to "X". In particular, "m" is a sample median if and only if "m" minimizes the arithmetic mean of the absolute deviations.
More generally, a median is defined as a minimum of
as discussed below in the section on multivariate medians (specifically, the spatial median).
This optimization-based definition of the median is useful in statistical data-analysis, for example, in "k"-medians clustering.
If the distribution has finite variance, then the distance between the median formula_13 and the mean formula_14 is bounded by one standard deviation.
This bound was proved by Mallows, who used Jensen's inequality twice, as follows. Using |·| for the absolute value, we have
The first and third inequalities come from Jensen's inequality applied to the absolute-value function and the square function, which are each convex. The second inequality comes from the fact that a median minimizes the absolute deviation function formula_16.
Mallows' proof can be generalized to obtain a multivariate version of the inequality simply by replacing the absolute value with a norm:
where "m" is a spatial median, that is, a minimizer of the function formula_18 The spatial median is unique when the data-set's dimension is two or more.
An alternative proof uses the one-sided Chebyshev inequality; it appears in an inequality on location and scale parameters. This formula also follows directly from Cantelli's inequality.
For the case of unimodal distributions, one can achieve a sharper bound on the distance between the median and the mean:
A similar relation holds between the median and the mode:
Jensen's inequality states that for any random variable "X" with a finite expectation "E"["X"] and for any convex function "f"
This inequality generalizes to the median as well. We say a function is a C function if, for any "t",
is a closed interval (allowing the degenerate cases of a single point or an empty set). Every C function is convex, but the reverse does not hold. If "f" is a C function, then
If the medians are not unique, the statement holds for the corresponding suprema.
Even though comparison-sorting "n" items requires operations, selection algorithms can compute the th-smallest of items with only operations. This includes the median, which is the th order statistic (or for an even number of samples, the arithmetic mean of the two middle order statistics).
Selection algorithms still have the downside of requiring memory, that is, they need to have the full sample (or a linear-sized portion of it) in memory. Because this, as well as the linear time requirement, can be prohibitive, several estimation procedures for the median have been developed. A simple one is the median of three rule, which estimates the median as the median of a three-element subsample; this is commonly used as a subroutine in the quicksort sorting algorithm, which uses an estimate of its input's median. A more robust estimator is Tukey's "ninther", which is the median of three rule applied with limited recursion: if is the sample laid out as an array, and
then
The "remedian" is an estimator for the median that requires linear time but sub-linear memory, operating in a single pass over the sample.
The distributions of both the sample mean and the sample median were determined by Laplace. The distribution of the sample median from a population with a density function formula_24 is asymptotically normal with mean formula_25 and variance
where formula_25 is the median of formula_24 and formula_5 is the sample size. A modern proof follows below. Laplace's result is now understood as a special case of the asymptotic distribution of arbitrary quantiles.
For normal samples, the density is formula_30, thus for large samples the variance of the median equals formula_31 (See also section #Efficiency below.)
We take the sample size to be an odd number formula_32 and assume our variable continuous; the formula for the case of discrete variables is given below in . The sample can be summarized as "below median", "at median", and "above median", which corresponds to a trinomial distribution with probabilities formula_33, formula_34 and formula_35. For a continuous variable, the probability of multiple sample values being exactly equal to the median is 0, so one can calculate the density of at the point formula_36 directly from the trinomial distribution:
Now we introduce the beta function. For integer arguments formula_38 and formula_39, this can be expressed as formula_40. Also, recall that formula_41. Using these relationships and setting both formula_38 and formula_39 equal to formula_44 allows the last expression to be written as
Hence the density function of the median is a symmetric beta distribution pushed forward by formula_46. Its mean, as we would expect, is 0.5 and its variance is formula_47. By the chain rule, the corresponding variance of the sample median is
The additional 2 is negligible in the limit.
In practice, the functions formula_49 and formula_50 are often not known or assumed. However, they can be estimated from an observed frequency distribution. In this section, we give an example. Consider the following table, representing a sample of 3,800 (discrete-valued) observations:
Because the observations are discrete-valued, constructing the exact distribution of the median is not an immediate translation of the above expression for formula_51; one may (and typically does) have multiple instances of the median in one's sample. So we must sum over all these possibilities:
Here, "i" is the number of points strictly less than the median and "k" the number strictly greater.
Using these preliminaries, it is possible to investigate the effect of sample size on the standard errors of the mean and median. The observed mean is 3.16, the observed raw median is 3 and the observed interpolated median is 3.174. The following table gives some comparison statistics.
The expected value of the median falls slightly as sample size increases while, as would be expected, the standard errors of both the median and the mean are proportionate to the inverse square root of the sample size. The asymptotic approximation errs on the side of caution by overestimating the standard error.
The value of formula_53—the asymptotic value of formula_54 where formula_55 is the population median—has been studied by several authors. The standard "delete one" jackknife method produces inconsistent results. An alternative—the "delete k" method—where formula_56 grows with the sample size has been shown to be asymptotically consistent. This method may be computationally expensive for large data sets. A bootstrap estimate is known to be consistent, but converges very slowly (order of formula_57). Other methods have been proposed but their behavior may differ between large and small samples.
The efficiency of the sample median, measured as the ratio of the variance of the mean to the variance of the median, depends on the sample size and on the underlying population distribution. For a sample of size formula_58 from the normal distribution, the efficiency for large N is
The efficiency tends to formula_60 as formula_61 tends to infinity.
In other words, the relative variance of the median will be formula_62, or 57% greater than the variance of the mean – the relative standard error of the median will be formula_63, or 25% greater than the standard error of the mean, formula_64 (see also section #Sampling distribution above.).
For univariate distributions that are "symmetric" about one median, the Hodges–Lehmann estimator is a robust and highly efficient estimator of the population median.
If data are represented by a statistical model specifying a particular family of probability distributions, then estimates of the median can be obtained by fitting that family of probability distributions to the data and calculating the theoretical median of the fitted distribution. Pareto interpolation is an application of this when the population is assumed to have a Pareto distribution.
Previously, this article discussed the univariate median, when the sample or population had one-dimension. When the dimension is two or higher, there are multiple concepts that extend the definition of the univariate median; each such multivariate median agrees with the univariate median when the dimension is exactly one.
The marginal median is defined for vectors defined with respect to a fixed set of coordinates. A marginal median is defined to be the vector whose components are univariate medians. The marginal median is easy to compute, and its properties were studied by Puri and Sen.
The geometric median of a discrete set of sample points formula_65 in a Euclidean space is the point minimizing the sum of distances to the sample points.
In contrast to the marginal median, the geometric median is equivariant with respect to Euclidean similarity transformations such as translations and rotations.
An alternative generalization of the median in higher dimensions is the centerpoint.
When dealing with a discrete variable, it is sometimes useful to regard the observed values as being midpoints of underlying continuous intervals. An example of this is a Likert scale, on which opinions or preferences are expressed on a scale with a set number of possible responses. If the scale consists of the positive integers, an observation of 3 might be regarded as representing the interval from 2.50 to 3.50. It is possible to estimate the median of the underlying variable. If, say, 22% of the observations are of value 2 or below and 55.0% are of 3 or below (so 33% have the value 3), then the median formula_67 is 3 since the median is the smallest value of formula_68 for which formula_69 is greater than a half. But the interpolated median is somewhere between 2.50 and 3.50. First we add half of the interval width formula_70 to the median to get the upper bound of the median interval. Then we subtract that proportion of the interval width which equals the proportion of the 33% which lies above the 50% mark. In other words, we split up the interval width pro rata to the numbers of observations. In this case, the 33% is split into 28% below the median and 5% above it so we subtract 5/33 of the interval width from the upper bound of 3.50 to give an interpolated median of 3.35. More formally, if the values formula_71 are known, the interpolated median can be calculated from
Alternatively, if in an observed sample there are formula_73 scores above the median category, formula_74 scores in it and formula_75 scores below it then the interpolated median is given by
For univariate distributions that are "symmetric" about one median, the Hodges–Lehmann estimator is a robust and highly efficient estimator of the population median; for non-symmetric distributions, the Hodges–Lehmann estimator is a robust and highly efficient estimator of the population "pseudo-median", which is the median of a symmetrized distribution and which is close to the population median. The Hodges–Lehmann estimator has been generalized to multivariate distributions.
The Theil–Sen estimator is a method for robust linear regression based on finding medians of slopes.
In the context of image processing of monochrome raster images there is a type of noise, known as the salt and pepper noise, when each pixel independently becomes black (with some small probability) or white (with some small probability), and is unchanged otherwise (with the probability close to 1). An image constructed of median values of neighborhoods (like 3×3 square) can effectively reduce noise in this case.
In cluster analysis, the k-medians clustering algorithm provides a way of defining clusters, in which the criterion of maximising the distance between cluster-means that is used in k-means clustering, is replaced by maximising the distance between cluster-medians.
This is a method of robust regression. The idea dates back to Wald in 1940 who suggested dividing a set of bivariate data into two halves depending on the value of the independent parameter formula_4: a left half with values less than the median and a right half with values greater than the median. He suggested taking the means of the dependent formula_78 and independent formula_4 variables of the left and the right halves and estimating the slope of the line joining these two points. The line could then be adjusted to fit the majority of the points in the data set.
Nair and Shrivastava in 1942 suggested a similar idea but instead advocated dividing the sample into three equal parts before calculating the means of the subsamples. Brown and Mood in 1951 proposed the idea of using the medians of two subsamples rather the means. Tukey combined these ideas and recommended dividing the sample into three equal size subsamples and estimating the line based on the medians of the subsamples.
Any "mean"-unbiased estimator minimizes the risk (expected loss) with respect to the squared-error loss function, as observed by Gauss. A "median"-unbiased estimator minimizes the risk with respect to the absolute-deviation loss function, as observed by Laplace. Other loss functions are used in statistical theory, particularly in robust statistics.
The theory of median-unbiased estimators was revived by George W. Brown in 1947:
Further properties of median-unbiased estimators have been reported. Median-unbiased estimators are invariant under one-to-one transformations.
There are methods of constructing median-unbiased estimators that are optimal (in a sense analogous to the minimum-variance property for mean-unbiased estimators). Such constructions exist for probability distributions having monotone likelihood-functions. One such procedure is an analogue of the Rao–Blackwell procedure for mean-unbiased estimators: The procedure holds for a smaller class of probability distributions than does the Rao—Blackwell procedure but for a larger class of loss functions.
Scientific researchers in the ancient near east appear not to have used summary statistics altogether, instead choosing values that offered maximal consistency with a broader theory that integrated a wide variety of phenomena. Within the Mediterranean (and, later, European) scholarly community, statistics like the mean are fundamentally a medieval and early modern development. (The history of the median outside Europe and its predecessors remains relatively unstudied.)
The idea of the median appeared in the 13th century in the Talmud, in order to fairly analyze divergent appraisals. However, the concept did not spread to the broader scientific community.
Instead, the closest ancestor of the modern median is the mid-range, invented by Al-Biruni. Transmission of Al-Biruni's work to later scholars is unclear. Al-Biruni applied his technique to assaying metals, but, after he published his work, most assayers still adopted the most unfavorable value from their results, lest they appear to cheat. However, increased navigation at sea during the Age of Discovery meant that ship's navigators increasingly had to attempt to determine latitude in unfavorable weather against hostile shores, leading to renewed interest in summary statistics. Whether rediscovered or independently invented, the mid-range is recommended to nautical navigators in Harriot's "Instructions for Raleigh's Voyage to Guiana, 1595".
The idea of the median may have first appeared in Edward Wright's 1599 book "Certaine Errors in Navigation" on a section about compass navigation. Wright was reluctant to discard measured values, and may have felt that the median — incorporating a greater proportion of the dataset than the mid-range — was more likely to be correct. However, Wright did not give examples of his technique's use, making it hard to verify that he described the modern notion of median. The median (in the context of probability) certainly appeared in the correspondence of Christiaan Huygens, but as an example of a statistic that was inappropriate for actuarial practice.
The earliest recommendation of the median dates to 1757, when Roger Joseph Boscovich developed a regression method based on the "L"1 norm and therefore implicitly on the median. In 1774, Laplace made this desire explicit: he suggested the median be used as the standard estimator of the value of a posterior PDF. The specific criterion was to minimize the expected magnitude of the error; formula_80 where formula_81 is the estimate and formula_82 is the true value. To this end, Laplace determined the distributions of both the sample mean and the sample median in the early 1800s. However, a decade later, Gauss and Legendre developed the least squares method, which minimizes formula_83 to obtain the mean. Within the context of regression, Gauss and Legendre's innovation offers vastly easier computation. Consequently, Laplaces' proposal was generally rejected until the rise of computing devices 150 years later (and is still a relatively uncommon algorithm).
Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1843 was the first to use the term "median" ("valeur médiane") for the value that divides a probability distribution into two equal halves. Gustav Theodor Fechner used the median ("Centralwerth") in sociological and psychological phenomena. It had earlier been used only in astronomy and related fields. Gustav Fechner popularized the median into the formal analysis of data, although it had been used previously by Laplace, and the median appeared in a textbook by F. Y. Edgeworth. Francis Galton used the English term "median" in 1881, having earlier used the terms "middle-most value" in 1869, and the "medium" in 1880.
Statisticians encouraged the use of medians intensely throughout the 19th century for its intuitive clarity and ease of manual computation. However, the notion of median does not lend itself to the theory of higher moments as well as the arithmetic mean does, and is much harder to compute by computer. As a result, the median was steadily supplanted as a notion of generic average by the arithmetic mean during the 20th century.
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Mammal
Mammals (from Latin "mamma" "breast") are vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), and characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females (and sometimes males) produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or hair, and three middle ear bones. These characteristics distinguish them from reptiles and birds, from which they diverged in the late Carboniferous, approximately 300 million years ago. Around 6,400 extant species of mammals have been described. The largest orders are the rodents, bats and Eulipotyphla (hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and others). The next three are the Primates (apes including humans, monkeys, and others), the Cetartiodactyla (cetaceans and even-toed ungulates), and the Carnivora (cats, dogs, seals, and others).
In terms of cladistics, which reflects evolutionary history, mammals are the only living members of the Synapsida; this clade, together with Sauropsida (reptiles and birds) together constitute the larger Amniota clade. The early synapsid mammalian ancestors were sphenacodont pelycosaurs, a group that included the non-mammalian "Dimetrodon". At the end of the Carboniferous period around 300 million years ago, this group diverged from the sauropsid line that led to today's reptiles and birds. The line following the stem group Sphenacodontia split into several diverse groups of non-mammalian synapsids—sometimes incorrectly referred to as mammal-like reptiles—before giving rise to Therapsida in the Early Permian period. The modern mammalian orders arose in the Paleogene and Neogene periods of the Cenozoic era, after the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, and have been among the dominant terrestrial animal groups from 66 million years ago to the present.
The basic body type is quadruped, and most mammals use their four extremities for terrestrial locomotion; but in some, the extremities are adapted for life at sea, in the air, in trees, underground, or on two legs. Mammals range in size from the bumblebee bat to the blue whale—possibly the largest animal to have ever lived. Maximum lifespan varies from two years for the shrew to 211 years for the bowhead whale. All modern mammals give birth to live young, except the five species of monotremes, which are egg-laying mammals. The most species-rich group of mammals, the cohort called placentals, have a placenta, which enables the feeding of the fetus during gestation.
Most mammals are intelligent, with some possessing large brains, self-awareness, and tool use. Mammals can communicate and vocalize in several ways, including the production of ultrasound, scent-marking, alarm signals, singing, and echolocation. Mammals can organize themselves into fission-fusion societies, harems, and hierarchies—but can also be solitary and territorial. Most mammals are polygynous, but some can be monogamous or polyandrous.
Domestication of many types of mammals by humans played a major role in the Neolithic revolution, and resulted in farming replacing hunting and gathering as the primary source of food for humans. This led to a major restructuring of human societies from nomadic to sedentary, with more co-operation among larger and larger groups, and ultimately the development of the first civilizations. Domesticated mammals provided, and continue to provide, power for transport and agriculture, as well as food (meat and dairy products), fur, and leather. Mammals are also hunted and raced for sport, and are used as model organisms in science. Mammals have been depicted in art since Palaeolithic times, and appear in literature, film, mythology, and religion. Decline in numbers and extinction of many mammals is primarily driven by human poaching and habitat destruction, primarily deforestation.
Mammal classification has been through several iterations since Carl Linnaeus initially defined the class. No classification system is universally accepted; McKenna & Bell (1997) and Wilson & Reader (2005) provide useful recent compendiums. George Gaylord Simpson's "Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals" (AMNH "Bulletin" v. 85, 1945) provides systematics of mammal origins and relationships that were universally taught until the end of the 20th century. Since Simpson's classification, the paleontological record has been recalibrated, and the intervening years have seen much debate and progress concerning the theoretical underpinnings of systematization itself, partly through the new concept of cladistics. Though field work gradually made Simpson's classification outdated, it remains the closest thing to an official classification of mammals.
Most mammals, including the six most species-rich orders, belong to the placental group. The three largest orders in numbers of species are Rodentia: mice, rats, porcupines, beavers, capybaras and other gnawing mammals; Chiroptera: bats; and Soricomorpha: shrews, moles and solenodons. The next three biggest orders, depending on the biological classification scheme used, are the Primates including the apes, monkeys and lemurs; the Cetartiodactyla including whales and even-toed ungulates; and the Carnivora which includes cats, dogs, weasels, bears, seals and allies. According to "Mammal Species of the World", 5,416 species were identified in 2006. These were grouped into 1,229 genera, 153 families and 29 orders. In 2008, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) completed a five-year Global Mammal Assessment for its IUCN Red List, which counted 5,488 species. According to research published in the "Journal of Mammalogy" in 2018, the number of recognized mammal species is 6,495 including 96 recently extinct.
The word "mammal" is modern, from the scientific name "Mammalia" coined by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, derived from the Latin "mamma" ("teat, pap"). In an influential 1988 paper, Timothy Rowe defined Mammalia phylogenetically as the crown group of mammals, the clade consisting of the most recent common ancestor of living monotremes (echidnas and platypuses) and therian mammals (marsupials and placentals) and all descendants of that ancestor. Since this ancestor lived in the Jurassic period, Rowe's definition excludes all animals from the earlier Triassic, despite the fact that Triassic fossils in the Haramiyida have been referred to the Mammalia since the mid-19th century. If Mammalia is considered as the crown group, its origin can be roughly dated as the first known appearance of animals more closely related to some extant mammals than to others. "Ambondro" is more closely related to monotremes than to therian mammals while "Amphilestes" and "Amphitherium" are more closely related to the therians; as fossils of all three genera are dated about in the Middle Jurassic, this is a reasonable estimate for the appearance of the crown group.
T. S. Kemp has provided a more traditional definition: "synapsids that possess a dentary–squamosal jaw articulation and occlusion between upper and lower molars with a transverse component to the movement" or, equivalently in Kemp's view, the clade originating with the last common ancestor of "Sinoconodon" and living mammals. The earliest known synapsid satisfying Kemp's definitions is "Tikitherium", dated , so the appearance of mammals in this broader sense can be given this Late Triassic date.
In 1997, the mammals were comprehensively revised by Malcolm C. McKenna and Susan K. Bell, which has resulted in the McKenna/Bell classification. Their 1997 book, "Classification of Mammals above the Species Level", is a comprehensive work on the systematics, relationships and occurrences of all mammal taxa, living and extinct, down through the rank of genus, though molecular genetic data challenge several of the higher level groupings. The authors worked together as paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. McKenna inherited the project from Simpson and, with Bell, constructed a completely updated hierarchical system, covering living and extinct taxa that reflects the historical genealogy of Mammalia.
In the following list, extinct groups are labelled with a dagger (†).
Class Mammalia
As of the early 21st century, molecular studies based on DNA analysis have suggested new relationships among mammal families. Most of these findings have been independently validated by retrotransposon presence/absence data. Classification systems based on molecular studies reveal three major groups or lineages of placental mammals—Afrotheria, Xenarthra and Boreoeutheria—which diverged in the Cretaceous. The relationships between these three lineages is contentious, and all three possible hypotheses have been proposed with respect to which group is basal. These hypotheses are Atlantogenata (basal Boreoeutheria), Epitheria (basal Xenarthra) and Exafroplacentalia (basal Afrotheria). Boreoeutheria in turn contains two major lineages—Euarchontoglires and Laurasiatheria.
Estimates for the divergence times between these three placental groups range from 105 to 120 million years ago, depending on the type of DNA used (such as nuclear or mitochondrial) and varying interpretations of paleogeographic data.
The cladogram above is based on Tarver "et al". (2016)
Group I: Superorder Afrotheria
Group II: Superorder Xenarthra
Group III: Magnaorder Boreoeutheria
Synapsida, a clade that contains mammals and their extinct relatives, originated during the Pennsylvanian subperiod (~323 million to ~300 million years ago), when they split from reptilian and avian lineages. Crown group mammals evolved from earlier mammaliaforms during the Early Jurassic. The cladogram takes Mammalia to be the crown group.
The first fully terrestrial vertebrates were amniotes. Like their amphibious tetrapod predecessors, they had lungs and limbs. Amniotic eggs, however, have internal membranes that allow the developing embryo to breathe but keep water in. Hence, amniotes can lay eggs on dry land, while amphibians generally need to lay their eggs in water.
The first amniotes apparently arose in the Pennsylvanian subperiod of the Carboniferous. They descended from earlier reptiliomorph amphibious tetrapods, which lived on land that was already inhabited by insects and other invertebrates as well as ferns, mosses and other plants. Within a few million years, two important amniote lineages became distinct: the synapsids, which would later include the common ancestor of the mammals; and the sauropsids, which now include turtles, lizards, snakes, crocodilians and dinosaurs (including birds). Synapsids have a single hole (temporal fenestra) low on each side of the skull. One synapsid group, the pelycosaurs, included the largest and fiercest animals of the early Permian. Nonmammalian synapsids are sometimes (inaccurately) called "mammal-like reptiles".
Therapsids, a group of synapsids, descended from pelycosaurs in the Middle Permian, about 265 million years ago, and became the dominant land vertebrates. They differ from basal eupelycosaurs in several features of the skull and jaws, including: larger skulls and incisors which are equal in size in therapsids, but not for eupelycosaurs. The therapsid lineage leading to mammals went through a series of stages, beginning with animals that were very similar to their pelycosaur ancestors and ending with probainognathian cynodonts, some of which could easily be mistaken for mammals. Those stages were characterized by:
The Permian–Triassic extinction event about 252 million years ago, which was a prolonged event due to the accumulation of several extinction pulses, ended the dominance of carnivorous therapsids. In the early Triassic, most medium to large land carnivore niches were taken over by archosaurs which, over an extended period (35 million years), came to include the crocodylomorphs, the pterosaurs and the dinosaurs; however, large cynodonts like "Trucidocynodon" and traversodontids still occupied large sized carnivorous and herbivorous niches respectively. By the Jurassic, the dinosaurs had come to dominate the large terrestrial herbivore niches as well.
The first mammals (in Kemp's sense) appeared in the Late Triassic epoch (about 225 million years ago), 40 million years after the first therapsids. They expanded out of their nocturnal insectivore niche from the mid-Jurassic onwards; The Jurassic "Castorocauda", for example, was a close relative of true mammals that had adaptations for swimming, digging and catching fish. Most, if not all, are thought to have remained nocturnal (the nocturnal bottleneck), accounting for much of the typical mammalian traits. The majority of the mammal species that existed in the Mesozoic Era were multituberculates, eutriconodonts and spalacotheriids. The earliest known metatherian is "Sinodelphys", found in 125 million-year-old Early Cretaceous shale in China's northeastern Liaoning Province. The fossil is nearly complete and includes tufts of fur and imprints of soft tissues.
The oldest known fossil among the Eutheria ("true beasts") is the small shrewlike "Juramaia sinensis", or "Jurassic mother from China", dated to 160 million years ago in the late Jurassic. A later eutherian relative, "Eomaia", dated to 125 million years ago in the early Cretaceous, possessed some features in common with the marsupials but not with the placentals, evidence that these features were present in the last common ancestor of the two groups but were later lost in the placental lineage. In particular, the epipubic bones extend forwards from the pelvis. These are not found in any modern placental, but they are found in marsupials, monotremes, other nontherian mammals and "Ukhaatherium", an early Cretaceous animal in the eutherian order Asioryctitheria. This also applies to the multituberculates. They are apparently an ancestral feature, which subsequently disappeared in the placental lineage. These epipubic bones seem to function by stiffening the muscles during locomotion, reducing the amount of space being presented, which placentals require to contain their fetus during gestation periods. A narrow pelvic outlet indicates that the young were very small at birth and therefore pregnancy was short, as in modern marsupials. This suggests that the placenta was a later development.
One of the earliest known monotremes was "Teinolophos", which lived about 120 million years ago in Australia. Monotremes have some features which may be inherited from the original amniotes such as the same orifice to urinate, defecate and reproduce (cloaca)—as lizards and birds also do— and they lay eggs which are leathery and uncalcified.
"Hadrocodium", whose fossils date from approximately 195 million years ago, in the early Jurassic, provides the first clear evidence of a jaw joint formed solely by the squamosal and dentary bones; there is no space in the jaw for the articular, a bone involved in the jaws of all early synapsids.
The earliest clear evidence of hair or fur is in fossils of "Castorocauda" and "Megaconus", from 164 million years ago in the mid-Jurassic. In the 1950s, it was suggested that the foramina (passages) in the maxillae and premaxillae (bones in the front of the upper jaw) of cynodonts were channels which supplied blood vessels and nerves to vibrissae (whiskers) and so were evidence of hair or fur; it was soon pointed out, however, that foramina do not necessarily show that an animal had vibrissae, as the modern lizard "Tupinambis" has foramina that are almost identical to those found in the nonmammalian cynodont "Thrinaxodon". Popular sources, nevertheless, continue to attribute whiskers to "Thrinaxodon". Studies on Permian coprolites suggest that non-mammalian synapsids of the epoch already had fur, setting the evolution of hairs possibly as far back as dicynodonts.
When endothermy first appeared in the evolution of mammals is uncertain, though it is generally agreed to have first evolved in non-mammalian therapsids. Modern monotremes have lower body temperatures and more variable metabolic rates than marsupials and placentals, but there is evidence that some of their ancestors, perhaps including ancestors of the therians, may have had body temperatures like those of modern therians. Likewise, some modern therians like afrotheres and xenarthrans have secondarily developed lower body temperatures.
The evolution of erect limbs in mammals is incomplete—living and fossil monotremes have sprawling limbs. The parasagittal (nonsprawling) limb posture appeared sometime in the late Jurassic or early Cretaceous; it is found in the eutherian "Eomaia" and the metatherian "Sinodelphys", both dated to 125 million years ago. Epipubic bones, a feature that strongly influenced the reproduction of most mammal clades, are first found in Tritylodontidae, suggesting that it is a synapomorphy between them and mammaliformes. They are omnipresent in non-placental mammaliformes, though "Megazostrodon" and "Erythrotherium" appear to have lacked them.
It has been suggested that the original function of lactation (milk production) was to keep eggs moist. Much of the argument is based on monotremes, the egg-laying mammals.
Therian mammals took over the medium- to large-sized ecological niches in the Cenozoic, after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event approximately 66 million years ago emptied ecological space once filled by non-avian dinosaurs and other groups of reptiles, as well as various other mammal groups, and underwent an exponential increase in body size (megafauna). Then mammals diversified very quickly; both birds and mammals show an exponential rise in diversity. For example, the earliest known bat dates from about 50 million years ago, only 16 million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
Molecular phylogenetic studies initially suggested that most placental orders diverged about 100 to 85 million years ago and that modern families appeared in the period from the late Eocene through the Miocene. However, no placental fossils have been found from before the end of the Cretaceous. The earliest undisputed fossils of placentals comes from the early Paleocene, after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. In particular, scientists have identified an early Paleocene animal named "Protungulatum donnae" as one of the first placental mammals. however it has been reclassified as a non-placental eutherian. Recalibrations of genetic and morphological diversity rates have suggested a Late Cretaceous origin for placentals, and a Paleocene origin for most modern clades.
The earliest known ancestor of primates is "Archicebus achilles" from around 55 million years ago. This tiny primate weighed 20–30 grams (0.7–1.1 ounce) and could fit within a human palm.
Living mammal species can be identified by the presence of sweat glands, including those that are specialized to produce milk to nourish their young. In classifying fossils, however, other features must be used, since soft tissue glands and many other features are not visible in fossils.
Many traits shared by all living mammals appeared among the earliest members of the group:
For the most part, these characteristics were not present in the Triassic ancestors of the mammals. Nearly all mammaliaforms possess an epipubic bone, the exception being modern placentals.
The majority of mammals have seven cervical vertebrae (bones in the neck), including bats, giraffes, whales and humans. The exceptions are the manatee and the two-toed sloth, which have just six, and the three-toed sloth which has nine cervical vertebrae. All mammalian brains possess a neocortex, a brain region unique to mammals. Placental mammals have a corpus callosum, unlike monotremes and marsupials.
The lungs of mammals are spongy and honeycombed. Breathing is mainly achieved with the diaphragm, which divides the thorax from the abdominal cavity, forming a dome convex to the thorax. Contraction of the diaphragm flattens the dome, increasing the volume of the lung cavity. Air enters through the oral and nasal cavities, and travels through the larynx, trachea and bronchi, and expands the alveoli. Relaxing the diaphragm has the opposite effect, decreasing the volume of the lung cavity, causing air to be pushed out of the lungs. During exercise, the abdominal wall contracts, increasing pressure on the diaphragm, which forces air out quicker and more forcefully. The rib cage is able to expand and contract the chest cavity through the action of other respiratory muscles. Consequently, air is sucked into or expelled out of the lungs, always moving down its pressure gradient. This type of lung is known as a bellows lung due to its resemblance to blacksmith bellows.
The mammalian heart has four chambers, two upper atria, the receiving chambers, and two lower ventricles, the discharging chambers. The heart has four valves, which separate its chambers and ensures blood flows in the correct direction through the heart (preventing backflow). After gas exchange in the pulmonary capillaries (blood vessels in the lungs), oxygen-rich blood returns to the left atrium via one of the four pulmonary veins. Blood flows nearly continuously back into the atrium, which acts as the receiving chamber, and from here through an opening into the left ventricle. Most blood flows passively into the heart while both the atria and ventricles are relaxed, but toward the end of the ventricular relaxation period, the left atrium will contract, pumping blood into the ventricle. The heart also requires nutrients and oxygen found in blood like other muscles, and is supplied via coronary arteries.
The integumentary system (skin) is made up of three layers: the outermost epidermis, the dermis and the hypodermis. The epidermis is typically 10 to 30 cells thick; its main function is to provide a waterproof layer. Its outermost cells are constantly lost; its bottommost cells are constantly dividing and pushing upward. The middle layer, the dermis, is 15 to 40 times thicker than the epidermis. The dermis is made up of many components, such as bony structures and blood vessels. The hypodermis is made up of adipose tissue, which stores lipids and provides cushioning and insulation. The thickness of this layer varies widely from species to species; marine mammals require a thick hypodermis (blubber) for insulation, and right whales have the thickest blubber at . Although other animals have features such as whiskers, feathers, setae, or cilia that superficially resemble it, no animals other than mammals have hair. It is a definitive characteristic of the class. Though some mammals have very little, careful examination reveals the characteristic, often in obscure parts of their bodies.
Herbivores have developed a diverse range of physical structures to facilitate the consumption of plant material. To break up intact plant tissues, mammals have developed teeth structures that reflect their feeding preferences. For instance, frugivores (animals that feed primarily on fruit) and herbivores that feed on soft foliage have low-crowned teeth specialized for grinding foliage and seeds. Grazing animals that tend to eat hard, silica-rich grasses, have high-crowned teeth, which are capable of grinding tough plant tissues and do not wear down as quickly as low-crowned teeth. Most carnivorous mammals have carnassialiforme teeth (of varying length depending on diet), long canines and similar tooth replacement patterns.
The stomach of Artiodactyls is divided into four sections: the rumen, the reticulum, the omasum and the abomasum (only ruminants have a rumen). After the plant material is consumed, it is mixed with saliva in the rumen and reticulum and separates into solid and liquid material. The solids lump together to form a bolus (or cud), and is regurgitated. When the bolus enters the mouth, the fluid is squeezed out with the tongue and swallowed again. Ingested food passes to the rumen and reticulum where cellulytic microbes (bacteria, protozoa and fungi) produce cellulase, which is needed to break down the cellulose in plants. Perissodactyls, in contrast to the ruminants, store digested food that has left the stomach in an enlarged cecum, where it is fermented by bacteria. Carnivora have a simple stomach adapted to digest primarily meat, as compared to the elaborate digestive systems of herbivorous animals, which are necessary to break down tough, complex plant fibers. The caecum is either absent or short and simple, and the large intestine is not sacculated or much wider than the small intestine.
The mammalian excretory system involves many components. Like most other land animals, mammals are ureotelic, and convert ammonia into urea, which is done by the liver as part of the urea cycle. Bilirubin, a waste product derived from blood cells, is passed through bile and urine with the help of enzymes excreted by the liver. The passing of bilirubin via bile through the intestinal tract gives mammalian feces a distinctive brown coloration. Distinctive features of the mammalian kidney include the presence of the renal pelvis and renal pyramids, and of a clearly distinguishable cortex and medulla, which is due to the presence of elongated loops of Henle. Only the mammalian kidney has a bean shape, although there are some exceptions, such as the multilobed reniculate kidneys of pinnipeds, cetaceans and bears. Most adult placental mammals have no remaining trace of the cloaca. In the embryo, the embryonic cloaca divides into a posterior region that becomes part of the anus, and an anterior region that has different fates depending on the sex of the individual: in females, it develops into the vestibule that receives the urethra and vagina, while in males it forms the entirety of the penile urethra. However, the tenrecs, golden moles, and some shrews retain a cloaca as adults. In marsupials, the genital tract is separate from the anus, but a trace of the original cloaca does remain externally. Monotremes, which translates from Greek into "single hole", have a true cloaca.
As in all other tetrapods, mammals have a larynx that can quickly open and close to produce sounds, and a supralaryngeal vocal tract which filters this sound. The lungs and surrounding musculature provide the air stream and pressure required to phonate. The larynx controls the pitch and volume of sound, but the strength the lungs exert to exhale also contributes to volume. More primitive mammals, such as the echidna, can only hiss, as sound is achieved solely through exhaling through a partially closed larynx. Other mammals phonate using vocal folds, as opposed to the vocal cords seen in birds and reptiles. The movement or tenseness of the vocal folds can result in many sounds such as purring and screaming. Mammals can change the position of the larynx, allowing them to breathe through the nose while swallowing through the mouth, and to form both oral and nasal sounds; nasal sounds, such as a dog whine, are generally soft sounds, and oral sounds, such as a dog bark, are generally loud.
Some mammals have a large larynx and thus a low-pitched voice, namely the hammer-headed bat ("Hypsignathus monstrosus") where the larynx can take up the entirety of the thoracic cavity while pushing the lungs, heart, and trachea into the abdomen. Large vocal pads can also lower the pitch, as in the low-pitched roars of big cats. The production of infrasound is possible in some mammals such as the African elephant ("Loxodonta" spp.) and baleen whales. Small mammals with small larynxes have the ability to produce ultrasound, which can be detected by modifications to the middle ear and cochlea. Ultrasound is inaudible to birds and reptiles, which might have been important during the Mesozoic, when birds and reptiles were the dominant predators. This private channel is used by some rodents in, for example, mother-to-pup communication, and by bats when echolocating. Toothed whales also use echolocation, but, as opposed to the vocal membrane that extends upward from the vocal folds, they have a melon to manipulate sounds. Some mammals, namely the primates, have air sacs attached to the larynx, which may function to lower the resonances or increase the volume of sound.
The vocal production system is controlled by the cranial nerve nuclei in the brain, and supplied by the recurrent laryngeal nerve and the superior laryngeal nerve, branches of the vagus nerve. The vocal tract is supplied by the hypoglossal nerve and facial nerves. Electrical stimulation of the periaqueductal gray (PEG) region of the mammalian midbrain elicit vocalizations. The ability to learn new vocalizations is only exemplified in humans, seals, cetaceans, elephants and possibly bats; in humans, this is the result of a direct connection between the motor cortex, which controls movement, and the motor neurons in the spinal cord.
The primary function of the fur of mammals is thermoregulation. Others include protection, sensory purposes, waterproofing, and camouflage. Different types of fur serve different purposes:
Hair length is not a factor in thermoregulation: for example, some tropical mammals such as sloths have the same length of fur length as some arctic mammals but with less insulation; and, conversely, other tropical mammals with short hair have the same insulating value as arctic mammals. The denseness of fur can increase an animal's insulation value, and arctic mammals especially have dense fur; for example, the musk ox has guard hairs measuring as well as a dense underfur, which forms an airtight coat, allowing them to survive in temperatures of . Some desert mammals, such as camels, use dense fur to prevent solar heat from reaching their skin, allowing the animal to stay cool; a camel's fur may reach in the summer, but the skin stays at . Aquatic mammals, conversely, trap air in their fur to conserve heat by keeping the skin dry.
Mammalian coats are colored for a variety of reasons, the major selective pressures including camouflage, sexual selection, communication, and thermoregulation. Coloration in both the hair and skin of mammals is mainly determined by the type and amount of melanin; eumelanins for brown and black colors and pheomelanin for a range of yellow to reddish-brown colors, giving mammals an earth tone. Some mammals, like the mandrill, have more vibrant colors due to structural coloration. Many sloths appear green because their fur hosts green algae; this may be a symbiotic relation that affords camouflage to the sloths.
Camouflage is a powerful influence in a large number of mammals, as it helps to conceal individuals from predators or prey. In arctic and subarctic mammals such as the arctic fox ("Alopex lagopus"), collared lemming ("Dicrostonyx groenlandicus"), stoat ("Mustela erminea"), and snowshoe hare ("Lepus americanus"), seasonal color change between brown in summer and white in winter is driven largely by camouflage. Some arboreal mammals, notably primates and marsupials, have shades of violet, green, or blue skin on parts of their bodies, indicating some distinct advantage in their largely arboreal habitat due to convergent evolution.
Aposematism, warning off possible predators, is the most likely explanation of the black-and-white pelage of many mammals which are able to defend themselves, such as in the foul-smelling skunk and the powerful and aggressive honey badger. Coat color is sometimes sexually dimorphic, as in many primate species. Differences in female and male coat color may indicate nutrition and hormone levels, important in mate selection. Coat color may influence the ability to retain heat, depending on how much light is reflected. Mammals with a darker colored coat can absorb more heat from solar radiation, and stay warmer, and some smaller mammals, such as voles, have darker fur in the winter. The white, pigmentless fur of arctic mammals, such as the polar bear, may reflect more solar radiation directly onto the skin. The dazzling black-and-white striping of zebras appear to provide some protection from biting flies.
In male placentals, the penis is used both for urination and copulation. Depending on the species, an erection may be fueled by blood flow into vascular, spongy tissue or by muscular action. A penis may be contained in a prepuce when not erect, and some placentals also have a penis bone (baculum). Marsupials typically have forked penises, while the echidna penis generally has four heads with only two functioning. The testes of most mammals descend into the scrotum which is typically posterior to the penis but is often anterior in marsupials. Female mammals generally have a clitoris, labia majora and labia minora on the outside, while the internal system contains paired oviducts, 1-2 uteri, 1-2 cervices and a vagina. Marsupials have two lateral vaginas and a medial vagina. The "vagina" of monotremes is better understood as a "urogenital sinus". The uterine systems of placental mammals can vary between a duplex, were there are two uteri and cervices which open into the vagina, a bipartite, were two uterine horns have a single cervix that connects to the vagina, a bicornuate, which consists where two uterine horns that are connected distally but separate medially creating a Y-shape, and a simplex, which has a single uterus.
The ancestral condition for mammal reproduction is the birthing of relatively undeveloped, either through direct vivipary or a short period as soft-shelled eggs. This is likely due to the fact that the torso could not expand due to the presence of epipubic bones. The oldest demonstration of this reproductive style is with "Kayentatherium", which produced undeveloped perinates, but at much higher litter sizes than any modern mammal, 38 specimens. Most modern mammals are viviparous, giving birth to live young. However, the five species of monotreme, the platypus and the four species of echidna, lay eggs. The monotremes have a sex determination system different from that of most other mammals. In particular, the sex chromosomes of a platypus are more like those of a chicken than those of a therian mammal.
Viviparous mammals are in the subclass Theria; those living today are in the marsupial and placental infraclasses. Marsupials have a short gestation period, typically shorter than its estrous cycle and gives birth to an undeveloped newborn that then undergoes further development; in many species, this takes place within a pouch-like sac, the marsupium, located in the front of the mother's abdomen. This is the plesiomorphic condition among viviparous mammals; the presence of epipubic bones in all non-placental mammals prevents the expansion of the torso needed for full pregnancy. Even non-placental eutherians probably reproduced this way. The placentals give birth to relatively complete and developed young, usually after long gestation periods. They get their name from the placenta, which connects the developing fetus to the uterine wall to allow nutrient uptake. In placental mammals, the epipubic is either completely lost or converted into the baculum; allowing the torso to be able to expand and thus birth developed offspring.
The mammary glands of mammals are specialized to produce milk, the primary source of nutrition for newborns. The monotremes branched early from other mammals and do not have the nipples seen in most mammals, but they do have mammary glands. The young lick the milk from a mammary patch on the mother's belly. Compared to placental mammals, the milk of marsupials changes greatly in both production rate and in nutrient composition, due to the underdeveloped young. In addition, the mammary glands have more autonomy allowing them to supply separate milks to young at different development stages. Lactose is the main sugar in placental mammal milk while monotreme and marsupial milk is dominated by oligosaccharides. Weaning is the process in which a mammal becomes less dependent on their mother's milk and more on solid food.
Nearly all mammals are endothermic ("warm-blooded"). Most mammals also have hair to help keep them warm. Like birds, mammals can forage or hunt in weather and climates too cold for ectothermic ("cold-blooded") reptiles and insects. Endothermy requires plenty of food energy, so mammals eat more food per unit of body weight than most reptiles. Small insectivorous mammals eat prodigious amounts for their size. A rare exception, the naked mole-rat produces little metabolic heat, so it is considered an operational poikilotherm. Birds are also endothermic, so endothermy is not unique to mammals.
Among mammals, species maximum lifespan varies significantly (for example the shrew has a lifespan of two years, whereas the oldest bowhead whale is recorded to be 211 years). Although the underlying basis for these lifespan differences is still uncertain, numerous studies indicate that the ability to repair DNA damage is an important determinant of mammalian lifespan. In a 1974 study by Hart and Setlow, it was found that DNA excision repair capability increased systematically with species lifespan among seven mammalian species. Species lifespan was observed to be robustly correlated with the capacity to recognize DNA double-strand breaks as well as the level of the DNA repair protein Ku80. In a study of the cells from sixteen mammalian species, genes employed in DNA repair were found to be up-regulated in the longer-lived species. The cellular level of the DNA repair enzyme poly ADP ribose polymerase was found to correlate with species lifespan in a study of 13 mammalian species. Three additional studies of a variety of mammalian species also reported a correlation between species lifespan and DNA repair capability.
Most vertebrates—the amphibians, the reptiles and some mammals such as humans and bears—are plantigrade, walking on the whole of the underside of the foot. Many mammals, such as cats and dogs, are digitigrade, walking on their toes, the greater stride length allowing more speed. Digitigrade mammals are also often adept at quiet movement. Some animals such as horses are unguligrade, walking on the tips of their toes. This even further increases their stride length and thus their speed. A few mammals, namely the great apes, are also known to walk on their knuckles, at least for their front legs. Giant anteaters and platypuses are also knuckle-walkers. Some mammals are bipeds, using only two limbs for locomotion, which can be seen in, for example, humans and the great apes. Bipedal species have a larger field of vision than quadrupeds, conserve more energy and have the ability to manipulate objects with their hands, which aids in foraging. Instead of walking, some bipeds hop, such as kangaroos and kangaroo rats.
Animals will use different gaits for different speeds, terrain and situations. For example, horses show four natural gaits, the slowest horse gait is the walk, then there are three faster gaits which, from slowest to fastest, are the trot, the canter and the gallop. Animals may also have unusual gaits that are used occasionally, such as for moving sideways or backwards. For example, the main human gaits are bipedal walking and running, but they employ many other gaits occasionally, including a four-legged crawl in tight spaces. Mammals show a vast range of gaits, the order that they place and lift their appendages in locomotion. Gaits can be grouped into categories according to their patterns of support sequence. For quadrupeds, there are three main categories: walking gaits, running gaits and leaping gaits. Walking is the most common gait, where some feet are on the ground at any given time, and found in almost all legged animals. Running is considered to occur when at some points in the stride all feet are off the ground in a moment of suspension.
Arboreal animals frequently have elongated limbs that help them cross gaps, reach fruit or other resources, test the firmness of support ahead and, in some cases, to brachiate (swing between trees). Many arboreal species, such as tree porcupines, silky anteaters, spider monkeys, and possums, use prehensile tails to grasp branches. In the spider monkey, the tip of the tail has either a bare patch or adhesive pad, which provides increased friction. Claws can be used to interact with rough substrates and reorient the direction of forces the animal applies. This is what allows squirrels to climb tree trunks that are so large to be essentially flat from the perspective of such a small animal. However, claws can interfere with an animal's ability to grasp very small branches, as they may wrap too far around and prick the animal's own paw. Frictional gripping is used by primates, relying upon hairless fingertips. Squeezing the branch between the fingertips generates frictional force that holds the animal's hand to the branch. However, this type of grip depends upon the angle of the frictional force, thus upon the diameter of the branch, with larger branches resulting in reduced gripping ability. To control descent, especially down large diameter branches, some arboreal animals such as squirrels have evolved highly mobile ankle joints that permit rotating the foot into a 'reversed' posture. This allows the claws to hook into the rough surface of the bark, opposing the force of gravity. Small size provides many advantages to arboreal species: such as increasing the relative size of branches to the animal, lower center of mass, increased stability, lower mass (allowing movement on smaller branches) and the ability to move through more cluttered habitat. Size relating to weight affects gliding animals such as the sugar glider. Some species of primate, bat and all species of sloth achieve passive stability by hanging beneath the branch. Both pitching and tipping become irrelevant, as the only method of failure would be losing their grip.
Bats are the only mammals that can truly fly. They fly through the air at a constant speed by moving their wings up and down (usually with some fore-aft movement as well). Because the animal is in motion, there is some airflow relative to its body which, combined with the velocity of the wings, generates a faster airflow moving over the wing. This generates a lift force vector pointing forwards and upwards, and a drag force vector pointing rearwards and upwards. The upwards components of these counteract gravity, keeping the body in the air, while the forward component provides thrust to counteract both the drag from the wing and from the body as a whole.
The wings of bats are much thinner and consist of more bones than those of birds, allowing bats to maneuver more accurately and fly with more lift and less drag. By folding the wings inwards towards their body on the upstroke, they use 35% less energy during flight than birds. The membranes are delicate, ripping easily; however, the tissue of the bat's membrane is able to regrow, such that small tears can heal quickly. The surface of their wings is equipped with touch-sensitive receptors on small bumps called Merkel cells, also found on human fingertips. These sensitive areas are different in bats, as each bump has a tiny hair in the center, making it even more sensitive and allowing the bat to detect and collect information about the air flowing over its wings, and to fly more efficiently by changing the shape of its wings in response.
A fossorial (from Latin "fossor", meaning "digger") is an animal adapted to digging which lives primarily, but not solely, underground. Some examples are badgers, and naked mole-rats. Many rodent species are also considered fossorial because they live in burrows for most but not all of the day. Species that live exclusively underground are subterranean, and those with limited adaptations to a fossorial lifestyle sub-fossorial. Some organisms are fossorial to aid in temperature regulation while others use the underground habitat for protection from predators or for food storage.
Fossorial mammals have a fusiform body, thickest at the shoulders and tapering off at the tail and nose. Unable to see in the dark burrows, most have degenerated eyes, but degeneration varies between species; pocket gophers, for example, are only semi-fossorial and have very small yet functional eyes, in the fully fossorial marsupial mole the eyes are degenerated and useless, talpa moles have vestigial eyes and the cape golden mole has a layer of skin covering the eyes. External ears flaps are also very small or absent. Truly fossorial mammals have short, stout legs as strength is more important than speed to a burrowing mammal, but semi-fossorial mammals have cursorial legs. The front paws are broad and have strong claws to help in loosening dirt while excavating burrows, and the back paws have webbing, as well as claws, which aids in throwing loosened dirt backwards. Most have large incisors to prevent dirt from flying into their mouth.
Many fossorial mammals such as shrews, hedgehogs, and moles were classified under the now obsolete order Insectivora.
Fully aquatic mammals, the cetaceans and sirenians, have lost their legs and have a tail fin to propel themselves through the water. Flipper movement is continuous. Whales swim by moving their tail fin and lower body up and down, propelling themselves through vertical movement, while their flippers are mainly used for steering. Their skeletal anatomy allows them to be fast swimmers. Most species have a dorsal fin to prevent themselves from turning upside-down in the water. The flukes of sirenians are raised up and down in long strokes to move the animal forward, and can be twisted to turn. The forelimbs are paddle-like flippers which aid in turning and slowing.
Semi-aquatic mammals, like pinnipeds, have two pairs of flippers on the front and back, the fore-flippers and hind-flippers. The elbows and ankles are enclosed within the body. Pinnipeds have several adaptions for reducing drag. In addition to their streamlined bodies, they have smooth networks of muscle bundles in their skin that may increase laminar flow and make it easier for them to slip through water. They also lack arrector pili, so their fur can be streamlined as they swim. They rely on their fore-flippers for locomotion in a wing-like manner similar to penguins and sea turtles. Fore-flipper movement is not continuous, and the animal glides between each stroke. Compared to terrestrial carnivorans, the fore-limbs are reduced in length, which gives the locomotor muscles at the shoulder and elbow joints greater mechanical advantage; the hind-flippers serve as stabilizers. Other semi-aquatic mammals include beavers, hippopotamuses, otters and platypuses. Hippos are very large semi-aquatic mammals, and their barrel-shaped bodies have graviportal skeletal structures, adapted to carrying their enormous weight, and their specific gravity allows them to sink and move along the bottom of a river.
Many mammals communicate by vocalizing. Vocal communication serves many purposes, including in mating rituals, as warning calls, to indicate food sources, and for social purposes. Males often call during mating rituals to ward off other males and to attract females, as in the roaring of lions and red deer. The songs of the humpback whale may be signals to females; they have different dialects in different regions of the ocean. Social vocalizations include the territorial calls of gibbons, and the use of frequency in greater spear-nosed bats to distinguish between groups. The vervet monkey gives a distinct alarm call for each of at least four different predators, and the reactions of other monkeys vary according to the call. For example, if an alarm call signals a python, the monkeys climb into the trees, whereas the eagle alarm causes monkeys to seek a hiding place on the ground. Prairie dogs similarly have complex calls that signal the type, size, and speed of an approaching predator. Elephants communicate socially with a variety of sounds including snorting, screaming, trumpeting, roaring and rumbling. Some of the rumbling calls are infrasonic, below the hearing range of humans, and can be heard by other elephants up to away at still times near sunrise and sunset.
Mammals signal by a variety of means. Many give visual anti-predator signals, as when deer and gazelle stot, honestly indicating their fit condition and their ability to escape, or when white-tailed deer and other prey mammals flag with conspicuous tail markings when alarmed, informing the predator that it has been detected. Many mammals make use of scent-marking, sometimes possibly to help defend territory, but probably with a range of functions both within and between species. Microbats and toothed whales including oceanic dolphins vocalize both socially and in echolocation.
To maintain a high constant body temperature is energy expensive—mammals therefore need a nutritious and plentiful diet. While the earliest mammals were probably predators, different species have since adapted to meet their dietary requirements in a variety of ways. Some eat other animals—this is a carnivorous diet (and includes insectivorous diets). Other mammals, called herbivores, eat plants, which contain complex carbohydrates such as cellulose. An herbivorous diet includes subtypes such as granivory (seed eating), folivory (leaf eating), frugivory (fruit eating), nectarivory (nectar eating), gummivory (gum eating) and mycophagy (fungus eating). The digestive tract of an herbivore is host to bacteria that ferment these complex substances, and make them available for digestion, which are either housed in the multichambered stomach or in a large cecum. Some mammals are coprophagous, consuming feces to absorb the nutrients not digested when the food was first ingested. An omnivore eats both prey and plants. Carnivorous mammals have a simple digestive tract because the proteins, lipids and minerals found in meat require little in the way of specialized digestion. Exceptions to this include baleen whales who also house gut flora in a multi-chambered stomach, like terrestrial herbivores.
The size of an animal is also a factor in determining diet type (Allen's rule). Since small mammals have a high ratio of heat-losing surface area to heat-generating volume, they tend to have high energy requirements and a high metabolic rate. Mammals that weigh less than about are mostly insectivorous because they cannot tolerate the slow, complex digestive process of an herbivore. Larger animals, on the other hand, generate more heat and less of this heat is lost. They can therefore tolerate either a slower collection process (carnivores that feed on larger vertebrates) or a slower digestive process (herbivores). Furthermore, mammals that weigh more than usually cannot collect enough insects during their waking hours to sustain themselves. The only large insectivorous mammals are those that feed on huge colonies of insects (ants or termites).
Some mammals are omnivores and display varying degrees of carnivory and herbivory, generally leaning in favor of one more than the other. Since plants and meat are digested differently, there is a preference for one over the other, as in bears where some species may be mostly carnivorous and others mostly herbivorous. They are grouped into three categories: mesocarnivory (50–70% meat), hypercarnivory (70% and greater of meat), and hypocarnivory (50% or less of meat). The dentition of hypocarnivores consists of dull, triangular carnassial teeth meant for grinding food. Hypercarnivores, however, have conical teeth and sharp carnassials meant for slashing, and in some cases strong jaws for bone-crushing, as in the case of hyenas, allowing them to consume bones; some extinct groups, notably the Machairodontinae, had saber-shaped canines.
Some physiological carnivores consume plant matter and some physiological herbivores consume meat. From a behavioral aspect, this would make them omnivores, but from the physiological standpoint, this may be due to zoopharmacognosy. Physiologically, animals must be able to obtain both energy and nutrients from plant and animal materials to be considered omnivorous. Thus, such animals are still able to be classified as carnivores and herbivores when they are just obtaining nutrients from materials originating from sources that do not seemingly complement their classification. For example, it is well documented that some ungulates such as giraffes, camels, and cattle, will gnaw on bones to consume particular minerals and nutrients. Also, cats, which are generally regarded as obligate carnivores, occasionally eat grass to regurgitate indigestible material (such as hairballs), aid with hemoglobin production, and as a laxative.
Many mammals, in the absence of sufficient food requirements in an environment, suppress their metabolism and conserve energy in a process known as hibernation. In the period preceding hibernation, larger mammals, such as bears, become polyphagic to increase fat stores, whereas smaller mammals prefer to collect and stash food. The slowing of the metabolism is accompanied by a decreased heart and respiratory rate, as well as a drop in internal temperatures, which can be around ambient temperature in some cases. For example, the internal temperatures of hibernating arctic ground squirrels can drop to , however the head and neck always stay above . A few mammals in hot environments aestivate in times of drought or extreme heat, namely the fat-tailed dwarf lemur ("Cheirogaleus medius").
In intelligent mammals, such as primates, the cerebrum is larger relative to the rest of the brain. Intelligence itself is not easy to define, but indications of intelligence include the ability to learn, matched with behavioral flexibility. Rats, for example, are considered to be highly intelligent, as they can learn and perform new tasks, an ability that may be important when they first colonize a fresh habitat. In some mammals, food gathering appears to be related to intelligence: a deer feeding on plants has a brain smaller than a cat, which must think to outwit its prey.
Tool use by animals may indicate different levels of learning and cognition. The sea otter uses rocks as essential and regular parts of its foraging behaviour (smashing abalone from rocks or breaking open shells), with some populations spending 21% of their time making tools. Other tool use, such as chimpanzees using twigs to "fish" for termites, may be developed by watching others use tools and may even be a true example of animal teaching. Tools may even be used in solving puzzles in which the animal appears to experience a "Eureka moment". Other mammals that do not use tools, such as dogs, can also experience a Eureka moment.
Brain size was previously considered a major indicator of the intelligence of an animal. Since most of the brain is used for maintaining bodily functions, greater ratios of brain to body mass may increase the amount of brain mass available for more complex cognitive tasks. Allometric analysis indicates that mammalian brain size scales at approximately the or exponent of the body mass. Comparison of a particular animal's brain size with the expected brain size based on such allometric analysis provides an encephalisation quotient that can be used as another indication of animal intelligence. Sperm whales have the largest brain mass of any animal on earth, averaging and in mature males.
Self-awareness appears to be a sign of abstract thinking. Self-awareness, although not well-defined, is believed to be a precursor to more advanced processes such as metacognitive reasoning. The traditional method for measuring this is the mirror test, which determines if an animal possesses the ability of self-recognition. Mammals that have passed the mirror test include Asian elephants (some pass, some do not); chimpanzees; bonobos; orangutans; humans, from 18 months (mirror stage); bottlenose dolphins killer whales; and false killer whales.
Eusociality is the highest level of social organization. These societies have an overlap of adult generations, the division of reproductive labor and cooperative caring of young. Usually insects, such as bees, ants and termites, have eusocial behavior, but it is demonstrated in two rodent species: the naked mole-rat and the Damaraland mole-rat.
Presociality is when animals exhibit more than just sexual interactions with members of the same species, but fall short of qualifying as eusocial. That is, presocial animals can display communal living, cooperative care of young, or primitive division of reproductive labor, but they do not display all of the three essential traits of eusocial animals. Humans and some species of Callitrichidae (marmosets and tamarins) are unique among primates in their degree of cooperative care of young. Harry Harlow set up an experiment with rhesus monkeys, presocial primates, in 1958; the results from this study showed that social encounters are necessary in order for the young monkeys to develop both mentally and sexually.
A fission-fusion society is a society that changes frequently in its size and composition, making up a permanent social group called the "parent group". Permanent social networks consist of all individual members of a community and often varies to track changes in their environment. In a fission–fusion society, the main parent group can fracture (fission) into smaller stable subgroups or individuals to adapt to environmental or social circumstances. For example, a number of males may break off from the main group in order to hunt or forage for food during the day, but at night they may return to join (fusion) the primary group to share food and partake in other activities. Many mammals exhibit this, such as primates (for example orangutans and spider monkeys), elephants, spotted hyenas, lions, and dolphins.
Solitary animals defend a territory and avoid social interactions with the members of its species, except during breeding season. This is to avoid resource competition, as two individuals of the same species would occupy the same niche, and to prevent depletion of food. A solitary animal, while foraging, can also be less conspicuous to predators or prey.
In a hierarchy, individuals are either dominant or submissive. A despotic hierarchy is where one individual is dominant while the others are submissive, as in wolves and lemurs, and a pecking order is a linear ranking of individuals where there is a top individual and a bottom individual. Pecking orders may also be ranked by sex, where the lowest individual of a sex has a higher ranking than the top individual of the other sex, as in hyenas. Dominant individuals, or alphas, have a high chance of reproductive success, especially in harems where one or a few males (resident males) have exclusive breeding rights to females in a group. Non-resident males can also be accepted in harems, but some species, such as the common vampire bat ("Desmodus rotundus"), may be more strict.
Some mammals are perfectly monogamous, meaning that they mate for life and take no other partners (even after the original mate's death), as with wolves, Eurasian beavers, and otters. There are three types of polygamy: either one or multiple dominant males have breeding rights (polygyny), multiple males that females mate with (polyandry), or multiple males have exclusive relations with multiple females (polygynandry). It is much more common for polygynous mating to happen, which, excluding leks, are estimated to occur in up to 90% of mammals. Lek mating occurs when males congregate around females and try to attract them with various courtship displays and vocalizations, as in harbor seals.
All higher mammals (excluding monotremes) share two major adaptations for care of the young: live birth and lactation. These imply a group-wide choice of a degree of parental care. They may build nests and dig burrows to raise their young in, or feed and guard them often for a prolonged period of time. Many mammals are K-selected, and invest more time and energy into their young than do r-selected animals. When two animals mate, they both share an interest in the success of the offspring, though often to different extremes. Mammalian females exhibit some degree of maternal aggression, another example of parental care, which may be targeted against other females of the species or the young of other females; however, some mammals may "aunt" the infants of other females, and care for them. Mammalian males may play a role in child rearing, as with tenrecs, however this varies species to species, even within the same genus. For example, the males of the southern pig-tailed macaque ("Macaca nemestrina") do not participate in child care, whereas the males of the Japanese macaque ("M. fuscata") do.
Non-human mammals play a wide variety of roles in human culture. They are the most popular of pets, with tens of millions of dogs, cats and other animals including rabbits and mice kept by families around the world. Mammals such as mammoths, horses and deer are among the earliest subjects of art, being found in Upper Paleolithic cave paintings such as at Lascaux. Major artists such as Albrecht Dürer, George Stubbs and Edwin Landseer are known for their portraits of mammals. Many species of mammals have been hunted for sport and for food; deer and wild boar are especially popular as game animals. Mammals such as horses and dogs are widely raced for sport, often combined with betting on the outcome. There is a tension between the role of animals as companions to humans, and their existence as individuals with rights of their own. Mammals further play a wide variety of roles in literature, film, mythology, and religion.
Domestic mammals form a large part of the livestock raised for meat across the world. They include (2009) around 1.4 billion cattle, 1 billion sheep, 1 billion domestic pigs, and (1985) over 700 million rabbits. Working domestic animals including cattle and horses have been used for work and transport from the origins of agriculture, their numbers declining with the arrival of mechanised transport and agricultural machinery. In 2004 they still provided some 80% of the power for the mainly small farms in the third world, and some 20% of the world's transport, again mainly in rural areas. In mountainous regions unsuitable for wheeled vehicles, pack animals continue to transport goods.
Mammal skins provide leather for shoes, clothing and upholstery. Wool from mammals including sheep, goats and alpacas has been used for centuries for clothing. Mammals serve a major role in science as experimental animals, both in fundamental biological research, such as in genetics, and in the development of new medicines, which must be tested exhaustively to demonstrate their safety. Millions of mammals, especially mice and rats, are used in experiments each year. A knockout mouse is a genetically modified mouse with an inactivated gene, replaced or disrupted with an artificial piece of DNA. They enable the study of sequenced genes whose functions are unknown. A small percentage of the mammals are non-human primates, used in research for their similarity to humans.
Charles Darwin, Jared Diamond and others have noted the importance of domesticated mammals in the Neolithic development of agriculture and of civilization, causing farmers to replace hunter-gatherers around the world. This transition from hunting and gathering to herding flocks and growing crops was a major step in human history. The new agricultural economies, based on domesticated mammals, caused "radical restructuring of human societies, worldwide alterations in biodiversity, and significant changes in the Earth's landforms and its atmosphere... momentous outcomes".
Hybrids are offspring resulting from the breeding of two genetically distinct individuals, which usually will result in a high degree of heterozygosity, though hybrid and heterozygous are not synonymous. The deliberate or accidental hybridizing of two or more species of closely related animals through captive breeding is a human activity which has been in existence for millennia and has grown for economic purposes. Hybrids between different subspecies within a species (such as between the Bengal tiger and Siberian tiger) are known as intra-specific hybrids. Hybrids between different species within the same genus (such as between lions and tigers) are known as interspecific hybrids or crosses. Hybrids between different genera (such as between sheep and goats) are known as intergeneric hybrids. Natural hybrids will occur in hybrid zones, where two populations of species within the same genera or species living in the same or adjacent areas will interbreed with each other. Some hybrids have been recognized as species, such as the red wolf (though this is controversial).
Artificial selection, the deliberate selective breeding of domestic animals, is being used to breed back recently extinct animals in an attempt to achieve an animal breed with a phenotype that resembles that extinct wildtype ancestor. A breeding-back (intraspecific) hybrid may be very similar to the extinct wildtype in appearance, ecological niche and to some extent genetics, but the initial gene pool of that wild type is lost forever with its extinction. As a result, bred-back breeds are at best vague look-alikes of extinct wildtypes, as Heck cattle are of the aurochs.
Purebred wild species evolved to a specific ecology can be threatened with extinction through the process of genetic pollution, the uncontrolled hybridization, introgression genetic swamping which leads to homogenization or out-competition from the heterosic hybrid species. When new populations are imported or selectively bred by people, or when habitat modification brings previously isolated species into contact, extinction in some species, especially rare varieties, is possible. Interbreeding can swamp the rarer gene pool and create hybrids, depleting the purebred gene pool. For example, the endangered wild water buffalo is most threatened with extinction by genetic pollution from the domestic water buffalo. Such extinctions are not always apparent from a morphological standpoint. Some degree of gene flow is a normal evolutionary process, nevertheless, hybridization threatens the existence of rare species.
The loss of species from ecological communities, defaunation, is primarily driven by human activity. This has resulted in empty forests, ecological communities depleted of large vertebrates. In the Quaternary extinction event, the mass die-off of megafaunal variety coincided with the appearance of humans, suggesting a human influence. One hypothesis is that humans hunted large mammals, such as the woolly mammoth, into extinction. The 2019 "Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services" by IPBES states that the total biomass of wild mammals has declined by 82 percent since the beginning of human civilization.
Various species are predicted to become extinct in the near future, among them the rhinoceros, primates, pangolins, and giraffes. Hunting alone threatens hundreds of mammalian species around the world. Scientists claim that the growing demand for meat is contributing to biodiversity loss as this is a significant driver of deforestation and habitat destruction; species-rich habitats, such as significant portions of the Amazon rainforest, are being converted to agricultural land for meat production. According to the World Wildlife Fund's 2016 Living Planet Index, global wildlife populations have declined 58% since 1970, primarily due to habitat destruction, over-hunting and pollution. They project that if current trends continue, 67% of wildlife could disappear by 2020. Another influence is over-hunting and poaching, which can reduce the overall population of game animals, especially those located near villages, as in the case of peccaries. The effects of poaching can especially be seen in the ivory trade with African elephants. Marine mammals are at risk from entanglement from fishing gear, notably cetaceans, with discard mortalities ranging from 65,000 to 86,000 individuals annually.
Attention is being given to endangered species globally, notably through the Convention on Biological Diversity, otherwise known as the Rio Accord, which includes 189 signatory countries that are focused on identifying endangered species and habitats. Another notable conservation organization is the IUCN, which has a membership of over 1,200 governmental and non-governmental organizations.
Recent extinctions can be directly attributed to human influences. The IUCN characterizes 'recent' extinction as those that have occurred past the cut-off point of 1500, and around 80 mammal species have gone extinct since that time and 2015. Some species, such as the Père David's deer are extinct in the wild, and survive solely in captive populations. Other species, such as the Florida panther, are ecologically extinct, surviving in such low numbers that they essentially have no impact on the ecosystem. Other populations are only locally extinct (extirpated), still existing elsewhere, but reduced in distribution, as with the extinction of gray whales in the Atlantic.
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Kattegat
The Kattegat (; ; ) is a sea area bounded by the Jutlandic peninsula in the west, the Danish Straits islands of Denmark to the south and the provinces of Västergötland, Scania, Halland and Bohuslän in Sweden in the east. The Baltic Sea drains into the Kattegat through the Danish Straits. The sea area is a continuation of the Skagerrak and may be seen as a bay of the Baltic Sea or the North Sea or, as in traditional Scandinavian usage, neither of these.
The Kattegat is a rather shallow sea and can be very difficult and dangerous to navigate because of the many sandy and stony reefs and tricky currents, which often shift. In modern times, artificial seabed channels have been dug, many reefs have been dredged by either sand pumping or stone fishing, and a well-developed light signaling network has been installed, to safeguard the very heavy international traffic of this small sea.
There are several large cities and major ports in the Kattegat, including Gothenburg, Aarhus, Aalborg, Halmstad and Frederikshavn, mentioned by descending size.
According to the definition established in a 1932 convention signed by Denmark, Norway and Sweden (registered in the League of Nations Treaty Series 1933–1934), the northern boundary between the Kattegat and Skagerrak is found at the northernmost point of Skagen on Jutland, while the southern boundary towards Øresund is found at the tip of Kullen Peninsula in Scania.
Major waterways that drain into the Kattegat are the rivers of Göta älv at Gothenburg, together with the Lagan, Nissan, Ätran and Viskan in the province of Halland on the Swedish side, and the river of Gudenå in Jutland, in Denmark.
The main islands of the Kattegat are Samsø, Læsø and Anholt; the latter two are, due to their relatively dry climate, situated in what is called "the Danish desert belt".
A number of noteworthy coastal areas abut the Kattegat, including the Kullaberg Nature Reserve in Scania, Sweden, which contains a number of rare species and a scenic rocky shore, the town of Mölle, which has a picturesque harbour and views into the Kullaberg, and Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark.
Since the 1950s, a bridge project usually referred to as "Kattegatbroen" (The Kattegat Bridge) connecting Jutland and Zealand across the Kattegat has been considered. Since the late 2000s, the project has seen a renewed interest from several influential politicians in Denmark. The bridge is usually envisioned as connecting Hov (a village south of Odder in the Aarhus area) with Samsø and Kalundborg.
The International Hydrographic Organization defines the limits of the "Kattegat, Sound and Belts" (that is, the Kattegat, Øresund, Great Belt, and Little Belt) as follows:
According to "Den Store Danske Encyklopædi" and "Nudansk Ordbog", the name derives from the Dutch words ' ("cat's") and ' ("hole, gate"). It derives from late medieval navigation jargon, in which captains of the Hanseatic trading fleets would compare the Danish Straits to a hole so narrow that even a cat would have difficulty squeezing its way through, on account of the many reefs and shallow waters. At one point, the passable waters were a mere wide. The name of the Copenhagen street "Kattesundet" has a comparable etymological meaning, namely "narrow passage".
An archaic name for both the Skagerrak and Kattegat was the "Norwegian Sea" or "Jutland Sea" (Knýtlinga saga mentions the name "Jótlandshaf"). Its ancient Latin name was "".
Control of the Kattegat, and access to it, have been important throughout the history of international seafaring. Until the completion of the Eider Canal in 1784, the Kattegat was the only sea route into and out of the Baltic region.
Beginning in 1429 in the Middle Ages, the Danish royal family – and later the state of Denmark – prospered greatly from the Sound dues, a toll charged for passage through the Øresund, while Copenhagen provided shelter, trade and repair opportunities and protection from piracy. The dues were eventually lifted in 1857.
In the Kattegat, the salinity has a pronounced two-layer structure. The upper layer has a salinity between 18‰ and 26‰ and the lower layer – separated by a strong halocline at around – has a salinity between 32‰ and 34‰. The lower layer consists of inflowing seawater from the Skagerrak, with a salinity on level with most other coastal seawaters, while the upper layer consists of inflowing seawater from the Baltic Sea and has a much lower salinity, comparable to brackish water, but still a great deal higher than the rest of the Baltic sea. These two opposing flows transport a net surplus of seawater from the Baltic to the Skagerrak every year. During stronger winds, the layers in the Kattegat are completely mixed in some places, such as the Great Belt, so the overall salinity is highly variable in this small sea. This sets some unique conditions for the sealife here.
Cold seeps, locally known as "bubbling reefs" (), are found in the northern Kattegat. Unlike cold seeps in most other places (including the North Sea and Skagerrak), the Kattegat bubbling reefs are at relatively shallow depths, generally between below the surface. The seeps rely on methane deposited during the Eemian period and during calm weather the bubbles can sometimes be seen on the water surface. Carbonate cementation and lithification form slaps or pillars up to tall, and support a rich biodiversity. Because of their unique status, the Kattegat bubbling reefs receive a level of protection and are recognized as a Natura 2000 habitat (type 1180) by the European Union (EU).
The Kattegat was one of the first marine dead zones to be noted in the 1970s, when scientists began studying how intensive industrial activities affected the natural world. Since then, studies and research has provided much insight into processes like eutrophication, and how to deal with it. Denmark and the EU have initiated costly and far-reaching domestic projects in order to stop, repair and prevent these environmentally destructive and economically damaging processes, since the first Action Plan for the Aquatic Environment in 1985, and are now busy implementing the fourth Action Plan. The action plans sums up a broad range of initiatives and includes the so-called Nitrate Directives. The action plans have generally been viewed as a success, although the work is not finished and all goals are not completely met yet.
Due to the very heavy sea traffic and many large coastal settlements, the Kattegat has been designated as a Sulphur Emission Control Area as part of the Baltic Sea since 2006. The benchmark for sulphur in fuels was recently lowered to 0.1%, to be effectuated from 1 January 2015.
Several larger areas of the Kattegat are designated as Natura 2000 and under various bird protections such as the Ramsar Convention. The remaining larger shallow reefs are among the protections, as they are important spawning and feeding grounds for fish and marine mammals and they support a thriving but threatened biodiversity. Protected areas includes:
Denmark
Sweden
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Kolmogorov–Smirnov test
In statistics, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test (K–S test or KS test) is a nonparametric test of the equality of continuous (or discontinuous, see Section 2.2), one-dimensional probability distributions that can be used to compare a sample with a reference probability distribution (one-sample K–S test), or to compare two samples (two-sample K–S test). It is named after Andrey Kolmogorov and Nikolai Smirnov.
The Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistic quantifies a distance between the empirical distribution function of the sample and the cumulative distribution function of the reference distribution, or between the empirical distribution functions of two samples. The null distribution of this statistic is calculated under the null hypothesis that the sample is drawn from the reference distribution (in the one-sample case) or that the samples are drawn from the same distribution (in the two-sample case). In the one-sample case, the distribution considered under the null hypothesis may be continuous (see Section 2), purely discrete or mixed (see Section 2.2). In the two-sample case (see Section 3), the distribution considered under the null hypothesis is a continuous distribution but is otherwise unrestricted.
The two-sample K–S test is one of the most useful and general nonparametric methods for comparing two samples, as it is sensitive to differences in both location and shape of the empirical cumulative distribution functions of the two samples.
The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test can be modified to serve as a goodness of fit test. In the special case of testing for normality of the distribution, samples are standardized and compared with a standard normal distribution. This is equivalent to setting the mean and variance of the reference distribution equal to the sample estimates, and it is known that using these to define the specific reference distribution changes the null distribution of the test statistic (see Test with estimated parameters). Various studies have found that, even in this corrected form, the test is less powerful for testing normality than the Shapiro–Wilk test or Anderson–Darling test. However, these other tests have their own disadvantages. For instance the Shapiro–Wilk test is known not to work well in samples with many identical values.
The empirical distribution function "F""n" for "n" independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) ordered observations "Xi" is defined as
where formula_2 is the indicator function, equal to 1 if formula_3 and equal to 0 otherwise.
The Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistic for a given cumulative distribution function "F"("x") is
where sup"x" is the supremum of the set of distances. By the Glivenko–Cantelli theorem, if the sample comes from distribution "F"("x"), then "D""n" converges to 0 almost surely in the limit when formula_5 goes to infinity. Kolmogorov strengthened this result, by effectively providing the rate of this convergence (see Kolmogorov distribution). Donsker's theorem provides a yet stronger result.
In practice, the statistic requires a relatively large number of data points (in comparison to other goodness of fit criteria such as the Anderson–Darling test statistic) to properly reject the null hypothesis.
The Kolmogorov distribution is the distribution of the random variable
where "B"("t") is the Brownian bridge. The cumulative distribution function of "K" is given by
which can also be expressed by the Jacobi theta function formula_8. Both the form of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test statistic and its asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis were published by Andrey Kolmogorov, while a table of the distribution was published by Nikolai Smirnov. Recurrence relations for the distribution of the test statistic in finite samples are available.
Under null hypothesis that the sample comes from the hypothesized distribution "F"("x"),
in distribution, where "B"("t") is the Brownian bridge.
If "F" is continuous then under the null hypothesis formula_10 converges to the Kolmogorov distribution, which does not depend on "F". This result may also be known as the Kolmogorov theorem. The accuracy of this limit as an approximation to the exact cdf of formula_11 when formula_5 is finite is not very impressive: even when formula_13, the corresponding maximum error is about formula_14; this error increases to formula_15 when formula_16 and to a totally unacceptable formula_17 when formula_18. However, a very simple expedient of replacing formula_19 by
in the argument of the Jacobi theta function reduces these errors to
formula_21, formula_22, and formula_23 respectively; such accuracy would be usually considered more than adequate for all practical applications.
The "goodness-of-fit" test or the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test can be constructed by using the critical values of the Kolmogorov distribution. This test is asymptotically valid when formula_24. It rejects the null hypothesis at level formula_25 if
where "K""α" is found from
The asymptotic power of this test is 1.
Fast and accurate algorithms to compute the cdf formula_28 or its complement for arbitrary formula_5 and formula_19, are available from:
If either the form or the parameters of "F"("x") are determined from the data "X""i" the critical values determined in this way are invalid. In such cases, Monte Carlo or other methods may be required, but tables have been prepared for some cases. Details for the required modifications to the test statistic and for the critical values for the normal distribution and the exponential distribution have been published, and later publications also include the Gumbel distribution. The Lilliefors test represents a special case of this for the normal distribution. The logarithm transformation may help to overcome cases where the Kolmogorov test data does not seem to fit the assumption that it came from the normal distribution.
Using estimated parameters, the questions arises which estimation method should be used. Usually this would be the maximum likelihood method, but e.g. for the normal distribution MLE has a large bias error on sigma. Using a moment fit or KS minimization instead has a large impact on the critical values, and also some impact on test power. If we need to decide for Student-T data with df = 2 via KS test whether the data could be normal or not, then a ML estimate based on H0 (data is normal, so using the standard deviation for scale) would give much larger KS distance, than a fit with minimum KS. In this case we should reject H0, which is often the case with MLE, because the sample standard deviation might be very large for T-2 data, but with KS minimization we may get still a too low KS to reject H0. In the Student-T case, a modified KS test with KS estimate instead of MLE, makes the KS test indeed slightly worse. However, in other cases, such a modified KS test leads to slightly better test power.
Under the assumption that formula_31 is non-decreasing and right-continuous, with countable (possibly infinite) number of jumps, the KS test statistic can be expressed as:
From the right-continuity of formula_31, it follows that formula_34 and formula_35 and hence, the distribution of formula_36 depends on the null distribution formula_31, i.e., is no longer distribution-free as in the continuous case. Therefore, a fast and accurate method has been developed to compute the exact and asymptotic distribution of formula_36 when formula_31 is purely discrete or mixed , implemented in C++ and in the KSgeneral package of the R language. The functions codice_1, codice_2 and codice_3 compute also the KS test statistic and p-values for purely discrete, mixed or continuous null distributions and arbitrary sample sizes. The KS test and its p-values for discrete null distributions and small sample sizes are also computed in as part of the dgof package of the R language. Major statistical packages among which SAS codice_4 , Stata codice_5 implement the KS test under the assumption that formula_31 is continuous, which is more conservative if the null distribution is actually not continuous (see
).
The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test may also be used to test whether two underlying one-dimensional probability distributions differ. In this case, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistic is
where formula_42 and formula_43 are the empirical distribution functions of the first and the second sample respectively, and formula_44 is the supremum function.
For large samples, the null hypothesis is rejected at level formula_25 if
Where formula_5 and formula_48 are the sizes of first and second sample respectively. The value of formula_49 is given in the table below for the most common levels of formula_25
and in general by
so that the condition reads
Here, again, the larger the sample sizes, the more sensitive the minimal bound: For a given ratio of sample sizes (e.g. formula_53), the minimal bound scales in the size of either of the samples according to its inverse square root.
Note that the two-sample test checks whether the two data samples come from the same distribution. This does not specify what that common distribution is (e.g. whether it's normal or not normal). Again, tables of critical values have been published. A shortcoming of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test is that it is not very powerful because it is devised to be sensitive against all possible types of differences between two distribution functions. and showed evidence that the Cucconi test, originally proposed for simultaneously comparing location and scale, is much more powerful than the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test when comparing two distribution functions.
While the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test is usually used to test whether a given "F"("x") is the underlying probability distribution of "F""n"("x"), the procedure may be inverted to give confidence limits on "F"("x") itself. If one chooses a critical value of the test statistic "D""α" such that P("D""n" > "D""α") = "α", then a band of width ±"D""α" around "F""n"("x") will entirely contain "F"("x") with probability 1 − "α".
A distribution-free multivariate Kolmogorov–Smirnov goodness of fit test has been proposed by Justel, Peña and Zamar (1997). The test uses a statistic which is built using Rosenblatt's transformation, and an algorithm is developed to compute it in the bivariate case. An approximate test that can be easily computed in any dimension is also presented.
The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test statistic needs to be modified if a similar test is to be applied to multivariate data. This is not straightforward because the maximum difference between two joint cumulative distribution functions is not generally the same as the maximum difference of any of the complementary distribution functions. Thus the maximum difference will differ depending on which of formula_54 or formula_55 or any of the other two possible arrangements is used. One might require that the result of the test used should not depend on which choice is made.
One approach to generalizing the Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistic to higher dimensions which meets the above concern is to compare the cdfs of the two samples with all possible orderings, and take the largest of the set of resulting K–S statistics. In "d" dimensions, there are 2"d"−1 such orderings. One such variation is due to Peacock
(see also Gosset
for a 3D version)
and another to Fasano and Franceschini (see Lopes et al. for a comparison and computational details). Critical values for the test statistic can be obtained by simulations, but depend on the dependence structure in the joint distribution.
In one dimension, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistic is identical to the so-called star discrepancy D, so another native KS extension to higher dimensions would be simply to use D also for higher dimensions. Unfortunately, the star discrepancy is hard to calculate in high dimensions.
The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (one or two sampled test verifies the equality of distributions) is implemented in many software programs:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16714
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Kansas
Kansas is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka and its largest city is Wichita. Kansas is bordered by Nebraska on the north; Missouri on the east; Oklahoma on the south; and Colorado on the west. Kansas is named after the Kansas River, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native Americans who lived along its banks. The tribe's name (natively "") is often said to mean "people of the (south) wind" although this was probably not the term's original meaning. For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison.
Kansas was first settled by Americans in 1827 with the establishment of Fort Leavenworth. The pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery debate. When it was officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854 with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists prevailed, and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state, hence the unofficial nickname "The Free State".
By 2015, Kansas was one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, corn, sorghum, and soybeans. Kansas, which has an area of is the 15th-largest state by area and is the 34th most-populous of the 50 states with a population of 2,913,314. Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans". Mount Sunflower is Kansas's highest point at .
For a millennium, the land that is now Kansas was inhabited by Native Americans. The first European to set foot in present-day Kansas was the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, who explored the area in 1541. In 1803, most of modern Kansas was acquired by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Southwest Kansas, however, was still a part of Spain, Mexico, and the Republic of Texas until the conclusion of the Mexican–American War in 1848, when these lands were ceded to the United States. From 1812 to 1821, Kansas was part of the Missouri Territory. The Santa Fe Trail traversed Kansas from 1821 to 1880, transporting manufactured goods from Missouri and silver and furs from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Wagon ruts from the trail are still visible in the prairie today.
In 1827, Fort Leavenworth became the first permanent settlement of white Americans in the future state. The Kansas–Nebraska Act became law on May 30, 1854, establishing Nebraska Territory and Kansas Territory, and opening the area to broader settlement by whites. Kansas Territory stretched all the way to the Continental Divide and included the sites of present-day Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo.
Missouri and Arkansas sent settlers into Kansas all along its eastern border. These settlers attempted to sway votes in favor of slavery. The secondary settlement of Americans in Kansas Territory were abolitionists from Massachusetts and other Free-Staters, who attempted to stop the spread of slavery from neighboring Missouri. Directly presaging the American Civil War, these forces collided, entering into skirmishes that earned the territory the name of Bleeding Kansas.
Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861, making it the 34th state to join the United States. By that time, the violence in Kansas had largely subsided, but during the Civil War, on August 21, 1863, William Quantrill led several hundred men on a raid into Lawrence, destroying much of the city and killing nearly 200 people. He was roundly condemned by both the conventional Confederate military and the partisan rangers commissioned by the Missouri legislature. His application to that body for a commission was flatly rejected due to his pre-war criminal record.
After the Civil War, many veterans constructed homesteads in Kansas. Many African Americans also looked to Kansas as the land of "John Brown" and, led by freedmen like Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, began establishing black colonies in the state. Leaving southern states in the late 1870s because of increasing discrimination, they became known as Exodusters.
At the same time, the Chisholm Trail was opened and the Wild West-era commenced in Kansas. Wild Bill Hickok was a deputy marshal at Fort Riley and a marshal at Hays and Abilene. Dodge City was another wild cowboy town, and both Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp worked as lawmen in the town. In one year alone, eight million head of cattle from Texas boarded trains in Dodge City bound for the East, earning Dodge the nickname "Queen of the Cowtowns".
In response to demands of Methodists and other evangelical Protestants, in 1881 Kansas became the first U.S. state to adopt a constitutional amendment prohibiting all alcoholic beverages, which was repealed in 1948.
Kansas is bordered by Nebraska on the north; Missouri on the east; Oklahoma on the south; and Colorado on the west. The state is divided into 105 counties with 628 cities with its largest county by area being Butler County. Kansas is located equidistant from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The geographic center of the 48 contiguous states is in Smith County near Lebanon. Until 1989, the Meades Ranch Triangulation Station in Osborne County was the geodetic center of North America: the central reference point for all maps of North America. The geographic center of Kansas is in Barton County.
Kansas is underlain by a sequence of horizontal to gently westward dipping sedimentary rocks. A sequence of Mississippian, Pennsylvanian and Permian rocks outcrop in the eastern and southern part of the state. The state's western half has exposures of Cretaceous through Tertiary sediments, the latter derived from the erosion of the uplifted Rocky Mountains to the west. These are underlain by older Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments which correlate well with the outcrops to the east. The state's northeastern corner was subjected to glaciation in the Pleistocene and is covered by glacial drift and loess.
The western two-thirds of the state, lying in the great central plain of the United States, has a generally flat or undulating surface, while the eastern third has many hills and forests. The land gradually rises from east to west; its altitude ranges from along the Verdigris River at Coffeyville in Montgomery County, to at Mount Sunflower, from the Colorado border, in Wallace County. It is a common misconception that Kansas is the flattest state in the nation—in 2003, a tongue-in-cheek study famously declared the state "flatter than a pancake". In fact, Kansas has a maximum topographic relief of , making it the 23rd flattest U.S. state measured by maximum relief.
Nearly of the state's northeastern boundary is defined by the Missouri River. The Kansas River (locally known as the Kaw), formed by the junction of the Smoky Hill and Republican rivers at appropriately-named Junction City, joins the Missouri River at Kansas City, after a course of across the northeastern part of the state.
The Arkansas River (pronunciation varies), rising in Colorado, flows with a bending course for nearly across the western and southern parts of the state. With its tributaries, (the Little Arkansas, Ninnescah, Walnut, Cow Creek, Cimarron, Verdigris, and the Neosho), it forms the southern drainage system of the state.
Kansas's other rivers are the Saline and Solomon Rivers, tributaries of the Smoky Hill River; the Big Blue, Delaware, and Wakarusa, which flow into the Kansas River; and the Marais des Cygnes, a tributary of the Missouri River. Spring River is located between Riverton and Baxter Springs.
Areas under the protection of the National Park Service include:
According to the Köppen climate classification, Kansas's climate can be characterized in terms of three types: it has humid continental, semi-arid steppe, and humid subtropical. The eastern two-thirds of the state (especially the northeastern portion) has a humid continental climate, with cool to cold winters and hot, often humid summers. Most of the precipitation falls during both the summer and the spring.
The western third of the state—from roughly the U.S. Route 83 corridor westward—has a semiarid steppe climate. Summers are hot, often very hot, and generally less humid. Winters are highly changeable between warm and very cold. The western region receives an average of about of precipitation per year. Chinook winds in the winter can warm western Kansas all the way into the range.
The far south-central and southeastern portions of the state, including the Wichita area, have a humid subtropical climate with hot and humid summers, milder winters, and more precipitation than elsewhere in Kansas. Some features of all three climates can be found in most of the state, with droughts and changeable weather between dry and humid not uncommon, and both warm and cold spells in the winter.
Temperatures in areas between U.S. Routes 83 and 81, as well as the southwestern portion of the state along and south of U.S. 50, reach or above on most days of June, July, and August. High humidity added to the high temperatures sends the heat index into life-threatening territory, especially in Wichita, Hutchinson, Salina, Russell, Hays, and Great Bend. Temperatures are often higher in Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal, but the heat index in those three cities is usually lower than the actual air temperature.
Although temperatures of or higher are not as common in areas east of U.S. 81, higher humidity and the urban heat island effect lead most summer days to heat indices between and in Topeka, Lawrence, and the Kansas City metropolitan area. During the summer, nightly low temperatures in the northeastern part of the state, especially in the aforementioned large cities, struggle to fall below . Also, combined with humidity between 85 and 95 percent, dangerous heat indices can be experienced at every hour of the day.
Precipitation ranges from about annually in the state's southeast corner to about in the southwest. Snowfall ranges from around in the fringes of the south, to in the far northwest. Frost-free days range from more than 200 days in the south, to 130 days in the northwest. Thus, Kansas is the country's ninth or tenth sunniest state, depending on the source. Western Kansas is as sunny as parts of California and Arizona.
Kansas is prone to severe weather, especially in the spring and the early-summer. Despite the frequent sunshine throughout much of the state, due to its location at a climatic boundary prone to intrusions of multiple air masses, the state is vulnerable to strong and severe thunderstorms. Some of these storms become supercell thunderstorms; these can produce some tornadoes, occasionally those of EF3 strength or higher. Kansas averages more than 50 tornadoes annually. Severe thunderstorms sometimes drop some very large hail over Kansas as well. Furthermore, these storms can even bring in flash flooding and damaging straight line winds.
According to NOAA, the all-time highest temperature recorded in Kansas is () on July 24, 1936, near Alton in Osborne County, and the all-time low is on February 13, 1905, near Lebanon in Smith County. Alton and Lebanon are approximately apart.
Kansas's record high of ties with North Dakota for the fifth-highest record high in an American state, behind California (), Arizona (), Nevada (), and New Mexico ().
The United States Census Bureau estimates that the population of Kansas was 2,913,314 on July 1, 2019, a 2.11% increase since the 2010 United States Census and an increase of 58,387, or 2.05%, since 2010. This includes a natural increase since the last census of 93,899 (246,484 births minus 152,585 deaths) and a decrease due to net migration of 20,742 people out of the state. Immigration from outside the United States resulted in a net increase of 44,847 people, and migration within the country produced a net loss of 65,589 people.
The population density of Kansas is 52.9 people per square mile. The center of population of Kansas is located in Chase County, at , approximately north of the community of Strong City.
The focus on labor-efficient grain-based agriculture—such as a large wheat farm that requires only one or a few people with large machinery to operate, rather than a vegetable farm that requires many people—is causing the de-population of rural areas across Kansas.
According to the 2010 United States Census, the racial makeup of the population was:
Ethnically 10.5% of the total population was of Hispanic or Latino origin (they may be of any race).
As of 2004, the population included 149,800 foreign-born (5.5% of the state population). The ten largest reported ancestry groups, which account for nearly 90% of the population, in the state are: German (33.75%), Irish (14.4%), English (14.1%), American (7.5%), French (4.4%), Scottish (4.2%), Dutch (2.5%), Swedish (2.4%), Italian (1.8%), and Polish (1.5%). German descendants are especially present in the northwest, while those of descendants of English and of white Americans from other states are especially present in the southeast.
Mexicans are present in the southwest and make up nearly half the population in certain counties. Many African Americans in Kansas are descended from the Exodusters, newly freed blacks who fled the South for land in Kansas following the Civil War.
As of 2011, 35.0% of Kansas's population younger than one year of age belonged to minority groups (i.e., did not have two parents of non-Hispanic white ancestry).
English is the most-spoken language in Kansas, with 91.3% of the population speaking only English at home as of the year 2000. 5.5% speak Spanish, 0.7% speak German, and 0.4% speak Vietnamese.
The 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey showed the religious makeup of adults in Kansas was as follows:
As of 2010, the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) reported that the Catholic Church has the highest number of adherents in Kansas (at 426,611), followed by the United Methodist Church with 202,989 members, and the Southern Baptist Convention, reporting 99,329 adherents.
Kansas's capital Topeka is sometimes cited as the home of Pentecostalism as it was the site of Charles Fox Parham's Bethel Bible College, where glossolalia was first claimed as the evidence of a spiritual experience referred to as the baptism of the Holy Spirit in 1901. It is also the home of Reverend Charles Sheldon, author of "In His Steps", and was the site where the question "What would Jesus do?" originated in a sermon of Sheldon's at Central Congregational Church.
Topeka is also home of the Westboro Baptist Church, a hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The church has garnered worldwide media attention for picketing the funerals of U.S. servicemen and women for what church members claim as "necessary to combat the fight for equality for gays and lesbians". They have sometimes successfully raised lawsuits against the city of Topeka.
Known as rural flight, the last few decades have been marked by a migratory pattern out of the countryside into cities. Out of all the cities in these Midwestern states, 89% have fewer than 3,000 people, and hundreds of those have fewer than 1,000. In Kansas alone, there are more than 6,000 ghost towns and dwindling communities, according to one Kansas historian, Daniel C. Fitzgerald. At the same time, some of the communities in Johnson County (metropolitan Kansas City) are among the fastest-growing in the country.
Kansas has 627 incorporated cities. By state statute, cities are divided into three classes as determined by the population obtained "by any census of enumeration". A city of the third class has a population of less than 5,000, but cities reaching a population of more than 2,000 may be certified as a city of the second class. The second class is limited to cities with a population of less than 25,000, and upon reaching a population of more than 15,000, they may be certified as a city of the first class. First and second class cities are independent of any township and are not included within the township's territory.
"Note: Births in table don't add up, because Hispanics are counted both by their ethnicity and by their race, giving a higher overall number."
The northeastern portion of the state, extending from the eastern border to Junction City and from the Nebraska border to south of Johnson County is home to more than 1.5 million people in the Kansas City (Kansas portion), Manhattan, Lawrence, and Topeka metropolitan areas. Overland Park, a young city incorporated in 1960, has the largest population and the largest land area in the county. It is home to Johnson County Community College and the corporate campus of Sprint Nextel, the largest private employer in the metro area. In 2006, the city was ranked as the sixth best place to live in America; the neighboring city of Olathe was 13th.
Olathe is the county seat and home to Johnson County Executive Airport. The cities of Olathe, Shawnee, De Soto and Gardner have some of the state's fastest growing populations. The cities of Overland Park, Lenexa, Olathe, De Soto, and Gardner are also notable because they lie along the former route of the Santa Fe Trail. Among cities with at least one thousand residents, Mission Hills has the highest median income in the state.
Several institutions of higher education are located in Northeast Kansas including Baker University (the oldest university in the state, founded in 1858 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church) in Baldwin City, Benedictine College (sponsored by St. Benedict's Abbey and Mount St. Scholastica Monastery and formed from the merger of St. Benedict's College (1858) and Mount St. Scholastica College (1923)) in Atchison, MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, Ottawa University in Ottawa and Overland Park, Kansas City Kansas Community College and KU Medical Center in Kansas City, and KU Edwards Campus in Overland Park. Less than an hour's drive to the west, Lawrence is home to the University of Kansas, the largest public university in the state, and Haskell Indian Nations University.
To the north, Kansas City, with the second largest land area in the state, contains a number of diverse ethnic neighborhoods. Its attractions include the Kansas Speedway, Sporting Kansas City, Kansas City T-Bones, Schlitterbahn, and The Legends at Village West retail and entertainment center. Nearby, Kansas's first settlement Bonner Springs is home to several national and regional attractions including the Providence Medical Center Amphitheather, the National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame, and the annual Kansas City Renaissance Festival. Further up the Missouri River, the city of Lansing is the home of the state's first maximum-security prison. Historic Leavenworth, founded in 1854, was the first incorporated city in Kansas. North of the city, Fort Leavenworth is the oldest active Army post west of the Mississippi River. The city of Atchison was an early commercial center in the state and is well known as the birthplace of Amelia Earhart.
To the west, nearly a quarter million people reside in the Topeka metropolitan area. Topeka is the state capital and home to Washburn University and Washburn Institute of Technology. Built at a Kansas River crossing along the old Oregon Trail, this historic city has several nationally registered historic places. Further westward along Interstate 70 and the Kansas River is Junction City with its historic limestone and brick buildings and nearby Fort Riley, well known as the home to the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division (nicknamed "the Big Red One"). A short distance away, the city of Manhattan is home to Kansas State University, the second-largest public university in the state and the nation's oldest land-grant university, dating back to 1863. South of the campus, Aggieville dates back to 1889 and is the state's oldest shopping district of its kind.
In south-central Kansas, the Wichita metropolitan area is home to more than 600,000 people. Wichita is the largest city in the state in terms of both land area and population. 'The Air Capital' is a major manufacturing center for the aircraft industry and the home of Wichita State University. Before Wichita was 'The Air Capital' it was a Cowtown. With a number of nationally registered historic places, museums, and other entertainment destinations, it has a desire to become a cultural mecca in the Midwest. Wichita's population growth has grown by double digits and the surrounding suburbs are among the fastest growing cities in the state. The population of Goddard has grown by more than 11% per year since 2000. Other fast-growing cities include Andover, Maize, Park City, Derby, and Haysville.
Wichita was one of the first cities to add the city commissioner and city manager in their form of government. Wichita is also home of the nationally recognized Sedgwick County Zoo.
Up river (the Arkansas River) from Wichita is the city of Hutchinson. The city was built on one of the world's largest salt deposits, and it has the world's largest and longest wheat elevator. It is also the home of Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, Prairie Dunes Country Club and the Kansas State Fair. North of Wichita along Interstate 135 is the city of Newton, the former western terminal of the Santa Fe Railroad and trailhead for the famed Chisholm Trail. To the southeast of Wichita are the cities of Winfield and Arkansas City with historic architecture and the Cherokee Strip Museum (in Ark City). The city of Udall was the site of the deadliest tornado in Kansas on May 25, 1955; it killed 80 people in and near the city. To the southwest of Wichita is Freeport, the state's smallest incorporated city (population 5).
Located midway between Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita in the heart of the Bluestem Region of the Flint Hills, the city of Emporia has several nationally registered historic places and is the home of Emporia State University, well known for its Teachers College. It was also the home of newspaper man William Allen White.
Southeast Kansas has a unique history with a number of nationally registered historic places in this coal-mining region. Located in Crawford County (dubbed the Fried Chicken Capital of Kansas), Pittsburg is the largest city in the region and the home of Pittsburg State University. The neighboring city of Frontenac in 1888 was the site of the worst mine disaster in the state in which an underground explosion killed 47 miners. "Big Brutus" is located outside the city of West Mineral. Along with the restored fort, historic Fort Scott has a national cemetery designated by President Lincoln in 1862.
Salina is the largest city in central and north-central Kansas. South of Salina is the small city of Lindsborg with its numerous Dala horses. Much of the architecture and decor of this town has a distinctly Swedish style. To the east along Interstate 70, the historic city of Abilene was formerly a trailhead for the Chisholm Trail and was the boyhood home of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and is the site of his Presidential Library and the tombs of the former President, First Lady and son who died in infancy. To the west is Lucas, the Grassroots Art Capital of Kansas.
Westward along the Interstate, the city of Russell, traditionally the beginning of sparsely-populated northwest Kansas, was the base of former U.S. Senator Bob Dole and the boyhood home of U.S. Senator Arlen Specter. The city of Hays is home to Fort Hays State University and the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, and is the largest city in the northwest with a population of around 20,001.
Two other landmarks are located in smaller towns in Ellis County: the "Cathedral of the Plains" is located east of Hays in Victoria, and the boyhood home of Walter Chrysler is west of Hays in Ellis. West of Hays, population drops dramatically, even in areas along I-70, and only two towns containing populations of more than 4,000: Colby and Goodland, which are located apart along I-70.
Dodge City, famously known for the cattle drive days of the late 19th century, was built along the old Santa Fe Trail route. The city of Liberal is located along the southern Santa Fe Trail route. The first wind farm in the state was built east of Montezuma. Garden City has the Lee Richardson Zoo. In 1992, a short-lived secessionist movement advocated the secession of several counties in southwest Kansas.
Total Employment of the metropolitan areas in the State of Kansas by total Non-farm Employment in 2016
Total Number of employer establishments in 2016: 74,884
The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that Kansas's total gross domestic product in 2014 was billion. In 2015, the job growth rate in was .8%, among the lowest rate in America with only "10,900 total nonfarm jobs" added that year. According to the Kansas Department of Labor's 2016 report, the average annual wage was $42,930 in 2015. As of April 2016, the state's unemployment rate was 4.2%.
The State of Kansas had a $350 million budget shortfall in February 2017. In February 2017, S&P downgraded Kansas's credit rating to AA-.
Nearly 90% of Kansas's land is devoted to agriculture. The state's agricultural outputs are cattle, sheep, wheat, sorghum, soybeans, cotton, hogs, corn, and salt. As of 2018, there were 59,600 farms in Kansas, 86 (0.14%) of which are certified organic farms. The average farm in the state is about 770 acres (more than a square mile), and in 2016, the average cost of running the farm was $300,000.
By far, the most significant agricultural crop in the state is wheat. Eastern Kansas is part of the Grain Belt, an area of major grain production in the central United States. Approximately 40% of all winter wheat grown in the US is grown in Kansas. Roughly 95% of the wheat grown in the state is hard red winter wheat. During 2016, farmers of conventionally grown wheat farmed 8.2 million acres and harvested an average of 57 bushels of wheat per acre.
The industrial outputs are transportation equipment, commercial and private aircraft, food processing, publishing, chemical products, machinery, apparel, petroleum, and mining.
Kansas is ranked eighth in US petroleum production. Production has experienced a steady, natural decline as it becomes increasingly difficult to extract oil over time. Since oil prices bottomed in 1999, oil production in Kansas has remained fairly constant, with an average monthly rate of about in 2004. The recent higher prices have made carbon dioxide sequestration and other oil recovery techniques more economical.
Kansas is also ranked eighth in US natural gas production. Production has steadily declined since the mid-1990s with the gradual depletion of the Hugoton Natural Gas Field—the state's largest field which extends into Oklahoma and Texas. In 2004, slower declines in the Hugoton gas fields and increased coalbed methane production contributed to a smaller overall decline. Average monthly production was over .
The state's economy is also heavily influenced by the aerospace industry. Several large aircraft corporations have manufacturing facilities in Wichita and Kansas City, including Spirit AeroSystems, Bombardier Aerospace (LearJet), and Textron Aviation (a merger of the former Cessna, Hawker, and Beechcraft brands). Boeing ended a decades-long history of manufacturing in Kansas between 2012 and 2013.
Major companies headquartered in Kansas include the Sprint Corporation (with world headquarters in Overland Park), YRC Worldwide (Overland Park), Garmin (Olathe), Payless Shoes (national headquarters and major distribution facilities in Topeka), and Koch Industries (with national headquarters in Wichita), and Coleman (headquarters in Wichita) . Telephone company Embarq formerly had its national headquarters in Overland Park before its acquisition by CenturyTel in 2009, and still employs several hundred people in Gardner.
Kansas is also home to three major military installations: Fort Leavenworth (Army), Fort Riley (Army), and McConnell Air Force Base (Air Force). Approximately 25,000 active duty soldiers and airmen are stationed at these bases which also employ approximately 8,000 civilian DoD employees. The US Army Reserve also has the 451st Expeditionary Sustainment Command headquartered in Wichita that serves reservists and their units from around the region. The Kansas Air National Guard has units at Forbes Field in Topeka and the 184th Intelligence Wing in Wichita. The Smoky Hill Weapons Range, a detachment of the Intelligence Wing, is one of the largest and busiest bombing ranges in the nation. During WWII, Kansas was home to numerous Army Air Corps training fields for training new pilots and aircrew. Many of those airfields live on today as municipal airports.
Tax is collected by the Kansas Department of Revenue.
Revenue shortfalls resulting from lower than expected tax collections and slower growth in personal income following a 1998 permanent tax reduction have contributed to the substantial growth in the state's debt level as bonded debt increased from $1.16 billion in 1998 to $3.83 billion in 2006. Some increase in debt was expected as the state continues with its 10-year Comprehensive Transportation Program enacted in 1999.
In 2003, Kansas had three income brackets for income tax calculation, ranging from 3.5% to 6.45%.
The state sales tax in Kansas is 6.15%. Various cities and counties in Kansas have an additional local sales tax. Except during the 2001 recession (March–November 2001), when monthly sales tax collections were flat, collections have trended higher as the economy has grown and two rate increases have been enacted. If there had been no change in sales tax rates or in the economy, the total sales tax collections for 2003 would have been $1,797 million, compared to $805.3 million in 1990. However, they instead amounted to $1,630 million an inflation-adjusted reduction of 10%. The state sales tax is a combined destination-based tax, meaning a single tax is applied that includes state, county, and local taxes, and the rate is based on where the consumer takes possession of the goods or services. Thanks to the destination structure and the numerous local special taxing districts, Kansas has 920 separate sales tax rates ranging from 6.5% to 11.5%. This taxing scheme, known as "Streamlined Sales Tax" was adopted on October 1, 2005, under the governorship of Kathleen Sebelius. Groceries are subject to sales tax in the state. All sales tax collected is remitted to the state department of revenue, and local taxes are then distributed to the various taxing agencies.
As of June 2004, Moody's Investors Service ranked the state 14th for net tax-supported debt per capita. As a percentage of personal income, it was at 3.8%—above the median value of 2.5% for all rated states and having risen from a value of less than 1% in 1992. The state has a statutory requirement to maintain cash reserves of at least 7.5% of expenses at the end of each fiscal year; however, lawmakers can vote to override the rule, and did so during the most recent budget agreement.
During his campaign for the 2010 election, Governor Sam Brownback called for a complete "phase out of Kansas's income tax". In May 2012, Governor Brownback signed into law the Kansas Senate Bill Substitute HB 2117. Starting in 2013, the "ambitious tax overhaul" trimmed income tax, eliminated some corporate taxes, and created pass-through income tax exemptions, he raised the sales tax by one percent to offset the loss to state revenues but that was inadequate. He made cuts to education and some state services to offset lost revenue. The tax cut led to years of budget shortfalls, culminating in a $350 million budget shortfall in February 2017. From 2013 to 2017, 300,000 businesses were considered to be pass-through income entities and benefited from the tax exemption. The tax reform "encouraged tens of thousands of Kansans to claim their wages and salaries as income from a business rather than from employment."
The economic growth that Brownback anticipated never materialized. He argued that it was because of "low wheat and oil prices and a downturn in aircraft sales". The state general fund debt load was $83 million in fiscal year 2010 and by fiscal year 2017 the debt load sat at $179 million. In 2016, Governor Brownback earned the title of "most unpopular governor in America". Only 26 percent of Kansas voters approved of his job performance, compared to 65 percent who said they did not. In the summer of 2016 S&P Global Ratings downgraded Kansas's credit rating. In February 2017, S&P lowered it to AA-.
In February 2017, a bi-partisan coalition presented a bill that would repeal the pass-through income exemption, the "most important provisions of Brownback's overhaul", and raise taxes to make up for the budget shortfall. Brownback vetoed the bill but "45 GOP legislators had voted in favor of the increase, while 40 voted to uphold the governor's veto." On June 6, 2017 a coalition of Democrats and newly-elected Republicans overrode [Brownback's] veto and implemented tax increases to a level close to what it was before 2013. Brownback's tax overhaul was described in a June 2017 article in "The Atlantic" as the United States' "most aggressive experiment in conservative economic policy". The drastic tax cuts had "threatened the viability of schools and infrastructure" in Kansas.
Kansas is served by two Interstate highways with one beltway, two spur routes, and three bypasses, with over in all. The first section of Interstate in the nation was opened on Interstate 70 (I-70) just west of Topeka on November 14, 1956.
I-70 is a major east–west route connecting to Denver, Colorado and Kansas City, Missouri. Cities along this route (from west to east) include Colby, Hays, Salina, Junction City, Topeka, Lawrence, Bonner Springs, and Kansas City.
I-35 is a major north–south route connecting to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Des Moines, Iowa. Cities along this route (from south to north) include Wichita, El Dorado, Emporia, Ottawa, and Kansas City (and suburbs).
Spur routes serve as connections between the two major routes. I-135, a north–south route, connects I-35 at Wichita to I-70 at Salina. I-335, a southwest–northeast route, connects I-35 at Emporia to I-70 at Topeka. I-335 and portions of I-35 and I-70 make up the Kansas Turnpike. Bypasses include I-470 around Topeka, I-235 around Wichita, and I-670 in downtown Kansas City. I-435 is a beltway around the Kansas City metropolitan area while I-635 bypasses through Kansas City.
U.S. Route 69 (US-69) travels south to north, from Oklahoma to Missouri. The highway passes through the eastern section of Kansas, traveling through Baxter Springs, Pittsburg, Frontenac, Fort Scott, Louisburg, and the Kansas City area.
Kansas also has the country's third largest state highway system after Texas and California. This is because of the high number of counties and county seats (105) and their intertwining.
In January 2004, the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) announced the new Kansas 511 traveler information service. By dialing 511, callers will get access to information about road conditions, construction, closures, detours and weather conditions for the state highway system. Weather and road condition information is updated every 15 minutes.
The state's only major commercial (Class C) airport is Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, located along US-54 on the western edge of the city. Manhattan Regional Airport in Manhattan offers daily flights to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, making it the second-largest commercial airport in the state. Most air travelers in northeastern Kansas fly out of Kansas City International Airport, located in Platte County, Missouri, as well as Topeka Regional Airport in the state's capital.
In the state's southeastern part, people often use Tulsa International Airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma or Joplin Regional Airport in Joplin, Missouri. For those in the far western part of the state, Denver International Airport is a popular option. Connecting flights are also available from smaller Kansas airports in Dodge City, Garden City, Hays, Hutchinson, Liberal, or Salina.
Dotted across the state are smaller regional and municipal airports, including the Lawrence Municipal Airport, which houses many aircraft for the city of Lawrence and the University of Kansas, Miami County Airport, Wamego Airport, Osage City Municipal Airport, which is the headquarters of "Skydive Kansas", Garden City Regional Airport, Manhattan Regional Airport, and Dodge City Regional Airport.
The "Southwest Chief" Amtrak route runs through the state on its route from Chicago to Los Angeles. Stops in Kansas include Lawrence, Topeka, Newton, Hutchinson, Dodge City, and Garden City. An Amtrak Thruway Motorcoach connects Newton and Wichita to the Heartland Flyer in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Amtrak is proposing to modify the Southwest Chief from its status as a direct passenger rail operation. Plans call for shortening the route to Los Angeles to Albuquerque. Thruway buses would replace the train on the route between Albuquerque and Dodge City, where train service east to Chicago would resume.
Kansas is served by four Class I railroads, Amtrak, BNSF, Kansas City Southern, and Union Pacific, as well as many shortline railroads.
Executive branch: The executive branch consists of one officer and five elected officers. The governor and lieutenant governor are elected on the same ticket. The attorney general, secretary of state, state treasurer, and state insurance commissioner are each elected separately.
Legislative branch: The bicameral Kansas Legislature consists of the Kansas House of Representatives, with 125 members serving two-year terms, and the Kansas Senate, with 40 members serving four-year terms.
Judicial branch: The judicial branch of the state government is headed by the Kansas Supreme Court. The court has seven judges. A vacancy is filled by the Governor picking one of three nominees selected by the nine-member Kansas Supreme Court Nominating Commission. The board consists of five Kansas lawyers elected by other Kansas lawyers and four members selected by the governor.
Since the mid-20th century, Kansas has remained one of the most socially conservative states in the nation. The 1990s brought the defeat of prominent Democrats, including Dan Glickman, and the Kansas State Board of Education's 1999 decision to eliminate evolution from the state teaching standards, a decision that was later reversed. In 2005, voters accepted a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The next year, the state passed a law setting a minimum age for marriage at 15 years. Kansas's path to a solid Republican state has been examined by historian Thomas Frank in his 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas?".
Kansas has a history of many firsts in legislative initiatives—it was the first state to institute a system of workers' compensation (1910) and to regulate the securities industry (1911). Kansas also permitted women's suffrage in 1912, almost a decade before the federal constitution was amended to require it. Suffrage in all states would not be guaranteed until ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.
The council–manager government model was adopted by many larger Kansas cities in the years following World War I while many American cities were being run by political machines or organized crime, notably the Pendergast Machine in neighboring Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas was also at the center of "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka", a 1954 Supreme Court decision that banned racially segregated schools throughout the U.S.
The state backed Republicans Wendell Willkie and Thomas E. Dewey in 1940 and 1944, respectively. Kansas also supported Dewey in 1948 despite the presence of incumbent president Harry S. Truman, who hailed from Independence, Missouri, approximately east of the Kansas–Missouri state line. Since Roosevelt carried Kansas in 1932 and 1936, only one Democrat has won Kansas's electoral votes, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
In 2008, Governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed permits for the construction of new coal-fired energy plants in Kansas, saying: "We know that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change. As an agricultural state, Kansas is particularly vulnerable. Therefore, reducing pollutants benefits our state not only in the short term—but also for generations of Kansans to come." However, shortly after Mark Parkinson became governor in 2009 upon Sebelius's resignation to become Secretary of U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Parkinson announced a compromise plan to allow construction of a coal-fired plant.
In 2010, Sam Brownback was elected governor with 63 percent of the state vote. He was sworn in as governor in 2011, Kansas's first Republican governor in eight years. Brownback had established himself as a conservative member of the U.S. Senate in years prior, but since becoming governor has made several controversial decisions, leading to a 23% approval rating among registered voters, the lowest of any governor in the United States. In May 2011, much to the opposition of art leaders and enthusiasts in the state, Brownback eliminated the Kansas Arts Commission, making Kansas the first state without an arts agency. In July 2011, Brownback announced plans to close the Lawrence branch of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services as a cost-saving measure. Hundreds rallied against the decision. Lawrence City Commission later voted to provide the funding needed to keep the branch open.
Democrat Laura Kelly defeated former Secretary of State of Kansas Kris Kobach in the 2018 election for Governor with 48.0% of the vote.
The state's current delegation to the Congress of the United States includes Republican Senators Pat Roberts of Dodge City and Jerry Moran of Manhattan; and Republican Representatives Roger Marshall of Great Bend (District 1), Steve Watkins (District 2), Ron Estes of Wichita (District 4), and Democratic Representative Sharice Davids (District 3).
Historically, Kansas has been strongly Republican, dating from the Antebellum age when the Republican Party was created out of the movement opposing the extension of slavery into Kansas Territory. Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since the 1932 election, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won his first term as President in the wake of the Great Depression. This is the longest Senate losing streak for either party in a single state. Senator Sam Brownback was a candidate for the Republican party nomination for President in 2008. Brownback was not a candidate for re-election to a third full term in 2010, but he was elected Governor in that year's general election. Moran defeated Tiahrt for the Republican nomination for Brownback's seat in the August 2010 primary, then won a landslide general election victory over Democrat Lisa Johnston.
The only non-Republican presidential candidates Kansas has given its electoral vote to are Populist James Weaver and Democrats Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt (twice), and Lyndon Johnson. In 2004, George W. Bush won the state's six electoral votes by an overwhelming margin of 25 percentage points with 62% of the vote. The only two counties to support Democrat John Kerry in that election were Wyandotte, which contains Kansas City, and Douglas, home to the University of Kansas, located in Lawrence. The 2008 election brought similar results as John McCain won the state with 57% of the votes. Douglas, Wyandotte, and Crawford County were the only counties in support of President Barack Obama.
Abilene was the boyhood home to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he maintained lifelong ties to family and friends there. Kansas was the adult home of two losing Republican candidates (Governor Alf Landon in 1936 and Senator Bob Dole in 1996).
The "New York Times" reported in September 2014 that as the Democratic candidate for Senator has tried to drop out of the race, independent Greg Orman has attracted enough bipartisan support to seriously challenge the reelection bid of Republican Pat Roberts:
The legal drinking age in Kansas is 21. In lieu of the state retail sales tax, a 10% Liquor Drink Tax is collected for liquor consumed on the licensed premises and an 8% Liquor Enforcement Tax is collected on retail purchases. Although the sale of cereal malt beverage (also known as 3.2 beer) was legalized in 1937, the first post-Prohibition legalization of alcoholic liquor did not occur until the state's constitution was amended in 1948. The following year the Legislature enacted the Liquor Control Act which created a system of regulating, licensing, and taxing, and the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) was created to enforce the act. The power to regulate cereal malt beverage remains with the cities and counties. Liquor-by-the-drink did not become legal until passage of an amendment to the state's constitution in 1986 and additional legislation the following year. As of November 2006, Kansas still has 29 dry counties and only 17 counties have passed liquor-by-the-drink with no food sales requirement. Today there are more than 2,600 liquor and 4,000 cereal malt beverage licensees in the state.
Education in Kansas is governed at the primary and secondary school level by the Kansas State Board of Education. The state's public colleges and universities are supervised by the Kansas Board of Regents.
Twice since 1999 the Board of Education has approved changes in the state science curriculum standards that encouraged the teaching of intelligent design. Both times, the standards were reversed after changes in the composition of the board in the next election.
The rock band Kansas was formed in the state capital of Topeka, the hometown of several of the band's members.
Joe Walsh, guitarist for the famous rock band the Eagles, was born in Wichita.
Danny Carey, drummer for the band Tool, was raised in Paola.
Singers from Kansas include Leavenworth native Melissa Etheridge, Sharon native Martina McBride, Chanute native Jennifer Knapp (whose first album was titled "Kansas"), Kansas City native Janelle Monáe, and Liberal native Jerrod Niemann.
The state anthem is the American classic Home on the Range, written by Kansan Brewster Higley. Another song, the official state march adopted by the Kansas Legislature in 1935 is called "The Kansas March", which features the lyrics, "Blue sky above us, silken strands of heat, Rim of the far horizon, where earth and heaven meet, Kansas as a temple, stands in velvet sod, Shrine which the sunshine, sanctifies to God."
The state's most famous appearance in literature was as the home of Dorothy Gale, the main character in the novel "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (1900). Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie", published in 1935, is another well-known tale about Kansas.
Kansas was also the setting of the 1965 best-seller "In Cold Blood", described by its author Truman Capote as a "nonfiction novel". Mixing fact and fiction, the book chronicles the events and aftermath of the 1959 murder of a wealthy farmer and his family who lived in the small West Kansas town of Holcomb in Finney County.
The fictional town of Smallville, Kansas is the childhood home of Clark Kent/Superman in American comic books published by DC Comics.
The science fiction novella "A Boy and His Dog", as well as the film based on it, take place in post-apocalyptic Topeka.
The winner of the 2011 Newbery Medal for excellence in children's literature, "Moon Over Manifest", tells the story of a young and adventurous girl named Abilene who is sent to the fictional town of Manifest, Kansas, by her father in the summer of 1936. It was written by Kansan Clare Vanderpool.
Lawrence is the setting for a number of science fiction writer James Gunn's novels.
The first film theater in Kansas was the Patee Theater in Lawrence. Most theaters at the time showed films only as part of vaudeville acts but not as an exclusive and stand alone form of entertainment. Though the Patee family had been involved in vaudeville, they believed films could carry the evening without other variety acts, but in order to show the films it was necessary for the Patee's to establish a generating plant (back in 1903 Lawrence was not yet fully electrified). The Patee Theater was one of the first of its kind west of the Mississippi River. The specialized equipment like the projector came from New York.
Kansas has been the setting of many award-winning and popular American films, as well as being the home of some of the oldest operating cinemas in the world. The Plaza Cinema in Ottawa, Kansas, located in the northeastern portion of the state, was built on May 22, 1907, and it is listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest operating cinema in the world. In 1926, The Jayhawk Theatre, an art-deco movie house in Topeka opened its doors for the first time to movie going audiences, and today, in addition to screenings of independent films, the theatre acts as a venue for plays and concerts. The Fox Theater in Hutchinson was built in 1930, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. Like the other theaters listed here, The Fox still plays first run movies to this day.
Sporting Kansas City, who have played their home games at Village West in Kansas City, since 2008, are the first top-tier professional sports league and first Major League Soccer team to be located within Kansas. In 2011 the team moved to their new home, a $165m soccer specific stadium now known as Children's Mercy Park.
Historically, Kansans have supported the major league sports teams of Kansas City, Missouri, including the Kansas City Royals (MLB), and the Kansas City Chiefs (NFL), in part because the home stadiums for these teams are a few miles from the Kansas border. The Chiefs and the Royals play at the Truman Sports Complex, located about from the Kansas–Missouri state line. FC Kansas City, a charter member of the National Women's Soccer League, played the 2013 season, the first for both the team and the league, on the Kansas side of the metropolitan area, but played on the Missouri side until folding after the 2017 season. From 1973 to 1997 the flagship radio station for the Royals was WIBW in Topeka.
Some Kansans, mostly from the westernmost parts of the state, support the professional sports teams of Denver, particularly the Denver Broncos of the NFL.
Two major auto racing facilities are located in Kansas. The Kansas Speedway located in Kansas City hosts races of the NASCAR, IndyCar, and ARCA circuits. Also, the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) holds drag racing events at Heartland Park Topeka. The Sports Car Club of America has its national headquarters in Topeka.
The history of professional sports in Kansas probably dates from the establishment of the minor league baseball Topeka Capitals and Leavenworth Soldiers in 1886 in the Western League. The African-American Bud Fowler played on the Topeka team that season, one year before the "color line" descended on professional baseball.
In 1887, the Western League was dominated by a reorganized Topeka team called the Golden Giants: a high-priced collection of major leaguer players, including Bug Holliday, Jim Conway, Dan Stearns, Perry Werden and Jimmy Macullar, which won the league by 15½ games. On April 10, 1887, the Golden Giants also won an exhibition game from the defending World Series champions, the St. Louis Browns (the present-day Cardinals), by a score of 12–9. However, Topeka was unable to support the team, and it disbanded after one year.
The first night game in the history of professional baseball was played in Independence on April 28, 1930 when the Muscogee (Oklahoma) Indians beat the Independence Producers 13–3 in a minor league game sanctioned by the Western League of the Western Baseball Association with 1,500 fans attending the game. The permanent lighting system was first used for an exhibition game on April 17, 1930 between the Independence Producers and House of David semi-professional baseball team of Benton Harbor, Michigan with the Independence team winning 9–1 before a crowd of 1,700 spectators.
The governing body for intercollegiate sports in the United States, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), was headquartered in Johnson County, Kansas from 1952 until moving to Indianapolis in 1999.
While there are no franchises of the four major professional sports within the state, many Kansans are fans of the state's major college sports teams, especially the Jayhawks of the University of Kansas (KU), and the Wildcats of Kansas State University (KSU or "K-State"). The teams are rivals in the Big 12 Conference.
Both KU and K-State have tradition-rich programs in men's basketball. The Jayhawks are a perennial national power, ranking second in all-time victories among NCAA programs, behind Kentucky. The Jayhawks have won five national titles, including NCAA tournament championships in 1952, 1988, and 2008. They also were retroactively awarded national championships by the Helms Foundation for 1922 and 1923. K-State also had a long stretch of success on the hardwood, lasting from the 1940s to the 1980s, making four Final Fours during that stretch. In 1988, KU and K-State met in the Elite Eight, KU taking the game 71–58. After a 12-year absence, the Wildcats returned to the NCAA tournament in 2008, and advanced to the Elite Eight in 2010 and 2018. KU is fifth all-time with 15 Final Four appearances, while K-State's four appearances are tied for 17th.
Conversely, success on the gridiron has been less frequent for both KSU and KU. However, there have been recent breakthroughs for both schools' football teams. The Jayhawks won the Orange Bowl for the first time in three tries in 2008, capping a 12–1 season, the best in school history. And when Bill Snyder arrived to coach at K-State in 1989, he turned the Wildcats from one of the worst college football programs in America, into a national force for most of the 1990s and early 2000s. The team won the Fiesta Bowl in 1997, achieved an undefeated (11–0) regular season and No.1 ranking in 1998, and took the Big 12 Conference championship in 2003. After three seasons in which K-State football languished, Snyder came out of retirement in 2009 and guided them to the top of the college football ranks again, finishing second in the Big 12 in 2011 and earning a berth in the Cotton Bowl, and winning the Big 12 again in 2012.
Wichita State University, which also fields teams (called the Shockers) in Division I of the NCAA, is best known for its baseball and basketball programs. In baseball, the Shockers won the College World Series in 1989. In men's basketball, they appeared in the Final Four in 1965 and 2013, and entered the 2014 NCAA tournament unbeaten. The school also fielded a football team from 1897 to 1986. The Shocker football team is tragically known for a plane crash in 1970 that killed 31 people, including 14 players.
Notable success has also been achieved by the state's smaller schools in football. Pittsburg State University, an NCAA Division II participant, has claimed four national titles in football, two in the NAIA and most recently the 2011 NCAA Division II national title. Pittsburg State became the winningest NCAA Division II football program in 1995. PSU passed Hillsdale College at the top of the all-time victories list in the 1995 season on its march to the national runner-up finish. The Gorillas, in 96 seasons of intercollegiate competition, have accumulated 579 victories, posting a 579–301–48 overall mark.
Washburn University, in Topeka, won the NAIA Men's Basketball Championship in 1987. The Fort Hays State University men won the 1996 NCAA Division II title with a 34–0 record, and the Washburn women won the 2005 NCAA Division II crown. St. Benedict's College (now Benedictine College), in Atchison, won the 1954 and 1967 Men's NAIA Basketball Championships.
The Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference has its roots as one of the oldest college sport conferences in existence and participates in the NAIA and all ten member schools are in the state of Kansas. Other smaller school conferences that have some members in Kansas are the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association the Midlands Collegiate Athletic Conference, the Midwest Christian College Conference, and the Heart of America Athletic Conference. Many junior colleges also have active athletic programs.
Emporia State's women's basketball team, under head coach Brandon Schneider, who is now serving as the women's basketball coach at the University of Kansas, has seen success as well. In 2010 the team won the NCAA Division II National Championship. Emporia State and Washburn in Topeka share a heated rivalry in all sports, mostly due to the close proximity of both cities.
The Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference has been heralded as one of the best conferences in all of NJCAA football, with Garden City Community College, Independence Community College, and Butler County Community College all consistently in contention for national championships.
The Kansas State High School Activities Association (KSHSAA) is the organization which oversees interscholastic competition in the state of Kansas at the high school level. It oversees both athletic and non-athletic competition, and sponsors championships in several sports and activities. The association is perhaps best known for devising the overtime system now used for almost all football games below the professional level (which has also been adopted at all levels of Canadian football).
Maps
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16716
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Kuiper's test
Kuiper's test is used in statistics to test that whether a given distribution, or family of distributions, is contradicted by evidence from a sample of data. It is named after Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Kuiper.
Kuiper's test is closely related to the better-known Kolmogorov–Smirnov test (or K-S test as it is often called). As with the K-S test, the discrepancy statistics "D"+ and "D"− represent the absolute sizes of the most positive and most negative differences between the two cumulative distribution functions that are being compared. The trick with Kuiper's test is to use the quantity "D"+ + "D"− as the test statistic. This small change makes Kuiper's test as sensitive in the tails as at the median and also makes it invariant under cyclic transformations of the independent variable. The Anderson–Darling test is another test that provides equal sensitivity at the tails as the median, but it does not provide the cyclic invariance.
This invariance under cyclic transformations makes Kuiper's test invaluable when testing for cyclic variations by time of year or day of the week or time of day, and more generally for testing the fit of, and differences between, circular probability distributions.
The test statistic, "V", for Kuiper's test is defined as follows. Let "F" be the continuous cumulative distribution function which is to be the null hypothesis. Denote the sample of data which are independent realisations of random variables, having "F" as their distribution function, by "xi" ("i"=1...,"n"). Then define
and finally,
Tables for the critical points of the test statistic are available, and these include certain cases where the distribution being tested is not fully known, so that parameters of the family of distributions are estimated.
We could test the hypothesis that computers fail more during some times of the year than others. To test this, we would collect the dates on which the test set of computers had failed and build an empirical distribution function. The null hypothesis is that the failures are uniformly distributed. Kuiper's statistic does not change if we change the beginning of the year and does not require that we bin failures into months or the like. Another test statistic having this property is the Watson statistic, which is related to the Cramér–von Mises test.
However, if failures occur mostly on weekends, many uniform-distribution tests such as K-S and Kuiper would miss this, since weekends are spread throughout the year. This inability to distinguish distributions with a comb-like shape from continuous uniform distributions is a key problem with all statistics based on a variant of the K-S test. Kuiper's test, applied to the event times modulo one week, is able to detect such a pattern. Using event times that have been modulated with the K-S test can result in different results depending on how the data is phased. In this example, the K-S test may detect the non-uniformity if the data is set to start the week on Saturday, but fail to detect the non-uniformity if the week starts on Wednesday.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16720
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Kirk Hammett
Kirk Lee Hammett (born November 18, 1962) is an American musician who has been the lead guitarist and a contributing songwriter for heavy metal band Metallica since 1983. Before joining Metallica he formed and named the band Exodus. In 2003, Hammett was ranked 11th on "Rolling Stone"'s list of The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. In 2009, Hammett was ranked number 15 in Joel McIver's book "The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists".
Hammett was born on November 18, 1962 in San Francisco, and raised in the town of El Sobrante, California. He is the son of Teofila "Chefela" (née Oyao) and Dennis L. Hammett (a Merchant Marine). His mother is of Filipino descent and his father was of English, German, Scottish and Irish ancestry. He attended De Anza High School in Richmond, California. While attending De Anza High School, he met Les Claypool of Primus, and they remain close friends.
Hammett has a well-known passion for horror movies that stretches back to the late Sixties. After spraining his arm in a fight with his sister at the age of five, Hammett's parents placed him in front of the television. It was during this time that he first watched "The Day of the Triffids". After that, Hammett found himself drawn to his brother's Frankenstein figures, and soon began spending his milk money on horror magazines. For the better part of the next decade, Hammett dove deep into the horror scene.
Hammett began showing an interest in music after listening to his brother Rick's extensive record collection (which included Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and UFO). He began selling his horror magazines to buy music records, which led him to properly picking up the guitar at the age of fifteen. Hammett's first guitar was (in his own words) a "wholly unglamorous" Montgomery Ward catalog special, which was accompanied by a shoebox (with a 4-inch speaker) for an amp. After purchasing a 1978 Fender Stratocaster copy, Hammett attempted to customize his sound with various guitar parts, before eventually buying a 1974 Gibson Flying V. Hammett also took a job at Burger King as a youth, which he quit as soon as he had saved enough money to purchase a Marshall amplifier.
Hammett's musical interests eventually drew him into the fledgling thrash metal genre. In 1979, he formed the band Exodus at the age of sixteen, along with vocalist Paul Baloff, guitarist Gary Holt, bassist Geoff Andrews, and drummer Tom Hunting. Hammett named Exodus after the Leon Uris novel of the same name, and played on the band's "1982 Demo". Exodus was an influential band in the Bay Area thrash movement.
In May 1983, Metallica traveled to Rochester, New York to record its debut album, "Metal Up Your Ass". Due to the lead guitarist's (Dave Mustaine) substance abuse and violent tendencies, he was fired from the band, and would eventually form the band Megadeth. Hammett received a phone call from Metallica the same afternoon. Even though he had never left California before, Hammett gathered some money together and flew out to New York for an audition. Vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield said: "The first song we played was "Seek and Destroy", and Kirk pulled off this solo, and it was like ... things are going to be alright!"; so Hammett was instantly asked to join the band. All of this happened prior to the recording of "Kill 'Em All". At the time, Hammett was taking private lessons from guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani. He was also still a member of Exodus at the time he was offered to join Metallica, and although the offer may have come as a surprise to him, he was already well acquainted with Metallica. While in Exodus, Hammett had shared the stage with Metallica on more than one occasion.
Hammett has written a number of riffs for Metallica since "Ride the Lightning" (the band's second album). One of his riffs was used on "Enter Sandman" - which went on to become one of Metallica's most popular songs. It was the first track and the first single on the band's self-titled album "Metallica" (also known as "The Black Album"), and was ranked 399th on "Rolling Stone"'s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The bridge for "Creeping Death" was originally an Exodus riff that Hammett took with him to Metallica.
In 1986, during the band's European leg of their tour to support "Master of Puppets", Hammett and bassist Cliff Burton had a dispute over sleeping arrangements on the band's tour bus. The outcome of the dispute was decided by a card draw, which Burton won by picking the Ace of Spades. Once the draw was completed, Burton looked at Hammett and said "I want your bunk", to which Hammett complied, saying that he might be able to sleep better in the front of the bus anyway. In the early hours of the following morning, Metallica's tour bus slid off the road and overturned in Sweden. Burton was thrown through the window of the bus, which fell on top of Burton and subsequently killed him. Hammett has stated in an interview that he once thought that it easily could've been him who was killed instead, since Burton was sleeping in what was considered to be Hammett's bunk. In Kirk's own words "You know to this day I just think, it could have been me or it couldn't have been me but ... its never left me to this day."
Between the end of touring (and promoting) the "Black Album" and the start of touring in promotion of "Load", he studied at San Francisco State University, focusing on film and Asian arts. Hammett went through a "blues period" around this time - which had some influence on Metallica's "Load" and "Reload" albums. He also began listening to a lot of jazz music. Hammett described this period of his life as "great education", because he was able to discover where all of his own rock influences had gotten their own guitar licks. However, even though jazz music had a profound effect on his improvisation skills and solos, Hammett felt that he was delving too deep into the genre. Since "Death Magnetic", Hammett has gone back to being "primarily" a metal guitarist, but some of his experiences of jazz and blues music still remain.
Hammett wanted to have guitar solos on Metallica's 2003 album, "St. Anger", but drummer Lars Ulrich and producer Bob Rock thought that the solos did not sound right in the songs. He later admitted himself, "We tried to put in solos but they sounded like an afterthought so we left them out". Recording for "St. Anger" was halted in 2001; so that Metallica front-man James Hetfield could enter rehab for alcohol abuse. Due to tensions within the band (which were well-documented in the Metallica documentary "Some Kind of Monster") at the time, Hammett expressed interest in working on a solo album. According to Hammett, if he ever worked on a solo album, it wouldn't be "super-duty" heavy metal, and may include some classical guitarists. When he was asked about his experiences of recording "St. Anger", Hammett said:
On April 4, 2009, Hammett, along with Metallica bandmates Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, and Robert Trujillo and former Metallica bandmates Jason Newsted and the deceased Cliff Burton, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2009, Hammett provided the foreword to British author Joel McIver's book "To Live Is to Die: The Life and Death of Metallica's Cliff Burton".
In April, 2015, Hammett admitted to losing his phone - which contained 250 new "ideas" for Metallica's upcoming studio release. The incident happened about six months prior to the admission (around November 2014). The phone wasn't backed up and Hammett can only remember eight out of the 250 "ideas" he had. On the subject, Hammett said:
In 2016, Hammett provided the foreword to author Greg Prato's book "German Metal Machine: Scorpions in the '70s".
He also appeared on the "Kichigai" E.P. by punk band Septic Death. He played additional lead guitar on the title track.
Hammett can be seen in the background in Primus' "John the Fisherman" video fishing off of Les Claypool's boat. Hammett has been friends with Primus bassist and lead vocalist Les Claypool since childhood. Claypool even auditioned for Metallica after the tragic death of Cliff Burton.
Hammett played guitar on the track "Satan" with Orbital for the "Spawn: The Album" soundtrack released in July 1997.
Hammett plays a guitar solo on Pansy Division's song Headbanger which appears on the ep "For Those About to Suck Cock" Lookout Records 1996
In 2005, Hammett was featured playing the guitar roles on the Carlos Santana track "Trinity" alongside steel-pedal guitarist, Robert Randolph. Santana personally asked Hammett to contribute to his then-upcoming album All That I Am. Hammett previously worked with Santana in 2001 at a live show benefit in San Francisco. Metallica had also invited Santana into the studio while recording "St. Anger".
In 2006, Hammett voiced himself on "The Simpsons" ("The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer"). He also provided various voices on the Adult Swim show "Metalocalypse", including a two fingered fan ("The Curse of Dethklok"), The Queen of Denmark ("Happy Dethday"), and a Finnish barkeep ("Dethtroll").
Hammett also appeared as a guest in an episode of "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" titled "Jacksonville", alongside fellow Metallica member James Hetfield.
He appeared as a guest guitarist on K'Naan's 2006 song "If Rap Gets Jealous" off of the "Troubadour" album.
After performing a set with Metallica at Bonnaroo in June 2008, Hammett played one song with My Morning Jacket and a couple songs with the annual Superjam collaboration, which also included Les Claypool and members of Gogol Bordello playing primarily Tom Waits songs.
Hammett is one of the main characters in "", along with the rest of the current line-up of Metallica.
In 2011, Hammett appeared in an episode of "Jon Benjamin Has a Van" as an actor and guitarist.
On October 1, 2012, Abrams Image published Hammett's first book, "Too Much Horror Business" (a collection of photos detailing Hammett's lifelong love of monster movies and horror memorabilia). Hammett has said that the book is "basically" all of the horror memorabilia he has managed to amass over the last 30 years. In an interview with "Guitar World", Hammett said that he has such a huge horror collection and thought it was the right time to share it with everyone. The 228 page hardcover features more than 300 images of Hammett's horror collection. Among these images are the costumes from the Bela Lugosi movies "White Zombie" and "The Black Cat" (which also starred Boris Karloff), original movie posters (ranging from "Nosferatu" to "Hellraiser"), rare horror-themed toys (including the 'Great Garloo' and 'Frankenstein Tricky Walkers'), movie props (including the 'Dr. Tongue' zombie from George Romero's "Day of the Dead", original Basil Gogos 'Famous Monsters', and fantasy paintings by the late Frank Frazetta. In addition to the images from Hammett's horror collection, "Too Much Horror Business" contains three conversations with the guitarist about his childhood, the nature of his horror collection, and the connection between Metallica's music and horror movies. On the book, Hammett has been quoted saying:
"Kirk Von Hammett's Fear FestEvil" is an annual horror convention created by Kirk Hammett. The first annual "Fear FestEvil" took place at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco - over a three-day period (from February 6–8, 2014). Hammett was inspired to create his own horror convention after experiencing the enjoyment of making his "crypt" at the "Orion Music + More" festival. The convention features live music, signings, interactive displays, vending, live talks, and guest appearances. At the 2014 event, guests included Sara Karloff (daughter of actor Boris Karloff), Bela G. Lugosi (son of actor Bela Lugosi), make-up artist Gregory Nicotero (who worked on George A. Romero's Day of the Dead), actor Tom Savini (who portrayed "Sex Machine" in From Dusk Till Dawn and worked on many of George A. Romero's movies), Heather Langenkamp (who portrayed Nancy in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street), Kane Hodder (who portrayed Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th film series), and Haruo Nakajima (of Godzilla fame). Other guests in attendance included Hammett's former band Exodus, Death Angel, Orchid, Metallica band member Robert Trujillo, Richard Christy, Stephen Perkins, Slash, and Scott Ian. Exodus played on-stage with Carcass on the Friday, whilst Death Division and Orchid played before Death Angel on the Saturday. Hammett joined Exodus and Death Angel on-stage for their encores.
The second annual "Fear FestEvil" took place between April 10–12, 2015, at the "Rockbar Theater" in San Jose, California. Meshuggah headlined the event, whilst High on Fire, Blues Pills, Agnostic Front, and Asada Messiah also made appearances. Orchid also made a second appearance at the "Fear FestEvil". On April 10, VIP's were able to attend the "Dinner and Murder Mystery" - along with Hammett - at the Winchester Mystery House.
Hammett has been married twice. His first marriage to Rebecca lasted three years, having ended in 1990, during the recording of "The Black Album". Hammett has been married to his second wife Lani since 1998. They have two sons, Angel (b. September 29, 2006), and Vincenzo (b. June 28, 2008). He and his family reside in his hometown of San Francisco.
In addition to playing guitar and collecting horror memorabilia, Hammett's hobbies include reading comic books and surfing.
At one point in his life, Hammett spent a "lot of money" on drugs. Hammett has said that he used drugs because he thought they would be fun. During the Damaged Justice tour, he had a cocaine addiction. Hammett eventually pulled out of the addiction because cocaine made him feel depressed, but relapsed during the "Load" era. One of the reasons that Hammett spends a lot of money on comic books, is because he finds them to be a more enjoyable (and healthier) alternative to drugs. Hammett has also smoked heroin a few times, but "didn't like it".
Even though Metallica chooses to stay away from politics, Hammett expressed his disagreement with U.S. President Donald Trump's public pronouncements. In an interview with "Billboard" magazine, he said, "I'm just waiting to get into a personal Twitter war with him." He stressed the importance of the fight against global warming, which Donald Trump claimed a hoax. Hammett has expressed his alignment to Barack Obama and the Democrats on several occasions.
Hammett is known for always having his picking hand taped to protect his skin due to his habit of palm muting and fast picking during lengthy tours.
Hammett's tour guitars :
On the 25th anniversary of Metallica's debut album "Kill 'Em All", Hammett appears on the cover of Feb. 2008's "Guitar World" sporting his new custom ESP. This model is the KH20, the 20th anniversary model from ESP.
In 2014, Hammett purchased the 1959 Les Paul formerly used by Gary Moore and Peter Green; using it on tour when playing the Thin Lizzy cover: "Whiskey in the Jar".
Throughout Metallica's career, Hammett has used a range of different amplifiers. For the first two albums, he used Marshall amplifiers and cabinets, with occasional effects. For the recording of Metallica's third album, "Master of Puppets" (1986), he and James Hetfield bought a Mesa/Boogie MarkIIC+ amplifier, and used Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier heads. Even when he made his move to Randall Amplifiers in 2007, he still used Mesa/Boogie amplifiers in his setup, and still does to this day. He currently uses two rackmounted Dual Rectifier 2-channel heads in tandem with his Randalls.
In September 2007, Randall Amplifiers announced a partnership with Hammett to design a line of signature amplifiers, heads, combos and preamp modules.
In December 2011, it was announced by Fortin Amps that they would team up with Randall to start a new line of tube amplifiers based on the Fortin Meathead amplifier. Hammett is currently using a prototype of the amplifier that he used for the Big 4 show at Yankee Stadium and for all of the shows in India and Asia, and was recently sent a second prototype.
To avoid problems with pedals being damaged during live performances, Hammett keeps his effect pedals in a rack along with his amplifiers and his guitar technician controls them through a pedalboard sidestage. The pedal controller allows him to change between different effect pedals and amplifiers.
In 2008, Jim Dunlop started working in partnership with Hammett to create a signature Wah-wah pedal, the KH95. It is now available to buy in stores.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16724
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Kul Tigin
Kul Tigin ( , Pinyin: Quètèqín, Wade-Giles: chüeh-t'e-ch'in, Xiao'erjing: ٿُؤ تْ ٿٍ, AD 684–731) was a general and a prince of the Second Turkic Khaganate.
He was a second son of Ilterish Qaghan, the dynasty's founder, and the younger brother of Bilge Kaghan, the fourth kaghan. He was 7 when his father died.
During the reign of Qapagan Khaghan, Kul Tigin and his older brother earned reputation for their military prowess. They defeated Yenisei Kirghiz, Turgesh, and Karluks, extending the Kaganate territory all the way to the Iron Gate (Central Asia) south of Samarkand. They also subjugated all nine of the Tokuz Oguz tribes.
In 705, Tujue forces commanded by Mojilian entered Lingwu, defeating Shazha Chongyi (沙吒忠义). Kul Tigin was commanding a unit in battle, in which he lost 3 horses.
In 711, he participated in Battle of Bolchu, which was disastrous for Turgesh.
In 713 he participated in subjugation of Karluk tribes with his brother and uncle.
Upon the death of Qapagan Khaghan, his son Inel Qaghan attempted to illegally ascend to the throne, defying the traditional Lateral succession law, but Kül Tigin refused to recognize the takeover. He raised an army, attacked, and killed Inel, Ashina Duoxifu and his trusted followers. He placed his elder brother Bilge Khagan on the throne, and took the title of Shad, an equivalent of commander-in-chief of the army for himself.
He died suddenly in 27 February 731. A stele in memory of Kül Tigin, which included inscriptions in both the Turkic and Chinese, was erected at his memorial complex at the present site of Khöshöö-Tsaidam. Kül-Tegin is also mentioned in the inscription erected in memory of his older brother Bilge Kagan at the neighbouring site of Khöshöö-Tsaidam-1.
His burial ceremony took place in 1 November 731. He was posthumously renamed Inanču Apa Yarğan Tarqan by Bilge Khagan.
The headdress on the glabella part of Kül Tigin sculpture in the Khöshöö-Tsaidam enclave (Orkhon, Northern Mongolia) carries a bird with wings spread like an eagle, personifying a raven.
He was portrayed by Ham Suk Hun (함석훈) in Korean TV Series "Dae Jo Yeong."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16726
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Kinky Friedman
Richard Samet "Kinky" Friedman (born November 1, 1944) is an American singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician, defender of stray animals, and former columnist for "Texas Monthly" who styles himself in the mold of popular Will Rogers and Mark Twain.
Friedman was one of two independent candidates in the 2006 election for the office of Governor of Texas. Receiving 12.6% of the vote, Friedman placed fourth in the six-person race.
He was born as Richard Samet Friedman in Chicago in 1944 to Jewish parents, Dr. S. Thomas Friedman and his wife Minnie (Samet) Friedman. Both of his parents were the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. When Friedman was young, his family moved to a ranch in Kerrville, Texas in Texas Hill Country and opened a summer camp called Echo Hill.
Friedman had an early interest in both pop music and chess, and was chosen at age seven as one of 50 local players to challenge U.S. grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky to simultaneous games in Houston. Reshevsky won all 50 games, but Friedman was, by far, the youngest competitor.
Friedman graduated from Austin High School in Austin, Texas in 1962. He went on and earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, majoring in Psychology. He took part in the Plan II Honors program and was a member of the Tau Delta Phi fraternity. During his first year, Chinga Chavin gave Friedman the nickname "Kinky" because of his curly hair.
Friedman served two years in the United States Peace Corps, teaching in Borneo, Indonesia with John Gross. During his service in the Peace Corps, he met future road manager Dylan Ferrero, with whom he still works. Friedman lives at Echo Hill Ranch, his family's summer camp near Kerrville, Texas. He founded Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, also located near Kerrville, whose mission is to care for stray, abused and aging animals; more than 1,000 dogs have been saved from animal euthanasia.
Friedman formed his first band, King Arthur & the Carrots, while a student at the University of Texas at Austin. The band, which poked fun at surf music, recorded only one single in 1966 ("Schwinn 24/Beach Party Boo Boo").
By 1973, Friedman had formed his second band, Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys, which many took to be a play on the name of the famous band Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. In keeping with the band's satirical nature, each member had a comical name: in addition to Kinky there were Little Jewford, Big Nig, Panama Red, Wichita Culpepper, Sky Cap Adams, Rainbow Colours, and Snakebite Jacobs. More conventionally named roadie Jack Slaughter and road manager Dylan Ferrero rounded out the crew and provided most of the driving of the "tour bus", a Cadillac with 10-year-old expired license plates and a propensity to break down (but, according to Friedman, her talent lay in her ability to stop on a dime and pick up the change).
Friedman's father objected to the name of the band, calling it a "negative, hostile, peculiar thing", which gave Kinky even more reason to choose the name.
Arriving on the wave of country rock following on from Gram Parsons, The Band, and Eagles, Friedman originally found cult fame as a country and western singer. His break came in 1973 thanks to Commander Cody of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, who contacted Vanguard Music on his behalf. Friedman released "Kinky Friedman" in 1974 for ABC Records, then toured with Bob Dylan in 1975–1976. His repertoire mixed social commentary ("We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You") and maudlin ballads ("Western Union Wire") with raucous humor (such as "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed"). His "Ride 'Em Jewboy" was an extended tribute to the victims of the Holocaust.
Some of his most famous songs are "How Can I Tell You I Love You (When You're Sitting on My Face)" and "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore," a song in which Kinky verbally and physically beats up a drunken white racist who berates blacks, Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Sigma Nus in a bar, with lyrics such as,
Oh, they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore,
They ain't makin' carpenters that know what nails are for
Other Friedman tunes include "The Ballad of Charles Whitman," in which Friedman lampooned Charles Whitman's sniper attack from the University of Texas at Austin's Main Building tower on August 1, 1966. His cover of Chinga Chavin's "Asshole from El Paso", a parody of Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" is, perhaps, his most famous song.
One of Friedman's most infamous concerts was a 1973 performance in Buffalo, New York; upon performing "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed" (a song that lampoons feminism), a group of what Friedman described as "cranked-up lesbians" entered into a fight with the band and forced the concert to end early while Friedman and the band were escorted off stage. The National Organization for Women awarded Friedman the "Male Chauvinist Pig Award" later that year, an award Friedman took with pride. Friedman would not return to Buffalo until 2012.
In 1975, Friedman and his band taped an "Austin City Limits" show which was never aired. According to the show's executive producer, Terry Lickona, this is the first and only time in the show's long history that an episode went unaired. Lickona told the "Austin Chronicle" "I've seen it many times – it's a very popular party tape among friends. I think it was a great show, and it might be as offensive today as it was back then."
In early 1976, he joined Bob Dylan on the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
Friedman was a musical guest on "Saturday Night Live" in October 1976.
Although hard to verify, given the number of Jewish-origin entertainers in country/hillbilly tour-circles (e.g. Gilbert Maxwell "Broncho Billy" Anderson, Friedman claims to have been the first full-blooded Jew to take the stage at the Grand Ole Opry.
In February 2007, Sustain Records released a compilation of the songs of Kinky Friedman sung by other artists called "Why the Hell Not..." The compilation includes contributions by Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, and Kelly Willis.
On July 20, 2007, Friedman hosted the "Concert to Save Town Lake" to honor the memory of Lady Bird Johnson and her efforts to protect and preserve the shores of Town Lake in Austin, Texas.
On April 27, 2011, Friedman launched his "Springtime for Kinky Tour" (cf. "Springtime for Hitler") in Kansas City, Missouri at Knuckleheads Saloon which included dates in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky before heading towards the East Coast. This was followed by a tour of Australia with Van Dyke Parks.
After his music career stalled in the 1980s, Friedman shifted his creative focus to writing detective novels. His books have similarities to his song lyrics, featuring a fictionalized version of himself solving crimes in New York City and dispensing jokes, wisdom, recipes, charm and Jameson's whiskey in equal measure. They are written in a straightforward style which owes a debt to Raymond Chandler. The Kinky character views himself as a latter-day Sherlock Holmes and he is aided in his investigations by his close friend Larry Sloman aka Ratso who assumes the role of Dr. Watson.
To date, he has written two novels that do not star the Kinky Friedman character: "Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned" and "The Christmas Pig."
Friedman also wrote a regular column for the magazine "Texas Monthly" from April 2001 to March 2005 which was suspended during his run for governor of Texas. In 2008, Texas Monthly brought his column back on a bimonthly basis.
Two books have been published collecting some of these nonfiction writings, as well as previously unpublished ones: "'Scuse Me While I Whip This Out" and "Texas Hold'em". He has also published a travelog ("The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic") and an etiquette guide.
Friedman's early books have been republished by Friedman's own Vandam Press as ebooks. During March and April 2011 Vandam released seven of Friedman's early titles including: "Greenwich Killing Time, A Case of Lone Star, Musical Chairs, When The Cat's Away, Frequent Flyer, Roadkill" and the rarely seen "Curse of the Missing Puppet Head". "Elvis Jesus and Coca-Cola, God Bless John Wayne, Blast From The Past, Armadillos and Old Lace" and two nonfiction books, "Drinker With A Writing Problem" and "Heroes of A Texas Childhood" were released in 2011. E-book releases are announced on Friedman's Twitter feed and Facebook page, "TheRealKinkster".
Friedman also announced (via Jim Bessman's column at examiner.com) the upcoming release of all Vandam Press titles as unabridged audio books "read by the author".
The recurring character "Rambam", a New York private investigator and friend of the Friedman character in the books, is based on the real-life investigator, Steven Rambam, who acts as a technical advisor for the real Friedman. Old Peace Corps friend and long time road manager Dylan Ferrero is also a recurring character in Kinky's mystery novels; his character is known for only speaking in rock and roll quotes, a trait taken from real life.
In 1986, Friedman ran for Justice of the Peace in Kerrville, Texas, as a Republican but lost the election.
In 2004, Friedman began an ostensibly serious, though colorful, campaign to become the Governor of Texas in 2006. One of his stated goals is the "dewussification" of Texas. Among his campaign slogans were "How Hard Could It Be?", "Why The Hell Not?", "My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy", and "He ain't Kinky, he's my Governor" (cf. "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother").
Friedman had hoped to follow in the footsteps of other entertainers-turned-governors, including Jimmie Davis, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Ronald Reagan. Jesse Ventura even campaigned with Friedman for his election. When the campaign finance reports came out after the second quarter had ended, Friedman had raised more funds than the Democratic nominee, former Congressman Chris Bell.
On election day, however, Friedman was defeated, receiving 12.6% of the votes in the six-candidate matchup.
Friedman released a statement on October 15, 2013, announcing his intent to again run for Texas agriculture commissioner as a Democrat. Friedman previously ran for the post in 2010, losing in the Democratic primary.
Kinky supports the full legalization and cultivation of hemp and marijuana, declaring that the end of the prohibition is a health, education funding, prison reduction, border security, and state's rights issue.
On education, he supports higher pay for teachers and working to lower Texas's dropout rate. He supports more investment in harnessing Texas's alternative fuel resources such as wind and biodiesel. Friedman is opposed to the Trans-Texas Corridor since it relies on toll road construction.
On capital punishment, he previously summed up his position, "I am not anti-death penalty, but I'm damn sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed." More recently, he has clarified his position: "The system is not perfect. Until it's perfect, let's do away with the death penalty."
On illegal immigration, Friedman wants to increase the number of Texas National Guard troops on the border (from the current 1,500 to 10,000), impose $25,000 and $50,000 fines on companies that hire illegal immigrants and require foreign nationals seeking employment to purchase a foreign taxpayer ID card once they have passed a criminal background check. "Texas can no longer wait for our federal government to solve our illegal immigration problem," Friedman said. "These are steps that Texas can immediately take to help stem the tide of illegal immigrants penetrating our border." Had he been elected, he had promised to meet regularly with Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona to develop a coordinated border state plan to supplement federal efforts to curb illegal immigration. Previously, Kinky put forth the "Five Mexican Generals" Plan, to pay Mexican officials to halt immigration on their side of the border. Although he originally stated "When I talk about the five Mexican generals, people think I'm joking but I'm dead serious", Friedman later told the "Dallas Morning News" that the plan, never meant to be carried out, was a joke with an element of seriousness.
According to his official Web site, Friedman's answer to the question "How does Kinky feel about abortion?" is "Kinky believes in a woman's right to choose." In person, he hedges his bet, saying "I'm not pro-life, and I'm not pro-choice. I'm pro-football." On social issues he has supported gay marriage, answering an Associated Press reporter's question on the subject on February 3, 2005, "I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us." (Friedman himself has never been married.)
According to "Cigar Aficionado" magazine, Friedman plans to roll back "any and all smoking bans" if elected. One of his favorite quotes comes from Mark Twain: "If smoking is not allowed in heaven, I shall not go." Friedman supports the decriminalization of marijuana, though he doesn't advocate making its sale legal. "I'm not talking about like Amsterdam," he noted, "We've got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians."
On August 9, 2007, the "Austin American-Statesman" reported that Friedman was considering another run for governor of Texas in 2010. "I'm open to running", Friedman said, adding that he wouldn't make a final decision until after the 2008 elections. On February 10, 2009, Friedman confirmed to the Associated Press that he was still interested in running.
In an August 23, 2007 interview with the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram" and a February 10, 2009 interview with the Associated Press, Friedman stated that if he did run in 2010, he would run as a Democrat, citing that "God probably couldn't have won as an Independent" and that he was a Democrat all his life.
On April 14, 2009, Friedman announced in an email to supporters that he intended to make a second gubernatorial run, this time as a Democrat. Friedman then announced on December 14, 2009, that he was leaving the gubernatorial race and would instead seek the party nomination in March 2010 for Texas Agriculture Commissioner. He lost the nomination to rancher Hank Gilbert in the primary held on March 2, 2010. Gilbert was in turn defeated for a second time by the incumbent Republican Todd Staples of Palestine, who vacates the office in January 2015, following his defeat for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in the March 4, 2014 primary.
In 2014, Friedman made another bid for state agriculture commissioner. He finished a strong second in the Democratic primary, forcing a runoff election with his party's top vote-getter, the politically unknown Jimmy Ray "Jim" Hogan (born c. 1950), a farmer and widower from Cleburne in Johnson County, southwest of Fort Worth, whose campaign was conducted mostly from the public computers in his hometown library.
Friedman polled 184,992 (37.7 percent), behind Hogan's 190,205 (38.8 percent), but ahead of rancher and former educator Hugh Asa Fitzsimons, III (born 1954), of San Antonio, who received a critical 114,953 votes (23.5 percent). Fitzsimons carried the endorsement of the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, his hometown State Senator Leticia Van de Putte, who is running on the ticket headed by State Senator Wendy R. Davis of Fort Worth. Friedman lost the May runoff to Hogan, 54 percent to 46 percent, who then faced Republican Sid Miller in the November election.
Friedman appeared in the 2004 documentary film "Barbecue: A Texas Love Story" by Austin-based director Chris Elley. In the film, narrated by Governor Ann Richards, Kinky exclaims that "Jesus loved Barbecue" and analyzes the speech patterns of Texans versus New Yorkers. Raw footage from Friedman's interview appears in the 2005 DVD release of the film. He has appeared in other movies as well including "Loose Shoes" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2".
Friedman's persona as a politically incorrect raconteur has been likened to that of movie critic and commentator John Irving Bloom, better known in print as Joe Bob Briggs, with whom he appeared in the B movie "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2".
Friedman prefers to smoke Montecristo No. 2 Cigars, the same brand once smoked by Fidel Castro. However, he also smokes Bolivars, noting that "Simón Bolívar is the only person in history to be exiled from a country named after him." Friedman now makes eponymous cigars under the name Kinky Friedman Cigars.
Friedman is given brief praise in Joseph Heller's 1976 novel, "Good as Gold", in which a governor (meant to satirize Lyndon B. Johnson), tells the main character, Bruce Gold: "Gold, I like you. You remind me a lot of this famous country singer from Texas I'm crazy about, a fellow calls himself Kinky Friedman, the Original Texas Jewboy. Kinky's smarter, but I like you more."
Friedman is friends with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and he has visited both at the White House. He wrote about his friendships with them in his November 2001 column ("Hail to the Kinkster") for "Texas Monthly".
The play "Becoming Kinky: The World According to Kinky Friedman", directed by Ted Swindley (Always...Patsy Cline), starring Jesse Dayton, Little Jewford, Alan Lee, and Andross Bautsch, premiered in Houston, Texas on March 28, 2011.
Friedman is responsible for the quote "you've got to find what you love and let it kill you," which is often falsely attributed to the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski.
Friedman hosted the live concert music television show "Texas Roadhouse Live" around 2011, which would air on over-the-air network television late Saturday night (or midnight Sunday morning) in some Texas markets.
On the 2017 album entitled "Out of All This Blue", Mike Scott of The Waterboys composed a song called "Kinky's History Lesson" where the singer attempts to correct Friedman on a number of false statements he has allegedly made.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16733
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Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel (; ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Austrian logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were analyzing the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics pioneered by Georg Cantor.
Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that cannot be proved from the axioms. To prove this theorem, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers.
He also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted axioms of set theory, assuming these axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the manager of a textile factory, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer of that time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a Czechoslovak citizen at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, following its defeat in the World War I. (According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia".) In February 1929 he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. After World War II (1948), at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, young Kurt was known as ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Kurt had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna to go to medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Kurt studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's "Theory of Colours" and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book "Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy", he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published ("Principles of Mathematical Logic"), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled "On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems". Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married Adele Nimbursky (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938.
Their relationship had been opposed by his parents on the grounds that she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing "Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory," a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Godel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his many years at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. He had an obsessive fear of being poisoned; he would eat only food that his wife, Adele, prepared for him. Late in 1977, she was hospitalized for six months and could subsequently no longer prepare her husband's food. In her absence, he refused to eat, eventually starving to death. He weighed when he died. His death certificate reported that he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978. He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele's death followed in 1981.
Gödel was a convinced theist, in the Christian tradition. He held the notion that God was personal.
He believed firmly in an afterlife, stating: "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is "theistic", not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Describing religion(s) in general, Gödel said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in the areas of logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990.
Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include Gödel's publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from Gödel's , and the final two include correspondence.
A biography of Gödel was published by John Dawson in 2005: "Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel" (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in the 2008 BBC documentary entitled "Dangerous Knowledge" by David Malone.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a popular book in 1979 called to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, along with those of artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The book partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16736
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Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, "The Communist Manifesto", and the three-volume "Das Kapital" (1867–1883). His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.
Marx's critical theories about society, economics and politics – collectively understood as Marxism – hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power in return for wages. Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions that would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.
For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers. Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.
Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised. His work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx's work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx (1777–1838) and Henriette Pressburg (1788–1863). He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. Marx was ethnically but not religiously Jewish. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx. His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education. He became a lawyer with a comfortably Upper middle class income; in addition to his income as an attorney, the family owned a number of Moselle vineyards. Prior to his son's birth, and after the abrogation of Jewish emancipation in the Rhineland, Herschel converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical Church of Prussia, taking on the German forename Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.
Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, at that time being an absolute monarchy. In 1815, Heinrich Marx began working as an attorney and in 1819 moved his family to a ten-room property near the Porta Nigra. His wife, Henriette Pressburg, was a Dutch Jewish woman from a prosperous business family that later founded the company Philips Electronics. Her sister Sophie Pressburg (1797–1854) married Lion Philips (1794–1866) and was the grandmother of both Gerard and Anton Philips and great-grandmother to Frits Philips. Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London.
Little is known of Marx's childhood. The third of nine children, he became the eldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819. Marx and his surviving siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie and Caroline, were baptised into the Lutheran Church in August 1824 and their mother in November 1825. Marx was privately educated by his father until 1830, when he entered Trier High School, whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father. By employing many liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government. Subsequently, police raided the school in 1832 and discovered that literature espousing political liberalism was being distributed among the students. Considering the distribution of such material a seditious act, the authorities instituted reforms and replaced several staff during Marx's attendance.
In October 1835 at the age of 17, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field. Due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest", Marx was excused from military duty when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals that were monitored by the police. Marx also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (), at one point serving as club co-president. Additionally, Marx was involved in certain disputes, some of which became serious: in August 1836 he took part in a duel with a member of the university's Borussian Korps. Although his grades in the first term were good, they soon deteriorated, leading his father to force a transfer to the more serious and academic University of Berlin.
Spending summer and autumn 1836 in Trier, Marx became more serious about his studies and his life. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, an educated baroness of the Prussian ruling class who had known Marx since childhood. As she had broken off her engagement with a young aristocrat to be with Marx, their relationship was socially controversial owing to the differences between their religious and class origins, but Marx befriended her father Ludwig von Westphalen (a liberal aristocrat) and later dedicated his doctoral thesis to him. Seven years after their engagement, on 19 June 1843, they married in a Protestant church in Kreuznach.
In October 1836, Marx arrived in Berlin, matriculating in the university's faculty of law and renting a room in the Mittelstrasse. During the first term, Marx attended lectures of Eduard Gans (who represented the progressive Hegelian standpoint, elaborated on rational development in history by emphasising particularly its libertarian aspects, and the importance of social question) and of Karl von Savigny (who represented the Historical School of Law). Although studying law, he was fascinated by philosophy and looked for a way to combine the two, believing that "without philosophy nothing could be accomplished". Marx became interested in the recently deceased German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas were then widely debated among European philosophical circles. During a convalescence in Stralau, he joined the Doctor's Club ("Doktorklub"), a student group which discussed Hegelian ideas, and through them became involved with a group of radical thinkers known as the Young Hegelians in 1837. They gathered around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, with Marx developing a particularly close friendship with Adolf Rutenberg. Like Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but adopted his dialectical method to criticise established society, politics and religion from a leftist perspective. Marx's father died in May 1838, resulting in a diminished income for the family. Marx had been emotionally close to his father and treasured his memory after his death.
By 1837, Marx was writing both fiction and non-fiction, having completed a short novel, "Scorpion and Felix", a drama, "Oulanem", as well as a number of love poems dedicated to Jenny von Westphalen, though none of this early work was published during his lifetime. Marx soon abandoned fiction for other pursuits, including the study of both English and Italian, art history and the translation of Latin classics. He began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel's "Philosophy of Religion" in 1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature", which he completed in 1841. It was described as "a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy". The essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin. Marx decided instead to submit his thesis to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his PhD in April 1841. As Marx and Bauer were both atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for a journal entitled "Archiv des Atheismus" ("Atheistic Archives"), but it never came to fruition. In July, Marx and Bauer took a trip to Bonn from Berlin. There they scandalised their class by getting drunk, laughing in church and galloping through the streets on donkeys.
Marx was considering an academic career, but this path was barred by the government's growing opposition to classical liberalism and the Young Hegelians. Marx moved to Cologne in 1842, where he became a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper "Rheinische Zeitung" ("Rhineland News"), expressing his early views on socialism and his developing interest in economics. Marx criticised right-wing European governments as well as figures in the liberal and socialist movements, whom he thought ineffective or counter-productive. The newspaper attracted the attention of the Prussian government censors, who checked every issue for seditious material before printing, as Marx lamented: "Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear". After the "Rheinische Zeitung" published an article strongly criticising the Russian monarchy, Tsar Nicholas I requested it be banned and Prussia's government complied in 1843.
In 1843, Marx became co-editor of a new, radical leftist Parisian newspaper, the "Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher" ("German-French Annals"), then being set up by the German socialist Arnold Ruge to bring together German and French radicals and thus Marx and his wife moved to Paris in October 1843. Initially living with Ruge and his wife communally at 23 Rue Vaneau, they found the living conditions difficult, so moved out following the birth of their daughter Jenny in 1844. Although intended to attract writers from both France and the German states, the "Jahrbücher" was dominated by the latter and the only non-German writer was the exiled Russian anarchist collectivist Mikhail Bakunin. Marx contributed two essays to the paper, "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" and "On the Jewish Question", the latter introducing his belief that the proletariat were a revolutionary force and marking his embrace of communism. Only one issue was published, but it was relatively successful, largely owing to the inclusion of Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King Ludwig of Bavaria, leading the German states to ban it and seize imported copies (Ruge nevertheless refused to fund the publication of further issues and his friendship with Marx broke down). After the paper's collapse, Marx began writing for the only uncensored German-language radical newspaper left, "Vorwärts!" ("Forward!"). Based in Paris, the paper was connected to the League of the Just, a utopian socialist secret society of workers and artisans. Marx attended some of their meetings, but did not join. In "Vorwärts!", Marx refined his views on socialism based upon Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideas of dialectical materialism, at the same time criticising liberals and other socialists operating in Europe.
On 28 August 1844, Marx met the German socialist Friedrich Engels at the Café de la Régence, beginning a lifelong friendship. Engels showed Marx his recently published "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844", convincing Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of the final revolution in history. Soon, Marx and Engels were collaborating on a criticism of the philosophical ideas of Marx's former friend, Bruno Bauer. This work was published in 1845 as "The Holy Family". Although critical of Bauer, Marx was increasingly influenced by the ideas of the Young Hegelians Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach, but eventually Marx and Engels abandoned Feuerbachian materialism as well.
During the time that he lived at 38 Rue Vanneau in Paris (from October 1843 until January 1845), Marx engaged in an intensive study of political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, "etc.")"," the French socialists (especially Claude Henri St. Simon and Charles Fourier) and the history of France. The study of political economy is a study that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life and would result in his major economic workthe three-volume series called "Capital". Marxism is based in large part on three influences: Hegel's dialectics, French utopian socialism and English economics. Together with his earlier study of Hegel's dialectics, the studying that Marx did during this time in Paris meant that all major components of "Marxism" were in place by the autumn of 1844. Marx was constantly being pulled away from his study of political economynot only by the usual daily demands of the time, but additionally by editing a radical newspaper and later by organising and directing the efforts of a political party during years of potentially revolutionary popular uprisings of the citizenry. Still Marx was always drawn back to his economic studies: he sought "to understand the inner workings of capitalism".
An outline of "Marxism" had definitely formed in the mind of Karl Marx by late 1844. Indeed, many features of the Marxist view of the world's political economy had been worked out in great detail, but Marx needed to write down all of the details of his economic world view to further clarify the new economic theory in his own mind. Accordingly, Marx wrote "The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts". These manuscripts covered numerous topics, detailing Marx's concept of alienated labour. However, by the spring of 1845 his continued study of political economy, capital and capitalism had led Marx to the belief that the new political economic theory that he was espousing – scientific socialism – needed to be built on the base of a thoroughly developed materialistic view of the world.
The "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844" had been written between April and August 1844, but soon Marx recognised that the "Manuscripts" had been influenced by some inconsistent ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach. Accordingly, Marx recognised the need to break with Feuerbach's philosophy in favour of historical materialism, thus a year later (in April 1845) after moving from Paris to Brussels, Marx wrote his eleven "Theses on Feuerbach". The "Theses on Feuerbach" are best known for Thesis 11, which states that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it". This work contains Marx's criticism of materialism (for being contemplative), idealism (for reducing practice to theory) overall, criticising philosophy for putting abstract reality above the physical world. It thus introduced the first glimpse at Marx's historical materialism, an argument that the world is changed not by ideas but by actual, physical, material activity and practice. In 1845, after receiving a request from the Prussian king, the French government shut down "Vorwärts!", with the interior minister, François Guizot, expelling Marx from France. At this point, Marx moved from Paris to Brussels, where Marx hoped to once again continue his study of capitalism and political economy.
Unable either to stay in France or to move to Germany, Marx decided to emigrate to Brussels in Belgium in February 1845. However, to stay in Belgium he had to pledge not to publish anything on the subject of contemporary politics. In Brussels, Marx associated with other exiled socialists from across Europe, including Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen and Joseph Weydemeyer. In April 1845, Engels moved from Barmen in Germany to Brussels to join Marx and the growing cadre of members of the League of the Just now seeking home in Brussels. Later, Mary Burns, Engels' long-time companion, left Manchester, England to join Engels in Brussels.
In mid-July 1845, Marx and Engels left Brussels for England to visit the leaders of the Chartists, a socialist movement in Britain. This was Marx's first trip to England and Engels was an ideal guide for the trip. Engels had already spent two years living in Manchester from November 1842 to August 1844. Not only did Engels already know the English language, he had also developed a close relationship with many Chartist leaders. Indeed, Engels was serving as a reporter for many Chartist and socialist English newspapers. Marx used the trip as an opportunity to examine the economic resources available for study in various libraries in London and Manchester.
In collaboration with Engels, Marx also set about writing a book which is often seen as his best treatment of the concept of historical materialism, "The German Ideology". In this work, Marx broke with Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and the rest of the Young Hegelians, while he also broke with Karl Grun and other "true socialists" whose philosophies were still based in part on "idealism". In "German Ideology", Marx and Engels finally completed their philosophy, which was based solely on materialism as the sole motor force in history. "German Ideology" is written in a humorously satirical form, but even this satirical form did not save the work from censorship. Like so many other early writings of his, "German Ideology" would not be published in Marx's lifetime and would be published only in 1932.
After completing "German Ideology", Marx turned to a work that was intended to clarify his own position regarding "the theory and tactics" of a truly "revolutionary proletarian movement" operating from the standpoint of a truly "scientific materialist" philosophy. This work was intended to draw a distinction between the utopian socialists and Marx's own scientific socialist philosophy. Whereas the utopians believed that people must be persuaded one person at a time to join the socialist movement, the way a person must be persuaded to adopt any different belief, Marx knew that people would tend on most occasions to act in accordance with their own economic interests, thus appealing to an entire class (the working class in this case) with a broad appeal to the class's best material interest would be the best way to mobilise the broad mass of that class to make a revolution and change society. This was the intent of the new book that Marx was planning, but to get the manuscript past the government censors he called the book "The Poverty of Philosophy" (1847) and offered it as a response to the "petty bourgeois philosophy" of the French anarchist socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as expressed in his book "The Philosophy of Poverty" (1840).
These books laid the foundation for Marx and Engels's most famous work, a political pamphlet that has since come to be commonly known as "The Communist Manifesto". While residing in Brussels in 1846, Marx continued his association with the secret radical organisation League of the Just. As noted above, Marx thought the League to be just the sort of radical organisation that was needed to spur the working class of Europe toward the mass movement that would bring about a working class revolution. However, to organise the working class into a mass movement the League had to cease its "secret" or "underground" orientation and operate in the open as a political party. Members of the League eventually became persuaded in this regard. Accordingly, in June 1847 the League was reorganised by its membership into a new open "above ground" political society that appealed directly to the working classes. This new open political society was called the Communist League. Both Marx and Engels participated in drawing up the programme and organisational principles of the new Communist League.
In late 1847, Marx and Engels began writing what was to become their most famous work – a programme of action for the Communist League. Written jointly by Marx and Engels from December 1847 to January 1848, "The Communist Manifesto" was first published on 21 February 1848. "The Communist Manifesto" laid out the beliefs of the new Communist League. No longer a secret society, the Communist League wanted to make aims and intentions clear to the general public rather than hiding its beliefs as the League of the Just had been doing. The opening lines of the pamphlet set forth the principal basis of Marxism: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It goes on to examine the antagonisms that Marx claimed were arising in the clashes of interest between the bourgeoisie (the wealthy capitalist class) and the proletariat (the industrial working class). Proceeding on from this, the "Manifesto" presents the argument for why the Communist League, as opposed to other socialist and liberal political parties and groups at the time, was truly acting in the interests of the proletariat to overthrow capitalist society and to replace it with socialism.
Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions and often violent upheavals that became known as the Revolutions of 1848. In France, a revolution led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the French Second Republic. Marx was supportive of such activity and having recently received a substantial inheritance from his father (withheld by his uncle Lionel Philips since his father's death in 1838) of either 6,000 or 5,000 francs he allegedly used a third of it to arm Belgian workers who were planning revolutionary action. Although the veracity of these allegations is disputed, the Belgian Ministry of Justice accused Marx of it, subsequently arresting him and he was forced to flee back to France, where with a new republican government in power he believed that he would be safe.
Temporarily settling down in Paris, Marx transferred the Communist League executive headquarters to the city and also set up a German Workers' Club with various German socialists living there. Hoping to see the revolution spread to Germany, in 1848 Marx moved back to Cologne where he began issuing a handbill entitled the "Demands of the Communist Party in Germany", in which he argued for only four of the ten points of the "Communist Manifesto", believing that in Germany at that time the bourgeoisie must overthrow the feudal monarchy and aristocracy before the proletariat could overthrow the bourgeoisie. On 1 June, Marx started publication of a daily newspaper, the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung", which he helped to finance through his recent inheritance from his father. Designed to put forward news from across Europe with his own Marxist interpretation of events, the newspaper featured Marx as a primary writer and the dominant editorial influence. Despite contributions by fellow members of the Communist League, according to Friedrich Engels it remained "a simple dictatorship by Marx".
Whilst editor of the paper, Marx and the other revolutionary socialists were regularly harassed by the police and Marx was brought to trial on several occasions, facing various allegations including insulting the Chief Public Prosecutor, committing a press misdemeanor and inciting armed rebellion through tax boycotting, although each time he was acquitted. Meanwhile, the democratic parliament in Prussia collapsed and the king, Frederick William IV, introduced a new cabinet of his reactionary supporters, who implemented counter-revolutionary measures to expunge leftist and other revolutionary elements from the country. Consequently, the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" was soon suppressed and Marx was ordered to leave the country on 16 May. Marx returned to Paris, which was then under the grip of both a reactionary counter-revolution and a cholera epidemic and was soon expelled by the city authorities, who considered him a political threat. With his wife Jenny expecting their fourth child and not able to move back to Germany or Belgium, in August 1849 he sought refuge in London.
Marx moved to London in early June 1849 and would remain based in the city for the rest of his life. The headquarters of the Communist League also moved to London. However, in the winter of 1849–1850 a split within the ranks of the Communist League occurred when a faction within it led by August Willich and Karl Schapper began agitating for an immediate uprising. Willich and Schapper believed that once the Communist League had initiated the uprising, the entire working class from across Europe would rise "spontaneously" to join it, thus creating revolution across Europe. Marx and Engels protested that such an unplanned uprising on the part of the Communist League was "adventuristic" and would be suicide for the Communist League. Such an uprising as that recommended by the Schapper/Willich group would easily be crushed by the police and the armed forces of the reactionary governments of Europe. Marx maintained that this would spell doom for the Communist League itself, arguing that changes in society are not achieved overnight through the efforts and will power of a handful of men. They are instead brought about through a scientific analysis of economic conditions of society and by moving toward revolution through different stages of social development. In the present stage of development ("circa" 1850), following the defeat of the uprisings across Europe in 1848 he felt that the Communist League should encourage the working class to unite with progressive elements of the rising bourgeoisie to defeat the feudal aristocracy on issues involving demands for governmental reforms, such as a constitutional republic with freely elected assemblies and universal (male) suffrage. In other words, the working class must join with bourgeois and democratic forces to bring about the successful conclusion of the bourgeois revolution before stressing the working class agenda and a working class revolution.
After a long struggle which threatened to ruin the Communist League, Marx's opinion prevailed and eventually the Willich/Schapper group left the Communist League. Meanwhile, Marx also became heavily involved with the socialist German Workers' Educational Society. The Society held their meetings in Great Windmill Street, Soho, central London's entertainment district. This organisation was also racked by an internal struggle between its members, some of whom followed Marx while others followed the Schapper/Willich faction. The issues in this internal split were the same issues raised in the internal split within the Communist League, but Marx lost the fight with the Schapper/Willich faction within the German Workers' Educational Society and on 17 September 1850 resigned from the Society.
In the early period in London, Marx committed himself almost exclusively to revolutionary activities, such that his family endured extreme poverty. His main source of income was Engels, whose own source was his wealthy industrialist father. In Prussia as editor of his own newspaper, and contributor to others ideologically aligned, Marx could reach his audience, the working classes. In London, without finances to run a newspaper themselves, he and Engels turned to international journalism. At one stage they were being published by six newspapers from England, the United States, Prussia, Austria and South Africa. Marx's principal earnings came from his work as European correspondent, from 1852 to 1862, for the "New-York Daily Tribune", and from also producing articles for more "bourgeois" newspapers. Marx had his articles translated from German by , until his proficiency in English had become adequate.
The "New-York Daily Tribune" had been founded in April 1841 by Horace Greeley. Its editorial board contained progressive bourgeois journalists and publishers, among them George Ripley and the journalist Charles Dana, who was editor-in-chief. Dana, a fourierist and an abolitionist, was Marx's contact.
The "Tribune" was a vehicle for Marx to reach a transatlantic public to make a "hidden war" to Henry Charles Carey. The journal had wide working-class appeal from its foundation; at two cents, it was inexpensive; and, with about 50,000 copies per issue, its circulation was the widest in the United States. Its editorial ethos was progressive and its anti-slavery stance reflected Greeley's. Marx's first article for the paper, on the British parliamentary elections, was published on 21 August 1852.
On 21 March 1857 Dana informed Marx that, due to the economic recession, only one article a week would be paid for, published or not; the others would be paid for only if published. Marx had sent his articles on Tuesdays and Fridays, but, that October, the "Tribune" discharged all its correspondents in Europe except Marx and B. Taylor, and reduced Marx to a weekly article. Between September and November 1860, only five were published. After a six-month interval, Marx resumed contributions in September 1861 until March 1862, when Dana wrote to inform him that there was no longer space in the "Tribune" for reports from London, due to American domestic affairs.
In 1868, Dana set up a rival newspaper, the "New York Sun", at which he was editor-in-chief.
In April 1857, Dana invited Marx to contribute articles, mainly on military history, to the "New American Cyclopedia", an idea of George Ripley, Dana's friend and literary editor of the "Tribune". In all, 67 Marx-Engels articles were published, of which 51 were written by Engels, although Marx did some research for them in the British Museum.
By the late 1850s, American popular interest in European affairs waned and Marx's articles turned to topics such as the "slavery crisis" and the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, in the "War Between the States".
Between December 1851 and March 1852, Marx worked on his theoretical work about the French Revolution of 1848, titled "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon". In this he explored concepts in historical materialism, class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, and victory of the proletariat over the bourgeois state.
The 1850s and 1860s may be said to mark a philosophical boundary distinguishing the young Marx's Hegelian idealism and the more mature Marx's scientific ideology associated with structural Marxism; however, not all scholars accept this distinction. For Marx and Engels, their experience of the Revolutions of 1848 to 1849 were formative in the development of their theory of economics and historical progression. After the "failures" of 1848, the revolutionary impetus appeared spent and not to be renewed without an economic recession. Contention arose between Marx and his fellow communists, whom he denounced as "adventurists". Marx deemed it fanciful to propose that "will power" could be sufficient to create the revolutionary conditions when in reality the economic component was the necessary requisite.
Recession in the United States' economy in 1852 gave Marx and Engels grounds for optimism for revolutionary activity. Yet, this economy was seen as too immature for a capitalist revolution. Open territories on America's western frontier dissipated the forces of social unrest. Moreover, any economic crisis arising in the United States would not lead to revolutionary contagion of the older economies of individual European nations, which were closed systems bounded by their national borders. When the so-called "Panic of 1857" in the United States spread globally, it broke all economic theory models, and was the first truly global economic crisis.
Financial necessity had forced Marx to abandon economic studies in 1844 and give thirteen years to working on other projects. He had always sought to return to economics.
Marx continued to write articles for the "New York Daily Tribune" as long as he was sure that the "Tribune's" editorial policy was still progressive. However, the departure of Charles Dana from the paper in late 1861 and the resultant change in the editorial board brought about a new editorial policy. No longer was the "Tribune" to be a strong abolitionist paper dedicated to a complete Union victory. The new editorial board supported an immediate peace between the Union and the Confederacy in the Civil War in the United States with slavery left intact in the Confederacy. Marx strongly disagreed with this new political position and in 1863 was forced to withdraw as a writer for the "Tribune."
In 1864, Marx became involved in the International Workingmen's Association (also known as the First International), to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. In that organisation, Marx was involved in the struggle against the anarchist wing centred on Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871, when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. In response to the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, "The Civil War in France", a defence of the Commune.
Given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers' revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand capitalism and spent a great deal of time in the reading room of the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and on economic data. By 1857, Marx had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state and foreign trade and the world market, though this work did not appear in print until 1939 under the title ""Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy"".
Finally in 1859, Marx published "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", his first serious economic work. This work was intended merely as a preview of his three-volume "Das Kapital" (English title: "Capital: Critique of Political Economy"), which he intended to publish at a later date. In "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", Marx expands on the labour theory of value advocated by David Ricardo. The work was enthusiastically received, and the edition sold out quickly.
The successful sales of "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" stimulated Marx in the early 1860s to finish work on the three large volumes that would compose his major life's work – "Das Kapital" and the "Theories of Surplus Value", which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. "Theories of Surplus Value" is often referred to as the fourth volume of "Das Kapital" and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought. In 1867, the first volume of "Das Kapital" was published, a work which analysed the capitalist process of production. Here Marx elaborated his labour theory of value, which had been influenced by Thomas Hodgskin. Marx acknowledged Hodgskin's "admirable work" "Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital" at more than one point in "Capital." Indeed, Marx quoted Hodgskin as recognising the alienation of labour that occurred under modern capitalist production. No longer was there any "natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part having no value or utility of itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: 'This is my product, this will I keep to myself'". In this first volume of "Capital", Marx outlined his conception of surplus value and exploitation, which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Demand for a Russian language edition of "Capital" soon led to the printing of 3,000 copies of the book in the Russian language, which was published on 27 March 1872. By the autumn of 1871, the entire first edition of the German language edition of "Capital" had been sold out and a second edition was published.
Volumes II and III of "Capital" remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life. Both volumes were published by Engels after Marx's death. Volume II of "Capital" was prepared and published by Engels in July 1893 under the name "Capital II: The Process of Circulation of Capital". Volume III of "Capital" was published a year later in October 1894 under the name "Capital III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole". "Theories of Surplus Value" derived from the sprawling "Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863", a "second" draft for "Capital", the latter spanning volumes 30–34 of the "Collected Works of Marx and Engels". Specifically, "Theories of Surplus Value" runs from the latter part of the "Collected Works' " thirtieth volume through the end of their thirty-second volume; meanwhile, the larger "Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863" run from the start of the "Collected Works' " thirtieth volume through the first half of their thirty-fourth volume. The latter half of the Collected Works' thirty-fourth volume consists of the surviving fragments of the "Economic Manuscripts of 1863–1864", which represented a "third" draft for Capital, and a large portion of which is included as an appendix to the Penguin edition of "Capital", volume I. A German language abridged edition of "Theories of Surplus Value" was published in 1905 and in 1910. This abridged edition was translated into English and published in 1951 in London, but the complete unabridged edition of "Theories of Surplus Value" was published as the "fourth volume" of "Capital" in 1963 and 1971 in Moscow.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he became incapable of the sustained effort that had characterised his previous work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. His "Critique of the Gotha Programme" opposed the tendency of his followers Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel to compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party. This work is also notable for another famous Marx quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
In a letter to Vera Zasulich dated 8 March 1881, Marx contemplated the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village "mir". While admitting that Russia's rural "commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia", Marx also warned that in order for the mir to operate as a means for moving straight to the socialist stage without a preceding capitalist stage it "would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it (the rural commune) from all sides". Given the elimination of these pernicious influences, Marx allowed that "normal conditions of spontaneous development" of the rural commune could exist. However, in the same letter to Vera Zasulich he points out that "at the core of the capitalist system ... lies the complete separation of the producer from the means of production". In one of the drafts of this letter, Marx reveals his growing passion for anthropology, motivated by his belief that future communism would be a return on a higher level to the communism of our prehistoric past. He wrote that "the historical trend of our age is the fatal crisis which capitalist production has undergone in the European and American countries where it has reached its highest peak, a crisis that will end in its destruction, in the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type – collective production and appropriation". He added that "the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, "etc". societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies". Before he died, Marx asked Engels to write up these ideas, which were published in 1884 under the title "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State".
Marx and von Westphalen had seven children together, but partly owing to the poor conditions in which they lived whilst in London, only three survived to adulthood. The children were: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–1883); Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar (1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido"; 1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska"; 1851–1852); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898) and one more who died before being named (July 1857). There are allegations that Marx also fathered a son, Freddy, out of wedlock by his housekeeper, Helene Demuth. Although it has been claimed since 1962 that Marx was the father of Helene Demuth's illegitimate son, according to Terrell Carver, "this [claim] is not well founded on the documentary materials available".
Marx frequently used pseudonyms, often when renting a house or flat, apparently to make it harder for the authorities to track him down. While in Paris, he used that of "Monsieur Ramboz", whilst in London he signed off his letters as "A. Williams". His friends referred to him as "Moor", owing to his dark complexion and black curly hair, while he encouraged his children to call him "Old Nick" and "Charley". He also bestowed nicknames and pseudonyms on his friends and family as well, referring to Friedrich Engels as "General", his housekeeper Helene as "Lenchen" or "Nym", while one of his daughters, Jennychen, was referred to as "Qui Qui, Emperor of China" and another, Laura, was known as "Kakadou" or "the Hottentot".
Marx was afflicted by poor health (what he himself described as "the wretchedness of existence") and various authors have sought to describe and explain it. His biographer Werner Blumenberg attributed it to liver and gall problems which Marx had in 1849 and from which he was never afterwards free, exacerbated by an unsuitable lifestyle. The attacks often came with headaches, eye inflammation, neuralgia in the head and rheumatic pains. A serious nervous disorder appeared in 1877 and protracted insomnia was a consequence, which Marx fought with narcotics. The illness was aggravated by excessive nocturnal work and faulty diet. Marx was fond of highly seasoned dishes, smoked fish, caviare, pickled cucumbers, "none of which are good for liver patients", but he also liked wine and liqueurs and smoked an enormous amount "and since he had no money, it was usually bad-quality cigars". From 1863, Marx complained a lot about boils: "These are very frequent with liver patients and may be due to the same causes". The abscesses were so bad that Marx could neither sit nor work upright. According to Blumenberg, Marx's irritability is often found in liver patients:
The illness emphasised certain traits in his character. He argued cuttingly, his biting satire did not shrink at insults, and his expressions could be rude and cruel. Though in general Marx had a blind faith in his closest friends, nevertheless he himself complained that he was sometimes too mistrustful and unjust even to them. His verdicts, not only about enemies but even about friends, were sometimes so harsh that even less sensitive people would take offence ... There must have been few whom he did not criticize like this ... not even Engels was an exception.
According to Princeton historian J.E. Seigel, in his late teens Marx may have had pneumonia or pleurisy, the effects of which led to his being exempted from Prussian military service. In later life whilst working on "Capital" (which he never completed), Marx suffered from a trio of afflictions. A liver ailment, probably hereditary, was aggravated by overwork, bad diet and lack of sleep. Inflammation of the eyes was induced by too much work at night. A third affliction, eruption of carbuncles or boils, "was probably brought on by general physical debility to which the various features of Marx's style of life – alcohol, tobacco, poor diet, and failure to sleep – all contributed. Engels often exhorted Marx to alter this dangerous regime". In Professor Siegel's thesis, what lay behind this punishing sacrifice of his health may have been guilt about self-involvement and egoism, originally induced in Karl Marx by his father.
In 2007, a retrodiagnosis of Marx's skin disease was made by dermatologist Sam Shuster of Newcastle University and for Shuster the most probable explanation was that Marx suffered not from liver problems, but from hidradenitis suppurativa, a recurring infective condition arising from blockage of apocrine ducts opening into hair follicles. This condition, which was not described in the English medical literature until 1933 (hence would not have been known to Marx's physicians), can produce joint pain (which could be misdiagnosed as rheumatic disorder) and painful eye conditions. To arrive at his retrodiagnosis, Shuster considered the primary material: the Marx correspondence published in the 50 volumes of the "Marx/Engels Collected Works". There, "although the skin lesions were called 'furuncles', 'boils' and 'carbuncles' by Marx, his wife and his physicians, they were too persistent, recurrent, destructive and site-specific for that diagnosis". The sites of the persistent 'carbuncles' were noted repeatedly in the armpits, groins, perianal, genital (penis and scrotum) and suprapubic regions and inner thighs, "favoured sites of hidradenitis suppurativa". Professor Shuster claimed the diagnosis "can now be made definitively".
Shuster went on to consider the potential psychosocial effects of the disease, noting that the skin is an organ of communication and that hidradenitis suppurativa produces much psychological distress, including loathing and disgust and depression of self-image, mood and well-being, feelings for which Shuster found "much evidence" in the Marx correspondence. Professor Shuster went on to ask himself whether the mental effects of the disease affected Marx's work and even helped him to develop his theory of alienation.
Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last 15 months of his life. It eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on 14 March 1883, when he died a stateless person at age 64. Family and friends in London buried his body in Highgate Cemetery (East), London, on 17 March 1883 in an area reserved for agnostics and atheists (George Eliot's grave is nearby). There were between nine and eleven mourners at his funeral. Research from contemporary sources identifies thirteen named individuals attending the funeral. They were, Friedrich Engels, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, Paul Lafargue, Charles Longuet, Helene Demuth, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Gottlieb Lemke, Frederick Lessner, G Lochner, Sir Ray Lankester, Carl Schorlemmer and Ernest Radford. A contemporary newspaper account claims that 25 to 30 relatives and friends attended the funeral. A writer in The Graphic noted that, 'By a strange blunder ... his death was not announced for two days, and then as having taken place at Paris. Next day the correction came from Paris; and when his friends and followers hastened to his house in Haverstock Hill, to learn the time and place of burial, they learned that he was already in the cold ground. But for this secresy [sic] and haste, a great popular demonstration would undoubtedly have been held over his grave'.
Several of his closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Engels. Engels' speech included the passage:
Marx's surviving daughters Eleanor and Laura, as well as Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, Marx's two French socialist sons-in-law, were also in attendance. He had been predeceased by his wife and his eldest daughter, the latter dying a few months earlier in January 1883. Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social Democratic Party, gave a speech in German and Longuet, a prominent figure in the French working-class movement, made a short statement in French. Two telegrams from workers' parties in France and Spain were also read out. Together with Engels's speech, this constituted the entire programme of the funeral. Non-relatives attending the funeral included three communist associates of Marx: Friedrich Lessner, imprisoned for three years after the Cologne Communist Trial of 1852; G. Lochner, whom Engels described as "an old member of the Communist League"; and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a member of the Royal Society and a communist activist involved in the 1848 Baden revolution. Another attendee of the funeral was Sir Ray Lankester, a British zoologist who would later become a prominent academic.
Marx left a personal estate valued for probate at £250 (equivalent to £ in ). Upon his own death in 1895, Engels left Marx's two surviving daughters a "significant portion" of his considerable estate (valued in 2011 at US$4.8 million).
Marx and his family were reburied on a new site nearby in November 1954. The tomb at the new site, unveiled on 14 March 1956, bears the carved message: "Workers of All Lands Unite", the final line of "The Communist Manifesto"; and, from the 11th "Thesis on Feuerbach" (as edited by Engels), "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various waysthe point however is to change it". The Communist Party of Great Britain had the monument with a portrait bust by Laurence Bradshaw erected and Marx's original tomb had only humble adornment.
The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked: "One cannot say Marx died a failure" because although he had not achieved a large following of disciples in Britain, his writings had already begun to make an impact on the leftist movements in Germany and Russia. Within 25 years of his death, the continental European socialist parties that acknowledged Marx's influence on their politics were each gaining between 15 and 47 per cent in those countries with representative democratic elections.
Marx's thought demonstrates influences from many thinkers including, but not limited to:
Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism (controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin), certainly shows the influence of Hegel's claim that one should view reality (and history) dialectically. However, Hegel had thought in idealist terms, putting ideas in the forefront, whereas Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms, arguing for the primacy of matter over idea. Where Hegel saw the "spirit" as driving history, Marx saw this as an unnecessary mystification, obscuring the reality of humanity and its physical actions shaping the world. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that one needed to set it upon its feet. Despite his dislike of mystical terms, Marx used Gothic language in several of his works: in "The Communist Manifesto" he proclaims "A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre", and in "The Capital" he refers to capital as "necromancy that surrounds the products of labour".
Though inspired by French socialist and sociological thought, Marx criticised utopian socialists, arguing that their favoured small-scale socialistic communities would be bound to marginalisation and poverty and that only a large-scale change in the economic system can bring about real change.
The other important contributions to Marx's revision of Hegelianism came from Engels's book, "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844", which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution, as well as from the social democrat Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz, who in "Die Bewegung der Produktion" described the movement of society as "flowing from the contradiction between the forces of production and the mode of production."
Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx therefore concluded that a communist revolution would inevitably occur. However, Marx famously asserted in the eleventh of his "Theses on Feuerbach" that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it" and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world.
Marx's polemic with other thinkers often occurred through critique and thus he has been called "the first great user of critical method in social sciences". He criticised speculative philosophy, equating metaphysics with ideology. By adopting this approach, Marx attempted to separate key findings from ideological biases. This set him apart from many contemporary philosophers.
Like Tocqueville, who described a faceless and bureaucratic despotism with no identifiable despot, Marx also broke with classical thinkers who spoke of a single tyrant and with Montesquieu, who discussed the nature of the single despot. Instead, Marx set out to analyse "the despotism of capital". Fundamentally, Marx assumed that human history involves transforming human nature, which encompasses both human beings and material objects. Humans recognise that they possess both actual and potential selves. For both Marx and Hegel, self-development begins with an experience of internal alienation stemming from this recognition, followed by a realisation that the actual self, as a subjective agent, renders its potential counterpart an object to be apprehended. Marx further argues that by moulding nature in desired ways the subject takes the object as its own and thus permits the individual to be actualised as fully human. For Marx, the human nature – , or species-being – exists as a function of human labour. Fundamental to Marx's idea of meaningful labour is the proposition that for a subject to come to terms with its alienated object it must first exert influence upon literal, material objects in the subject's world. Marx acknowledges that Hegel "grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his ", but characterises Hegelian self-development as unduly "spiritual" and abstract. Marx thus departs from Hegel by insisting that "the fact that man is a corporeal, actual, sentient, objective being with natural capacities means that he has actual, sensuous objects for his nature as objects of his life-expression, or that he can only express his life in actual sensuous objects". Consequently, Marx revises Hegelian "work" into material "labour" and in the context of human capacity to transform nature the term "labour power".
Marx had a special concern with how people relate to their own labour power. He wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. Capitalism mediates social relationships of production (such as among workers or between workers and capitalists) through commodities, including labour, that are bought and sold on the market. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour – one's capacity to transform the world – is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature and it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss as commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behaviour merely adapt.
Commodity fetishism provides an example of what Engels called "false consciousness", which relates closely to the understanding of ideology. By "ideology", Marx and Engels meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which contemporaries see as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels's point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths, as they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods, but also the production of ideas (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). An example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right":
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis at the argued that religion had as its primary social aim the promotion of solidarity, here Marx sees the social function of religion in terms of highlighting/preserving political and economic "status quo" and inequality.
Marx was an outspoken opponent of child labour, saying that British industries "could but live by sucking blood, and children's blood too", and that U.S. capital was financed by the "capitalized blood of children".
Marx's thoughts on labour were related to the primacy he gave to the economic relation in determining the society's past, present and future (see also economic determinism). Accumulation of capital shapes the social system. For Marx, social change was about conflict between opposing interests, driven in the background by economic forces. This became the inspiration for the body of works known as the conflict theory. In his evolutionary model of history, he argued that human history began with free, productive and creative work that was over time coerced and dehumanised, a trend most apparent under capitalism. Marx noted that this was not an intentional process, rather no individual or even state can go against the forces of economy.
The organisation of society depends on means of production. The means of production are all things required to produce material goods, such as land, natural resources and technology but not human labour. The relations of production are the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together, these compose the mode of production and Marx distinguished historical eras in terms of modes of production. Marx differentiated between base and superstructure, where the base (or substructure) is the economic system and superstructure is the cultural and political system. Marx regarded this mismatch between economic base and social superstructure as a major source of social disruption and conflict.
Despite Marx's stress on critique of capitalism and discussion of the new communist society that should replace it, his explicit critique is guarded, as he saw it as an improved society compared to the past ones (slavery and feudalism). Marx never clearly discusses issues of morality and justice, but scholars agree that his work contained implicit discussion of those concepts.
Marx's view of capitalism was two-sided. On one hand, in the 19th century's deepest critique of the dehumanising aspects of this system he noted that defining features of capitalism include alienation, exploitation and recurring, cyclical depressions leading to mass unemployment. On the other hand, he characterised capitalism as "revolutionising, industrialising and universalising qualities of development, growth and progressivity" (by which Marx meant industrialisation, urbanisation, technological progress, increased productivity and growth, rationality and scientific revolution) that are responsible for progress. Marx considered the capitalist class to be one of the most revolutionary in history because it constantly improved the means of production, more so than any other class in history and was responsible for the overthrow of feudalism. Capitalism can stimulate considerable growth because the capitalist has an incentive to reinvest profits in new technologies and capital equipment.
According to Marx, capitalists take advantage of the difference between the labour market and the market for whatever commodity the capitalist can produce. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry, input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that it was based on surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce. Although Marx describes capitalists as vampires sucking worker's blood, he notes that drawing profit is "by no means an injustice" and that capitalists cannot go against the system. The problem is the "cancerous cell" of capital, understood not as property or equipment, but the relations between workers and owners – the economic system in general.
At the same time, Marx stressed that capitalism was unstable and prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies and less and less in labour. Since Marx believed that profit derived from surplus value appropriated from labour, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall as the economy grows. Marx believed that increasingly severe crises would punctuate this cycle of growth and collapse. Moreover, he believed that in the long-term, this process would enrich and empower the capitalist class and impoverish the proletariat. In section one of "The Communist Manifesto", Marx describes feudalism, capitalism and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process:
Marx believed that those structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to socialism, or a post-capitalistic, communist society:
Thanks to various processes overseen by capitalism, such as urbanisation, the working class, the proletariat, should grow in numbers and develop class consciousness, in time realising that they can and must change the system. Marx believed that if the proletariat were to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, abolishing exploiting class and introduce a system of production less vulnerable to cyclical crises. Marx argued in "The German Ideology" that capitalism will end through the organised actions of an international working class:
In this new society, the alienation would end and humans would be free to act without being bound by the labour market. It would be a democratic society, enfranchising the entire population. In such a utopian world, there would also be little need for a state, whose goal was previously to enforce the alienation. Marx theorised that between capitalism and the establishment of a socialist/communist system, would exist a period of dictatorship of the proletariat – where the working class holds political power and forcibly socialises the means of production. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat". While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional structures (such as Britain, the United States and the Netherlands), he suggested that in other countries in which workers cannot "attain their goal by peaceful means" the "lever of our revolution must be force".
Marx viewed Russia as the main counter-revolutionary threat to European revolutions. During the Crimean War, Marx backed the Ottoman Empire and its allies Britain and France against Russia. He was absolutely opposed to Pan-Slavism, viewing it as an instrument of Russian foreign policy. Marx had considered the Slavic nations except Poles as 'counter-revolutionary'. Marx and Engels published in the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" in February 1849:
Marx and Engels sympathised with the Narodnik revolutionaries of the 1860s and 1870s. When the Russian revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II of Russia, Marx expressed the hope that the assassination foreshadowed 'the formation of a Russian commune'. Marx supported the Polish uprisings against tsarist Russia. He said in a speech in London in 1867:
Marx supported the cause of Irish independence. In 1867, he wrote Engels: "I used to think the separation of Ireland from England impossible. I now think it inevitable. The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland. ... English reaction in England had its roots ... in the subjugation of Ireland."
Marx spent some time in French Algeria, which had been invaded and made a French colony in 1830, and had opportunity to observe life in colonial North Africa. He wrote about the colonial justice system, in which "a form of torture has been used (and this happens 'regularly') to extract confessions from the Arabs; naturally it is done (like the English in India) by the 'police'; the judge is supposed to know nothing at all about it." Marx was surprised by the arrogance of many European settlers in Algiers and wrote in a letter: "when a European colonist dwells among the 'lesser breeds,' either as a settler or even on business, he generally regards himself as even more inviolable than handsome William I [a Prussian king]. Still, when it comes to bare-faced arrogance and presumptuousness vis-à-vis the 'lesser breeds,' the British and Dutch outdo the French."
According to the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy": "Marx's analysis of colonialism as a progressive force bringing modernization to a backward feudal society sounds like a transparent rationalization for foreign domination. His account of British domination, however, reflects the same ambivalence that he shows towards capitalism in Europe. In both cases, Marx recognizes the immense suffering brought about during the transition from feudal to bourgeois society while insisting that the transition is both necessary and ultimately progressive. He argues that the penetration of foreign commerce will cause a social revolution in India."
Marx discussed British colonial rule in India in the "New York Herald Tribune" in June 1853:
Marx's ideas have had a profound impact on world politics and intellectual thought. Followers of Marx have often debated among themselves over how to interpret Marx's writings and apply his concepts to the modern world. The legacy of Marx's thought has become contested between numerous tendencies, each of which sees itself as Marx's most accurate interpreter. In the political realm, these tendencies include Leninism, Marxism–Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Luxemburgism and libertarian Marxism. Various currents have also developed in academic Marxism, often under influence of other views, resulting in structuralist Marxism, historical Marxism, phenomenological Marxism, analytical Marxism and Hegelian Marxism.
From an academic perspective, Marx's work contributed to the birth of modern sociology. He has been cited as one of the 19th century's three masters of the "school of suspicion" alongside Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud and as one of the three principal architects of modern social science along with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. In contrast to other philosophers, Marx offered theories that could often be tested with the scientific method. Both Marx and Auguste Comte set out to develop scientifically justified ideologies in the wake of European secularisation and new developments in the philosophies of history and science. Working in the Hegelian tradition, Marx rejected Comtean sociological positivism in an attempt to develop a "science of society". Karl Löwith considered Marx and Søren Kierkegaard to be the two greatest Hegelian philosophical successors. In modern sociological theory, Marxist sociology is recognised as one of the main classical perspectives. Isaiah Berlin considers Marx the true founder of modern sociology "in so far as anyone can claim the title". Beyond social science, he has also had a lasting legacy in philosophy, literature, the arts and the humanities.
Social theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries have pursued two main strategies in response to Marx. One move has been to reduce it to its analytical core, known as analytical Marxism. Another, more common, move has been to dilute the explanatory claims of Marx's social theory and emphasise the "relative autonomy" of aspects of social and economic life not directly related to Marx's central narrative of interaction between the development of the "forces of production" and the succession of "modes of production". Such has been for example the neo-Marxist theorising adopted by historians inspired by Marx's social theory, such as E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. It has also been a line of thinking pursued by thinkers and activists like Antonio Gramsci who have sought to understand the opportunities and the difficulties of transformative political practice, seen in the light of Marxist social theory. Marx's ideas would also have a profound influence on subsequent artists and art history, with avant-garde movements across literature, visual art, music, film and theatre.
Politically, Marx's legacy is more complex. Throughout the 20th century, revolutions in dozens of countries labelled themselves "Marxist"most notably the Russian Revolution, which led to the founding of the Soviet Union. Major world leaders including Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, Josip Broz Tito, Kwame Nkrumah, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nelson Mandela, Xi Jinping, Jean-Claude Juncker and Thomas Sankara have all cited Marx as an influence. Beyond where Marxist revolutions took place, Marx's ideas have informed political parties worldwide. In countries associated with some Marxist claims, some events have led political opponents to blame Marx for millions of deaths, but the fidelity of these varied revolutionaries, leaders and parties to Marx's work is highly contested and has been rejected by many Marxists. It is now common to distinguish between the legacy and influence of Marx specifically and the legacy and influence of those who have shaped his ideas for political purposes.
Marx remains both relevant and controversial. In May 2018, to mark the bicentenary of his birth, a 4.5m statue of him by leading Chinese sculptor Wu Weishan and donated by the Chinese government was unveiled in his birthplace of Trier. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker defended Marx's memory, saying that today Marx "stands for things which he is not responsible for and which he didn't cause because many of the things he wrote down were redrafted into the opposite".
In 2017 a feature film, "The Young Karl Marx", featuring Marx, his wife Jenny Marx, and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, among other revolutionaries and intellectuals prior to the revolutions of 1848, received good reviews for both its historical accuracy and its brio in dealing with intellectual life.
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Keno
Keno is a lottery-like gambling game often played at modern casinos, and also offered as a game by some state lotteries.
Players wager by choosing numbers ranging from 1 through (usually) 80. After all players make their wagers, 20 numbers (some variants draw fewer numbers) are drawn at random, either with a ball machine similar to ones used for lotteries and bingo, or with a random number generator.
Each casino sets its own series of payouts, called "paytables". The player is paid based on how many numbers were chosen (either player selection, or the terminal picking the numbers), the number of matches out of those chosen, and the wager.
There are a wide variety of keno paytables depending on the casino, usually with a larger "house edge" than other games offered by that casino. The house edge ranges from less than 4 percent to over 35 percent. The typical house edge for non-slot casino games is under 5%.
The word "keno" has French or Latin roots (Fr. "quine" "five winning numbers", L. "quini" "five each"), but by all accounts the game originated in China. Legend has it that the invention of the game saved an ancient city in time of war, and its widespread popularity helped raise funds to build the Great Wall of China. In modern China, the idea of using lotteries to fund a public institution was not accepted before the late 19th century.
Chinese lotteries are not documented before 1847 when the Portuguese government of Macau decided to grant a license to lottery operators. According to some, results of keno games in great cities were sent to outlying villages and hamlets by carrier pigeons, resulting in its Chinese name 白鸽票 "báigē piào", literally "white dove ticket", pronounced "baak-gap-piu" in Cantonese (on which the Western spelling 'pak-ah-pu' / 'pakapoo' was based).
The Chinese played the game using sheets printed with Chinese characters, often the first 80 characters of the "Thousand Character Classic", from which the winning characters were selected. Eventually, Chinese immigrants introduced keno to the US in the 19th century, where the name was Westernized into "boc hop bu" and "puck-apu". By 1866, it had already become a widely popular gambling game in Houston, Texas, under the name "keno".
Keno payouts are based on how many numbers the player chooses and how many of those numbers are "hit", multiplied by the proportion of the player's original wager to the "base rate" of the paytable. Typically, the more numbers a player chooses and the more numbers hit, the greater the payout, although some paytables pay for hitting a lesser number of spots. For example, it is not uncommon to see casinos paying $500 or even $1,000 for a "catch" of 0 out of 20 on a 20 spot ticket with a $5.00 wager. Payouts vary widely by casino. Most casinos allow paytable wagers of 1 through 20 numbers, but some limit the choice to only 1 through 10, 12, and 15 numbers, or "spots" as the numbers selected are known.
The probability of a player hitting all 20 numbers on a 20 spot ticket is 1 in 3,535,316,142,212,174,320.
Even though it is virtually impossible to hit all 20 numbers on a 20 spot ticket, the same player would typically also get paid for hitting "catches" 0, 1, 2, 3, and 7 through 19 out of 20, often with the 17 through 19 catches paying the same as the solid 20 hit. Some of the other paying "catches" on a 20 spot ticket or any other ticket with high "solid catch" odds are in reality very possible to hit:
Probabilities change significantly based on the number of spots that are picked on each ticket.
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Kenyanthropus
Kenyanthropus platyops is a 3.5 to 3.2-million-year-old (Pliocene) hominin fossil discovered in Lake Turkana, Kenya in 1999 by Justus Erus, who was part of Meave Leakey's team.
Archaeological discoveries in Lomekwi in 2015, identifying possibly the oldest known evidence of hominin use of tools to date, have indicated that "Kenyanthropus platyops" may have been the earliest tool-users known.
The name "Kenyanthropus platyops" was assigned to this unique species for several reasons: the genus name ""Kenyanthropus"" was proposed to recognize Kenya since so many different hominins have been discovered there, and those findings have played a significant role in understanding human evolution. The species name ""platyops"" is derived from two Greek words: "platus", which means "flat", and "opsis", which means "to appear, to look", referring to the appearance of the very flat face of the fossil cranium.
The discovery of these fossils led to the prediction of an early diet-driven adaptive radiation, which is when species diversify to fulfill new ecological niches; this would be attributed to the fact that many new species of "Australopithecus" and other hominins were being discovered that pre-dated or lived around the same time as "Australopithecus afarensis". This indicated that species were much more diverse in the distant past than previously thought. Even with the findings of a skull, their diet is still relatively unknown at this time. Also, no evidence of material culture or anything that would lead to its behavioral adaptations or lifestyle has been discovered at this time.
Several aspects of the environment in which it may have lived have been proposed, basing on faunal comparison tests with other animals that lived during their time. It is believed that they lived in a "mosaic" environment, which had both grassland and some forested areas. This is quite different from their close relative, "A. afarensis", which was found in sites such as Laetoli, Tanzania, and Hadar, Ethiopia, where they are believed to have spent a lot of time among trees.
In 1999, Meave Leakey led an expedition in Kenya to search for fossils, the second such expedition in the area. The first expedition was in 1998 in which the paratype, KNM-WT 38350 was discovered. They began to dig at a site that had yielded many other prominent hominin fossil specimens, Lake Turkana. A member of the team, Justus Erus, discovered a skull in the Nachukui Formation at Lomekwi, an area of specific geology right next to the lake. The total number of fossils recovered from both expeditions at the dig sites included a temporal bone, three partial mandibles, two partial maxillae, and forty four teeth, but it was the skull dubbed KNM-WT 40000 that sparked the most scientific interest because of its relative completeness (Leakey 2001). This skull had many characteristics that had been seen before in other specimens, however the combination of features had never been seen before; this led scientists to realize that this was indeed a separate and unique species.
KNM-WT 40000 and the other bones were collected from a dark mudstone, which contained volcanic pebbles and solidified CaCO3. The mudstone was located in between the Lokochot Tuff and the Tulu Bor Tuff in the Kataboi Member. Beneath the Lokochot Tuff were the Moiti Tuff and the Topernawi Tuff. The KNM-WT 40000 specimen was dated at 3.5 million years, with the bed dated at 3.53 million years. Directly beneath the bed was the KNM-WT 38341 specimen, which was dated at 3.53 million years. Other specimens from various localities that were found above the b-Tulu Bor Tuff were dated at around 3.3 million years. The location of the mudstone was near a shallow lake, suggesting that the hominins lived near rivers or lakes.
KNM-WT 40000 is the holotype, the specimen of which the description and name of the species is based.
The fossils of "Kenyanthropus platyops" indicate that hominins were more taxonomically diverse during the middle Pliocene, and that non-forward-projecting jaws evolved earlier that previously thought. Its facial structure and derived features of were very different from those of "Paranthropus", including almost every cranial feature. As such there was no reason to assign the new skull to the genus "Paranthropus", unless it could somehow be linked to be an earlier "Paranthropus" species. It is still thought that the differences in cranial structure are too different for even that to be a possibility. It also shows many differences to "Homo" and "Ardipithecus", and, while its cranial structure bears a few similarities to those of "Australopithecus" – such as brain size, parts of the nasal, the suborbital and the temporal regions – the differences far outweigh the similarities leading to it being placed in its new genus. White (2003) considered the "Kenyanthropus platyops" holotype a distorted specimen of "Australopithecus afarensis", viewing features cited as diagnostic for "Kenyanthropus" as caused by taphonomic distortion. Cela-Conde and Ayala (2003), for their part, proposed that "Kenyanthropus" should be consider a synonym of "Homo", with "K. platyops" being a primitive "Homo" species. Spoor et al. (2010) provided additional morphological evidence to rebuke White's (2003) conclusions by noting that the maxilla of KMN-WT-40000 is distinct from that of all australopithecines, and a 2016 study reinforced the conclusions of Spoor et al. (2010) by highlighting differences between the maxilla of "Kenyanthropus" and that of "A. afarensis" and "A. deyiremeda".
Having smaller molars at the date they existed, it is possible that the previous sister taxon of all modern hominins, "Praeanthropus afarensis", should be replaced by "Kenyanthropus". Fragmentary specimens which have proven difficult to classify are now being reassessed to see if they fit with "Kenyanthropus".
The "Kenyanthropus platyops" was examined by Collard and Wood (2001) to have two types of characteristics categorized as craniometric and traditional. Craniometric characters represent size-adjusted linear measurements between standard cranial landmarks. Traditional characters represent those most commonly used in systematic studies of apes and early hominids. These characters can be quantitative and qualitative. "Kenyanthropus platyops" was singled out by the morphology of the maxilla, characterized by a flat and relatively orthognathic subnasal region, an anteriorly placed zygomatic process and small molars. In other words, the "Kenyanthropus" had small molars and a flat face which resembled anatomically modern humans. Other features of the "Kenyanthropus" are thick enamel, steep nasal cavity entrance and moderate mandibular depth.
Although it is an extremely difficult task to figure out the evolution of the hominins, knowledge of these hominins has been growing. As indicated in the image of the family tree of the evolution of hominins, the "Australopithecus" group were known to be one of the older hominins before the finding of the "Kenyanthropus platyops" fossils in 1999. "Kenyanthropus platyops" actually made the evolutionary path of the hominins more confusing, because of the fact that the specific species represented a new type of species and genus. However, after the discovery of the fossil in Kenya, it came to the notion that the "K. platyops" were one of the earlier species, living in the same time of the "Australopithecus afarensis". After the finding of the "K. platyops" skull, the common ancestor has shifted to the "K. platyops" from the "A. afarensis".
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Karate
The Empire of Japan annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879. Karate came to the Japanese archipelago in the early 20th century during a time of migration as Ryukyuans, especially from Okinawa, looked for work in Japan. It was systematically taught in Japan after the Taishō era of 1912–1926. In 1922 the Japanese Ministry of Education invited Gichin Funakoshi to Tokyo to give a karate demonstration. In 1924 Keio University established the first university karate club in mainland Japan, and by 1932 major Japanese universities had karate clubs. In this era of escalating Japanese militarism, the name was changed from ("Chinese hand" or "Tang hand") to ("empty hand") – both of which are pronounced "karate" in Japanese – to indicate that the Japanese wished to develop the combat form in Japanese style. After World War II, Okinawa became (1945) an important United States military site and karate became popular among servicemen stationed there.
The martial-arts movies of the 1960s and 1970s served to greatly increase the popularity of martial arts around the world, and English-speakers began to use the word "karate" in a generic way to refer to all striking-based Asian martial arts. Karate schools began appearing across the world, catering to those with casual interest as well as those seeking a deeper study of the art.
Shigeru Egami, Chief Instructor of Shotokan Dōjō, opined that "the majority of followers of karate in overseas countries pursue karate only for its fighting techniques ... Movies and television ... depict karate as a mysterious way of fighting capable of causing death or injury with a single blow ... the mass media present a pseudo art far from the real thing." Shōshin Nagamine said: "Karate may be considered as the conflict within oneself or as a life-long marathon which can be won only through self-discipline, hard training and one's own creative efforts."
On 28 September 2015 karate featured on a shortlist (along with baseball, softball, skateboarding, surfing, and sport climbing) for consideration for inclusion in the 2020 Summer Olympics. On 1 June 2016 the International Olympic Committee's executive board announced they were supporting the inclusion of all five sports (counting baseball and softball as only one sport) for inclusion in the 2020 Games.
Web Japan (sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs) claims that karate has 50 million practitioners worldwide, while the World Karate Federation claims there are 100 million practitioners around the world.
"Karate" was originally written as "Chinese hand" (唐手 literally "Tang dynasty hand") in kanji. It was changed to a homophone meaning "empty hand" (空手) in 1935. The original use of the word "karate" in print is attributed to Ankō Itosu; he wrote it as "唐手". The Tang Dynasty of China ended in AD 907, but the kanji representing it remains in use in Japanese language referring to China generally, in such words as "唐人街" meaning Chinatown. Thus the word "karate" was originally a way of expressing "martial art from China."
The first documented use of a homophone of the logogram pronounced "kara" by replacing the Chinese character meaning "Tang Dynasty" with the character meaning "empty" took place in "Karate Kumite" written in August 1905 by Chōmo Hanashiro (1869–1945). Sino-Japanese relations have never been very good, and especially at the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, referring to the Chinese origins of karate was considered politically incorrect.
Another nominal development is the addition of "dō" (道:どう) to the end of the word karate. "Dō" is a suffix having numerous meanings including road, path, route, and way. It is used in many martial arts that survived Japan's transition from feudal culture to modern times. It implies that these arts are not just fighting systems but contain spiritual elements when promoted as disciplines. In this context "dō" is usually translated as "the way of ___". Examples include aikido, judo, kyūdō, and kendo. Thus karatedō is more than just empty hand techniques. It is "The Way of the Empty Hand".
Karate began as a common fighting system known as "te" (Okinawan: ti) among the Pechin class of the Ryukyuans. After trade relationships were established with the Ming dynasty of China in 1372 by King Satto of Chūzan, some forms of Chinese martial arts were introduced to the Ryukyu Islands by the visitors from China, particularly Fujian Province. A large group of Chinese families moved to Okinawa around 1392 for the purpose of cultural exchange, where they established the community of Kumemura and shared their knowledge of a wide variety of Chinese arts and sciences, including the Chinese martial arts. The political centralization of Okinawa by King Shō Hashi in 1429 and the policy of banning weapons by King Shō Shin in 1477, later enforced in Okinawa after the invasion by the Shimazu clan in 1609, are also factors that furthered the development of unarmed combat techniques in Okinawa.
There were few formal styles of "te," but rather many practitioners with their own methods. One surviving example is the Motobu-ryū school passed down from the Motobu family by Seikichi Uehara. Early styles of karate are often generalized as Shuri-te, Naha-te, and Tomari-te, named after the three cities from which they emerged. Each area and its teachers had particular kata, techniques, and principles that distinguished their local version of "te" from the others.
Members of the Okinawan upper classes were sent to China regularly to study various political and practical disciplines. The incorporation of empty-handed Chinese Kung Fu into Okinawan martial arts occurred partly because of these exchanges and partly because of growing legal restrictions on the use of weaponry. Traditional karate "kata" bear a strong resemblance to the forms found in Fujian martial arts such as Fujian White Crane, Five Ancestors, and Gangrou-quan (Hard Soft Fist; pronounced "Gōjūken" in Japanese). Many Okinawan weapons such as the sai, tonfa, and nunchaku may have originated in and around Southeast Asia.
Sakukawa Kanga (1782–1838) had studied pugilism and staff ("bo") fighting in China (according to one legend, under the guidance of Kosokun, originator of "kusanku kata"). In 1806 he started teaching a fighting art in the city of Shuri that he called "Tudi Sakukawa," which meant "Sakukawa of China Hand." This was the first known recorded reference to the art of "Tudi," written as 唐手. Around the 1820s Sakukawa's most significant student Matsumura Sōkon (1809–1899) taught a synthesis of "te" (Shuri-te and Tomari-te) and Shaolin (Chinese 少林) styles. Matsumura's style would later become the Shōrin-ryū style.
Matsumura taught his art to Itosu Ankō (1831–1915) among others. Itosu adapted two forms he had learned from Matsumura. These are "kusanku" and "chiang nan". He created the "ping'an" forms (""heian"" or ""pinan"" in Japanese) which are simplified kata for beginning students. In 1901 Itosu helped to get karate introduced into Okinawa's public schools. These forms were taught to children at the elementary school level. Itosu's influence in karate is broad. The forms he created are common across nearly all styles of karate. His students became some of the most well-known karate masters, including Gichin Funakoshi, Kenwa Mabuni, and Motobu Chōki. Itosu is sometimes referred to as "the Grandfather of Modern Karate."
In 1881 Higaonna Kanryō returned from China after years of instruction with Ryu Ryu Ko and founded what would become Naha-te. One of his students was the founder of Gojū-ryū, Chōjun Miyagi. Chōjun Miyagi taught such well-known karateka as Seko Higa (who also trained with Higaonna), Meitoku Yagi, Miyazato Ei'ichi, and Seikichi Toguchi, and for a very brief time near the end of his life, An'ichi Miyagi (a teacher claimed by Morio Higaonna).
In addition to the three early "te" styles of karate a fourth Okinawan influence is that of Kanbun Uechi (1877–1948). At the age of 20 he went to Fuzhou in Fujian Province, China, to escape Japanese military conscription. While there he studied under Shū Shiwa (Chinese: "Zhou Zihe" 1874-1926). He was a leading figure of Chinese Nanpa Shorin-ken style at that time. He later developed his own style of Uechi-ryū karate based on the Sanchin, Seisan, and Sanseiryu kata that he had studied in China.
Gichin Funakoshi, founder of Shotokan karate, is generally credited with having introduced and popularized karate on the main islands of Japan. In addition many Okinawans were actively teaching, and are thus also responsible for the development of karate on the main islands. Funakoshi was a student of both Asato Ankō and Itosu Ankō (who had worked to introduce karate to the Okinawa Prefectural School System in 1902). During this time period, prominent teachers who also influenced the spread of karate in Japan included Kenwa Mabuni, Chōjun Miyagi, Motobu Chōki, Kanken Tōyama, and Kanbun Uechi. This was a turbulent period in the history of the region. It includes Japan's annexation of the Okinawan island group in 1872, the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the annexation of Korea, and the rise of Japanese militarism (1905–1945).
Japan was invading China at the time, and Funakoshi knew that the art of Tang/China hand would not be accepted; thus the change of the art's name to "way of the empty hand." The "dō" suffix implies that "karatedō" is a path to self-knowledge, not just a study of the technical aspects of fighting. Like most martial arts practiced in Japan, karate made its transition from -"jutsu" to -"dō" around the beginning of the 20th century. The ""dō"" in "karate-dō" sets it apart from karate-"jutsu", as aikido is distinguished from aikijutsu, judo from jujutsu, kendo from kenjutsu and iaido from iaijutsu.
Funakoshi changed the names of many kata and the name of the art itself (at least on mainland Japan), doing so to get karate accepted by the Japanese budō organization Dai Nippon Butoku Kai. Funakoshi also gave Japanese names to many of the kata. The five "pinan" forms became known as "heian", the three "naihanchi" forms became known as "tekki", "seisan" as "hangetsu", "Chintō" as "gankaku", "wanshu" as "enpi", and so on. These were mostly political changes, rather than changes to the content of the forms, although Funakoshi did introduce some such changes. Funakoshi had trained in two of the popular branches of Okinawan karate of the time, Shorin-ryū and Shōrei-ryū. In Japan he was influenced by kendo, incorporating some ideas about distancing and timing into his style. He always referred to what he taught as simply karate, but in 1936 he built a dōjō in Tokyo and the style he left behind is usually called Shotokan after this dōjō. "Shoto", meaning "pine wave", was Funakoshi's pen name and "kan" meaning "hall".
The modernization and systemization of karate in Japan also included the adoption of the white uniform that consisted of the kimono and the "dogi" or "keikogi"—mostly called just karategi—and colored belt ranks. Both of these innovations were originated and popularized by Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo and one of the men Funakoshi consulted in his efforts to modernize karate.
A new form of karate called Kyokushin was formally founded in 1957 by Masutatsu Oyama (who was born a Korean, Choi Yeong-Eui 최영의). Kyokushin is largely a synthesis of Shotokan and Gōjū-ryū. It teaches a curriculum that emphasizes aliveness, physical toughness, and full contact sparring. Because of its emphasis on physical, full-force sparring, Kyokushin is now often called "full contact karate", or "Knockdown karate" (after the name for its competition rules). Many other karate organizations and styles are descended from the Kyokushin curriculum.
Karate can be practiced as an art (budō), self defense or as a combat sport. Traditional karate places emphasis on self-development (budō). Modern Japanese style training emphasizes the psychological elements incorporated into a proper "kokoro" (attitude) such as perseverance, fearlessness, virtue, and leadership skills. Sport karate places emphasis on exercise and competition. Weapons are an important training activity in some styles of karate.
Karate training is commonly divided into "kihon" (basics or fundamentals), "kata" (forms), and "kumite" (sparring).
Kihon means basics and these form the base for everything else in the style including stances, strikes, punches, kicks and blocks. Karate styles place varying importance on kihon. Typically this is training in unison of a technique or a combination of techniques by a group of karateka. Kihon may also be prearranged drills in smaller groups or in pairs.
Kata (型:かた) means literally "shape" or "model." Kata is a formalized sequence of movements which represent various offensive and defensive postures. These postures are based on idealized combat applications. The applications when applied in a demonstration with real opponents is referred to as a Bunkai. The Bunkai shows how every stance and movement is used. Bunkai is a useful tool to understand a kata.
To attain a formal rank the karateka must demonstrate competent performance of specific required kata for that level. The Japanese terminology for grades or ranks is commonly used. Requirements for examinations vary among schools.
Sparring in Karate is called kumite (組手:くみて). It literally means "meeting of hands." Kumite is practiced both as a sport and as self-defense training.
Levels of physical contact during sparring vary considerably. Full contact karate has several variants. Knockdown karate (such as Kyokushin) uses full power techniques to bring an opponent to the ground. In kickboxing variants (for example K-1), the preferred win is by knockout. Sparring in armour, "bogu kumite", allows full power techniques with some safety. Sport kumite in many international competition under the World Karate Federation is free or structured with light contact or semi contact and points are awarded by a referee.
In structured kumite ("yakusoku", prearranged), two participants perform a choreographed series of techniques with one striking while the other blocks. The form ends with one devastating technique ("hito tsuki").
In free sparring (Jiyu Kumite), the two participants have a free choice of scoring techniques. The allowed techniques and contact level are primarily determined by sport or style organization policy, but might be modified according to the age, rank and sex of the participants. Depending upon style, take-downs, sweeps and in some rare cases even time-limited grappling on the ground are also allowed.
Free sparring is performed in a marked or closed area. The bout runs for a fixed time (2 to 3 minutes.) The time can run continuously ("iri kume") or be stopped for referee judgment. In light contact or semi contact kumite, points are awarded based on the criteria: good form, sporting attitude, vigorous application, awareness/"zanshin", good timing and correct distance.
In full contact karate kumite, points are based on the results of the impact, rather than the formal appearance of the scoring technique.
In the bushidō tradition "dōjō kun" is a set of guidelines for karateka to follow. These guidelines apply both in the "dōjō" (training hall) and in everyday life.
Okinawan karate uses supplementary training known as "hojo undo". This utilizes simple equipment made of wood and stone. The "makiwara" is a striking post. The "nigiri game" is a large jar used for developing grip strength. These supplementary exercises are designed to increase strength, stamina, speed, and muscle coordination. Sport Karate emphasizes aerobic exercise, anaerobic exercise, power, agility, flexibility, and stress management. All practices vary depending upon the school and the teacher.
said, "There are no contests in karate." In pre–World War II Okinawa, kumite was not part of karate training. Shigeru Egami relates that, in 1940, some karateka were ousted from their "dōjō" because they adopted sparring after having learned it in Tokyo.
Karate is divided into style organizations. These organizations sometimes cooperate in non-style specific sport karate organizations or federations. Examples of sport organizations include AAKF/ITKF, AOK, TKL, AKA, WKF, NWUKO, WUKF and WKC. Organizations hold competitions (tournaments) from local to international level. Tournaments are designed to match members of opposing schools or styles against one another in kata, sparring and weapons demonstration. They are often separated by age, rank and sex with potentially different rules or standards based on these factors. The tournament may be exclusively for members of a particular style (closed) or one in which any martial artist from any style may participate within the rules of the tournament (open).
The World Karate Federation (WKF) is the largest sport karate organization and is recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as being responsible for karate competition in the Olympic Games. The WKF has developed common rules governing all styles. The national WKF organizations coordinate with their respective National Olympic Committees.
WKF karate competition has two disciplines: sparring ("kumite") and forms ("kata"). Competitors may enter either as individuals or as part of a team. Evaluation for kata and kobudō is performed by a panel of judges, whereas sparring is judged by a head referee, usually with assistant referees at the side of the sparring area. Sparring matches are typically divided by weight, age, gender, and experience.
WKF only allows membership through one national organization/federation per country to which clubs may join. The World Union of Karate-do Federations (WUKF) offers different styles and federations a world body they may join, without having to compromise their style or size. The WUKF accepts more than one federation or association per country.
Sport organizations use different competition rule systems. Light contact rules are used by the WKF, WUKO, IASK and WKC. Full contact karate rules used by Kyokushinkai, Seidokaikan and other organizations. Bogu kumite (full contact with protective shielding of targets) rules are used in the World Koshiki Karate-Do Federation organization. Shinkaratedo Federation use boxing gloves. Within the United States, rules may be under the jurisdiction of state sports authorities, such as the boxing commission.
In August 2016, the International Olympic Committee approved karate as an Olympic sport beginning at the 2020 Summer Olympics.
Karate, although not widely used in mixed martial arts, has been effective for some MMA practitioners.
Various styles of karate are practiced in MMA: Lyoto Machida and John Makdessi practice Shotokan; Bas Rutten and Georges St-Pierre train in Kyokushin; and Michelle Waterson holds a black belt in American Free Style Karate.
In 1924 Gichin Funakoshi, founder of Shotokan Karate, adopted the Dan system from the judo founder Jigoro Kano using a rank scheme with a limited set of belt colors. Other Okinawan teachers also adopted this practice. In the Kyū/Dan system the beginner grades start with a higher numbered kyū ("e.g.", 10th Kyū or Jukyū) and progress toward a lower numbered kyū. The Dan progression continues from 1st Dan (Shodan, or 'beginning dan') to the higher dan grades. Kyū-grade karateka are referred to as "color belt" or mudansha ("ones without dan/rank"). Dan-grade karateka are referred to as "yudansha" (holders of dan/rank). Yudansha typically wear a black belt. Normally, the first five to six dans are given by examination by superior dan holders, while the subsequent (7 and up) are honorary, given for special merits and/or age reached.
Requirements of rank differ among styles, organizations, and schools. Kyū ranks stress stance, balance, and coordination. Speed and power are added at higher grades.
Minimum age and time in rank are factors affecting promotion. Testing consists of demonstration of techniques before a panel of examiners. This will vary by school, but testing may include everything learned at that point, or just new information. The demonstration is an application for new rank (shinsa) and may include kata, bunkai, self-defense, routines, tameshiwari (breaking), and kumite (sparring).
In "Karate-Do Kyohan," Funakoshi quoted from the Heart Sutra, which is prominent in Shingon Buddhism: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form itself" ("shiki zokuze kū kū zokuze shiki").
He interpreted the "kara" of Karate-dō to mean "to purge oneself of selfish and evil thoughts ... for only with a clear mind and conscience can the practitioner understand the knowledge which he receives." Funakoshi believed that one should be "inwardly humble and outwardly gentle." Only by behaving humbly can one be open to Karate's many lessons. This is done by listening and being receptive to criticism. He considered courtesy of prime importance. He said that "Karate is properly applied only in those rare situations in which one really must either down another or be downed by him." Funakoshi did not consider it unusual for a devotee to use Karate in a real physical confrontation no more than perhaps once in a lifetime. He stated that Karate practitioners must "never be easily drawn into a fight." It is understood that one blow from a real expert could mean death. It is clear that those who misuse what they have learned bring dishonor upon themselves. He promoted the character trait of personal conviction. In "time of grave public crisis, one must have the courage ... to face a million and one opponents." He taught that indecisiveness is a weakness.
Karate has grown in popularity in Africa, particularly in South Africa and Ghana.
Karate began in Canada in the 1930s and 1940s as Japanese people immigrated to the country. Karate was practised quietly without a large amount of organization. During the Second World War, many Japanese-Canadian families were moved to the interior of British Columbia. Masaru Shintani, at the age of 13, began to study Shorin-Ryu karate in the Japanese camp under Kitigawa. In 1956 after 9 years of training with Kitigawa, Shintani travelled to Japan and met Hironori Otsuka (Wado Ryu). In 1958 Otsuka invited Shintani to join his organization Wado Kai, and in 1969 he asked Shintani to officially call his style Wado.
In Canada during this same time, karate was also introduced by Masami Tsuruoka who had studied in Japan in the 1940s under Tsuyoshi Chitose. In 1954 Tsuruoka initiated the first karate competition in Canada and laid the foundation for the National Karate Association.
In the late 1950s Shintani moved to Ontario and began teaching karate and judo at the Japanese Cultural Centre in Hamilton. In 1966 he began (with Otsuka's endorsement) the Shintani Wado Kai Karate Federation. During the 1970s Otsuka appointed Shintani the Supreme Instructor of Wado Kai in North America. In 1979, Otsuka publicly promoted Shintani to hachidan (8th dan) and privately gave him a kudan certificate (9th dan), which was revealed by Shintani in 1995. Shintani and Otsuka visited each other in Japan and Canada several times, the last time in 1980 two years prior to Otsuka's death. Shintani died 7 May 2000.
In the 1950s and 1960s, several Japanese karate masters began to teach the art in Europe, but it was not until 1965 that the Japan Karate Association (JKA) sent to Europe four well-trained young Karate instructors Taiji Kase, Keinosuke Enoeda, Hirokazu Kanazawa and Hiroshi Shirai. Kase went to France, Enoeada to England and Shirai in Italy. These Masters maintained always a strong link between them, the JKA and the others JKA masters in the world, especially Hidetaka Nishiyama in the US
France Shotokan Karate was created in 1964 by Tsutomu Ohshima. It is affiliated with another of his organizations, Shotokan Karate of America (SKA). However, in 1965 Taiji Kase came from Japan along with Enoeda and Shirai, who went to England and Italy respectively, and karate came under the influence of the JKA.
Hiroshi Shirai, one of the original instructors sent by the JKA to Europe along with Kase, Enoeda and Kanazawa, moved to Italy in 1965 and quickly established a Shotokan enclave that spawned several instructors who in their turn soon spread the style all over the country. By 1970 Shotokan karate was the most spread martial art in Italy apart from Judo. Other styles such as Wado Ryu, Goju Ryu and Shito Ryu, are present and well established in Italy, while Shotokan remains the most popular.
Due to past conflict between Korea and Japan, most notably during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 20th century, the influence of karate in Korea is a contentious issue. From 1910 until 1945, Korea was annexed by the Japanese Empire. It was during this time that many of the Korean martial arts masters of the 20th century were exposed to Japanese karate. After regaining independence from Japan, many Korean martial arts schools that opened up in the 1940s and 1950s were founded by masters who had trained in karate in Japan as part of their martial arts training.
Won Kuk Lee, a Korean student of Funakoshi, founded the first martial arts school after the Japanese occupation of Korea ended in 1945, called the Chung Do Kwan. Having studied under Gichin Funakoshi at Chuo University, Lee had incorporated taekkyon, kung fu, and karate in the martial art that he taught which he called "Tang Soo Do", the Korean transliteration of the Chinese characters for "Way of Chinese Hand" (唐手道). In the mid-1950s, the martial arts schools were unified under President Rhee Syngman's order, and became taekwondo under the leadership of Choi Hong Hi and a committee of Korean masters. Choi, a significant figure in taekwondo history, had also studied karate under Funakoshi. Karate also provided an important comparative model for the early founders of taekwondo in the formalization of their art including hyung and the belt ranking system. The original taekwondo "hyung" were identical to karate "kata". Eventually, original Korean forms were developed by individual schools and associations. Although the World Taekwondo Federation and International Taekwon-Do Federation are the most prominent among Korean martial arts organizations, "tang soo do" schools that teach Japanese karate still exist as they were originally conveyed to Won Kuk Lee and his contemporaries from Funakoshi.
Karate appeared in the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s, during Nikita Khrushchev's policy of improved international relations. The first Shotokan clubs were opened in Moscow's universities. In 1973, however, the government banned karate—together with all other foreign martial arts—endorsing only the Soviet martial art of sambo. Failing to suppress these uncontrolled groups, the USSR's Sport Committee formed the Karate Federation of USSR in December 1978. On 17 May 1984, the Soviet Karate Federation was disbanded and all karate became illegal again. In 1989, karate practice became legal again, but under strict government regulations, only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 did independent karate schools resume functioning, and so federations were formed and national tournaments in authentic styles began.
Vernon Bell, a 3rd Dan Judo instructor who had been instructed by Kenshiro Abbe introduced Karate to England in 1956, having attended classes in Henry Plée's Yoseikan "dōjō" in Paris. Yoseikan had been founded by Minoru Mochizuki, a master of multiple Japanese martial arts, who had studied Karate with Gichin Funakoshi, thus the Yoseikan style was heavily influenced by Shotokan. Bell began teaching in the tennis courts of his parents' back garden in Ilford, Essex and his group was to become the British Karate Federation. On 19 July 1957, Vietnamese Hoang Nam 3rd Dan, billed as "Karate champion of Indo China", was invited to teach by Bell at Maybush Road, but the first instructor from Japan was Tetsuji Murakami (1927–1987) a 3rd Dan Yoseikan under Minoru Mochizuki and 1st Dan of the JKA, who arrived in England in July 1959. In 1959 Frederick Gille set up the Liverpool branch of the British Karate Federation, which was officially recognised in 1961. The Liverpool branch was based at Harold House Jewish Boys Club in Chatham Street before relocating to the YMCA in Everton where it became known as the Red Triangle. One of the early members of this branch was Andy Sherry who had previously studied Jujutsu with Jack Britten. In 1961 Edward Ainsworth, another blackbelt Judoka, set up the first Karate study group in Ayrshire, Scotland having attended Bell's third 'Karate Summer School' in 1961.
Outside of Bell's organisation, Charles Mack traveled to Japan and studied under Masatoshi Nakayama of the Japan Karate Association who graded Mack to 1st Dan Shotokan on 4 March 1962 in Japan. Shotokai Karate was introduced to England in 1963 by another of Gichin Funakoshi's students, Mitsusuke Harada. Outside of the Shotokan stable of karate styles, Wado Ryu Karate was also an early adopted style in the UK, introduced by Tatsuo Suzuki, a 6th Dan at the time in 1964.
Despite the early adoption of Shotokan in the UK, it was not until 1964 that JKA Shotokan officially came to the UK. Bell had been corresponding with the JKA in Tokyo asking for his grades to be ratified in Shotokan having apparently learnt that Murakami was not a designated representative of the JKA. The JKA obliged, and without enforcing a grading on Bell, ratified his black belt on 5 February 1964, though he had to relinquish his Yoseikan grade. Bell requested a visitation from JKA instructors and the next year Taiji Kase, Hirokazu Kanazawa, Keinosuke Enoeda and Hiroshi Shirai gave the first JKA demo at Kensington Town Hall on 21 April 1965. Hirokazu Kanazawa and Keinosuke Enoeda stayed and Murakami left (later re-emerging as a 5th Dan Shotokai under Harada).
In 1966, members of the former British Karate Federation established the Karate Union of Great Britain (KUGB) under Hirokazu Kanazawa as chief instructor and affiliated to JKA. Keinosuke Enoeda came to England at the same time as Kanazawa, teaching at a "dōjō" in Liverpool. Kanazawa left the UK after 3 years and Enoeda took over. After Enoeda's death in 2003, the KUGB elected Andy Sherry as Chief Instructor. Shortly after this, a new association split off from KUGB, JKA England.
An earlier significant split from the KUGB took place in 1991 when a group led by KUGB senior instructor Steve Cattle formed the English Shotokan Academy (ESA). The aim of this group was to follow the teachings of Taiji Kase, formerly the JKA chief instructor in Europe, who along with Hiroshi Shirai created the World Shotokan Karate-do Academy (WKSA), in 1989 in order to pursue the teaching of "Budo" karate as opposed to what he viewed as "sport karate". Kase sought to return the practice of Shotokan Karate to its martial roots, reintroducing amongst other things open hand and throwing techniques that had been side lined as the result of competition rules introduced by the JKA. Both the ESA and the WKSA (renamed the Kase-Ha Shotokan-Ryu Karate-do Academy (KSKA) after Kase's death in 2004) continue following this path today.
In 1975 Great Britain became the first team ever to take the World male team title from Japan after being defeated the previous year in the final.
After World War II, members of the United States military learned karate in Okinawa or Japan and then opened schools in the US. In 1945 Robert Trias opened the first "dōjō" in the United States in Phoenix, Arizona, a Shuri-ryū karate "dōjō". In the 1950s, William J. Dometrich, Ed Parker, Cecil T. Patterson, Gordon Doversola, Donald Hugh Nagle, George Mattson and Peter Urban all began instructing in the US.
Tsutomu Ohshima began studying karate under Shotokan's founder, Gichin Funakoshi, while a student at Waseda University, beginning in 1948. In 1957 Ohshima received his godan (fifth degree black belt), the highest rank awarded by Funakoshi. He founded the first university karate club in the United States at California Institute of Technology in 1957. In 1959 he founded the Southern California Karate Association (SCKA) which was renamed Shotokan Karate of America (SKA) in 1969.
In the 1960s, Anthony Mirakian, Richard Kim, Teruyuki Okazaki, John Pachivas, Allen Steen, Gosei Yamaguchi (son of Gōgen Yamaguchi), Michael G. Foster and Pat Burleson began teaching martial arts around the country.
In 1961 Hidetaka Nishiyama, a co-founder of the Japan Karate Association (JKA) and student of Gichin Funakoshi, began teaching in the United States. He founded the International Traditional Karate Federation (ITKF). Takayuki Mikami was sent to New Orleans by the JKA in 1963.
In 1964, Takayuki Kubota relocated the International Karate Association from Tokyo to California.
Karate spread rapidly in the West through popular culture. In 1950s popular fiction, karate was at times described to readers in near-mythical terms, and it was credible to show Western experts of unarmed combat as unaware of Eastern martial arts of this kind. Following the inclusion of judo at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, there was growing mainstream Western interest in Japanese martial arts, particularly karate, during the 1960s. By the 1970s, martial arts films (especially kung fu films and Bruce Lee flicks from Hong Kong) had formed a mainstream genre and launched the "kung fu craze" which propelled karate and other Asian martial arts into mass popularity. However, mainstream audiences at the time generally did not distinguish between different Asian martial arts such as karate, kung fu and tae kwon do.
"The Karate Kid" (1984) and its sequels "The Karate Kid, Part II" (1986), "The Karate Kid, Part III" (1989) and "The Next Karate Kid" (1994) are films relating the fictional story of an American adolescent's introduction into karate. The success of "The Karate Kid" further popularized karate (as opposed to Asian martial arts more generally) in mainstream American popular culture. "Karate Kommandos" is an animated children's show, with Chuck Norris appearing to reveal the moral lessons contained in every episode.
Many other film stars such as Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Jet Li come from a range of other martial arts.
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Kickboxing
Kickboxing is a stand-up combat sport based on kicking and punching, historically developed from karate mixed with boxing. Kickboxing is practiced for self-defence, general fitness, or as a contact sport.
Japanese kickboxing originated in the late 1950s, with competitions held since then. American kickboxing originated in the 1970s and was brought to prominence in September 1974, when the Professional Karate Association (PKA) held the first World Championships. Historically, kickboxing can be considered a hybrid martial art formed from the combination of elements of various traditional styles. This approach became increasingly popular since the 1970s, and since the 1990s, kickboxing has contributed to the emergence of mixed martial arts via further hybridization with ground fighting techniques from Brazilian jiu-jitsu and folk wrestling.
There is no single international governing body. International governing bodies include the World Association of Kickboxing Organizations( also known as WAKO), World Kickboxing Association, International Sport Karate Association, International Kickboxing Federation, and World Kickboxing Network, among others. Consequently, there is no single kickboxing world championship, and champion titles are issued by individual promotions, such as Glory, ONE Championship, K-1, SUPERKOMBAT and Kunlun Fight among others. Bouts organized under different governing bodies apply different rules, such as allowing the use of knees or clinching, etc.
The term "kickboxing" can be used in a narrow and in a broad sense.
The term itself was introduced in the 1960s as a Japanese anglicism by Japanese boxing promoter Osamu Noguchi for a hybrid martial art combining Muay Thai and karate which he had introduced in 1958. The term was later also adopted by the American variant. Since there has been a lot of cross-fertilization between these styles, with many practitioners training or competing under the rules of more than one style, the history of the individual styles cannot be seen in isolation from one another.
The French term "Boxe pieds-poings" (literally "feet-fists-boxing") is also used in the sense of "kickboxing" in the general meaning, including French boxing (Savate) as well as American, Dutch and Japanese kickboxing, Burmese and Thai boxing, any style of full contact karate, etc.
Arts labeled as "kickboxing" in the general sense include:
Since kickboxing is a broad term, understanding the history can be somewhat difficult. Some of the earliest forms of kickboxing included the various Indochinese martial arts especially muay boran, which developed into modern Muay Thai.
However, in terms of modern competition, it was during the 1950s that a Japanese karateka named Tatsuo Yamada first established an outline of a new sport that combined karate and Muay Thai.
This was further explored during the early 1960s, when competitions between karate and Muay Thai began, which allowed for rule modifications to take place. By the middle of the decade the first true kickboxing events were being held in Osaka.
By the 1970s and 1980s, the sport had expanded beyond Japan and had reached North America and Europe. It was during this time that many of the most prominent governing bodies were formed.
Since the 1990s the sport has been mostly dominated by the Japanese K-1 promotion, with some competition coming from other promotions and mostly pre-existing governing bodies.
Along with the growing popularity in competition, there has been an increased amount of participation and exposure in the mass media, fitness, and self-defense.
On December 20, 1959, a Muay Thai match among Thai fighters was held at Asakusa town hall in Tokyo. Tatsuo Yamada, who established ""Nihon Kempo Karate-do"", was interested in Muay Thai because he wanted to perform karate matches with full-contact rules since practitioners are not allowed to hit each other directly in karate matches. At this time, it was unimaginable to hit each other in karate matches in Japan. He had already announced his plan which was named ""The draft principles of project of establishment of a new sport and its industrialization"" in November 1959, and he proposed the tentative name of "karate-boxing" for this new sport. It is still unknown whether Nak Muay were invited by Yamada, but it is clear that Yamada was the only karateka who was really interested in Muay Thai. Yamada invited a champion Nak Muay (and formerly his son Kan Yamada's sparring partner), and started studying Muay Thai. At this time, the Thai fighter was taken by Osamu Noguchi who was a promoter of boxing and was also interested in Muay Thai. The Thai fighter's photo was on the magazine "The Primer of Nihon Kempo Karate-do, the first number" which was published by Yamada.
There were "Karate vs. Muay Thai fights" on February 12, 1963. The three karate fighters from "Oyama dojo" (kyokushin later) went to the Lumpinee Boxing Stadium in Thailand and fought against three Muay Thai fighters. The three kyokushin karate fighters' names are Tadashi Nakamura, Kenji Kurosaki and Akio Fujihira (also known as Noboru Osawa). The Muay Thai team were composed of only one authentic Thai fighter. Japan won by 2–1: Tadashi Nakamura and Akio Fujihira both KOed opponents by punch while Kenji Kurosaki, who fought the Thai, was KOed by elbow. The only Japanese loser Kenji Kurosaki was then a kyokushin instructor rather than a contender and temporarily designated as a substitute for the absent chosen fighter. On June of the same year, karateka and future kickboxer Tadashi Sawamura faced against top Thai fighter Samarn Sor Adisorn, in which Sawamura was knocked down 16 times and defeated. Sawamura would use what he learned in that fight to incorporate in the evolving kickboxing tournaments.
Noguchi studied Muay Thai and developed a combined martial art which Noguchi named "kick boxing", which absorbed and adopted more rules than techniques from Muay Thai. The main techniques of kickboxing are still derived from Japanese full contact karate (kyokushin). However, throwing and butting were allowed in the beginning to distinguish it from Muay Thai. This was later repealed. The "Kickboxing Association", the first kickboxing sanctioning body, was founded by Osamu Noguchi in 1966 soon after that. Then the first kickboxing event was held in Osaka on April 11, 1966.
Tatsu Yamada died in 1967, but his dojo changed its name to "Suginami Gym", and kept sending kickboxers off to support kickboxing.
Kickboxing boomed and became popular in Japan as it began to be broadcast on TV. By 1970, kickboxing was telecast in Japan on three different channels three times weekly. The fight cards regularly included bouts between Japanese (kickboxers) and Thai (Muay Thai) boxers. Tadashi Sawamura was an especially popular early kickboxer. In 1971 the All Japan Kickboxing Association (AJKA) was established and it registered approximately 700 kickboxers. The first AJKA Commissioner was Shintaro Ishihara, the longtime Governor of Tokyo. Champions were in each weight division from fly to middle. Longtime Ilyushiner Noboru Osawa won the AJKA bantamweight title, which he held for years. Raymond Edler, an American university student studying at Sophia University in Tokyo, took up kickboxing and won the AJKC middleweight title in 1972; he was the first non-Thai to be officially ranked in the sport of Thai boxing, when in 1972 Rajadamnern ranked him no. 3 in the Middleweight division. Edler defended the All Japan title several times and abandoned it. Other popular champions were Toshio Fujiwara and Mitsuo Shima. Most notably, Fujiwara was the first non-Thai to win an official Thai boxing title, when he defeated his Thai opponent in 1978 at Rajadamnern Stadium winning the lightweight championship bout.
By 1980, due to poor ratings and then infrequent television coverage, the golden-age of kickboxing in Japan was suddenly finished.
Kickboxing had not been seen on TV until K-1 was founded in 1993.
In 1993, as Kazuyoshi Ishii (founder of Seidokaikan karate) produced K-1 under special kickboxing rules (no elbow and neck wrestling) in 1993, kickboxing became famous again.
In the mid-1980s to early 1990s, before the first k-1, Kazuyoshi Ishii also partook in the formation of glove karate as an amateur sport in Japan. Glove karate is based on knockdown karate rules, but wearing boxing gloves and allowing punches to the head. In effect, it is oriental rules kickboxing with scoring based on knockdowns and aggression rather than the number of hits. As K-1 grew in popularity, Glove karate for a while became the fastest growing amateur sport in Japan.
Count Dante, Ray Scarica and Maung Gyi held the United States' earliest
cross-style full-contact style martial arts tournaments as early as 1962.
Between 1970 and 1973 a handful of kickboxing promotions were staged across the USA. The first recognized bout of this kind occurred on January 17, 1970, and came about when Joe Lewis, a Shorin Ryu stylist who had also studied Jeet Kune Do with the legendary Bruce Lee, and noted champion in the Karate tournament circuit, grew disillusioned with the point-sparring format and sought to create an event that would allow martial artists to fight to the knock out. Enlisting the help of promoter Lee Faulkner, training in boxing and combining the techniques of boxing and Karate for the first time in America, Lewis arranged the bout to be held at the 1st Pro Team Karate Championships. Lewis faced Kenpo stylist Greg "Om" Baines, who had defeated two opponents in years pasts. Lewis won the fight by knockout in the second round. The event was advertised as "Full contact" but the announcers referred to it as Kickboxing, and rules included knees, elbows and sweeps. Lewis would defend his U.S Heavyweight champion title 10 times, remaining undefeated until he came back from his retirement. In the early days, the rules were never clear; one of the first tournaments had no weight divisions and all the competitors fought off until one was left. During this early time, kickboxing and full contact karate are essentially the same sport.
The institutional separation of American full-contact karate from kickboxing occurred with the formation of the Professional Karate Association (PKA) in 1974 and of the World Kickboxing Association (WKA) in 1976.
They were the first organised body of martial arts on a global scale to sanction fights, create ranking systems, and institute a development programme.
The International Kickboxing Federation (IKF) and the International Sport Kickboxing Association (ISKA) have been the only organizations to have thrived in the modern era.
The International Kickboxing Federation (IKF) was founded in 1992 by Steve Fossum and Dan Stell. Stell eventually stepped down to go back to fighting while Fossum continued with the organization. In 1999 Fossum and Joe Taylor of Ringside Products created the first amateur open North American tournament for Kickboxing and Muay Thai, now the IKF World Classic.
After ending its venture with K-1 in 2006, ISKA co-operated the World Combat League with Chuck Norris, and Strikeforce MMA in partnership with Silicon Valley Entertainment (SVE), an investor group who also own the San Jose Sharks. Norris passed the WCL to his son-in-law Damien Diciolli in 2007, and it has since become inactive. Strikeforce MMA was sold to UFC in 2011.
The ISKA expanded into sport (tournament) martial arts about 15 years ago, and is a co-operator along with WAKO and Global Marketing Ventures (GMV) in the global Open World Tour (OWT) the first worldwide pro circuit of sport karate professional competitors. It sanctions and assists in the annual US Open & ISKA World Championships that anchors the OWT and the North American-based NASKA Tour. The US Open & ISKA World Championships is broadcast live on ESPN2 and ESPN3 each year.
Other kickboxing sanctioning bodies include World Association of Kickboxing Organizations (primarily amateurs) and KICK International.
In West Germany, American-styled kickboxing was promulgated from its inception in the 1970s by Georg F. Bruckner, who in 1976 was the co-founder of the World Association of Kickboxing Organizations. The term "kickboxing" as used in German-speaking Europe is therefore mostly synonymous with American kickboxing. The elbow and knee techniques allowed in Japanese kickboxing, by contrast, were associated with Muay Thai, and Japanese kickboxing went mostly unnoticed in German-speaking Europe before the launch of K-1 in 1993.
By contrast, in the Netherlands kickboxing was introduced in its Japanese form, by Jan Plas and Thom Harinck who founded NKBB (The Dutch Kickboxing Association) in 1976.
Harinck also founded the MTBN (Dutch Muay Thai Association) in 1983, and the WMTA (World Muay Thai Association) and the EMTA (European Muay Thai Association) in 1984.
The most prominent kickboxing gyms in the Netherlands, Mejiro Gym, Chakuriki Gym and Golden Glory, were all derived from or were significantly influenced by Japanese kickboxing and kyokushin karate.
Dutch athletes have been very successful in the K-1 competitions.
Out of the 19 K-1 World Grand Prix championship titles issued from 1993 to 2012, 15 went to Dutch participants (Peter Aerts, Ernesto Hoost, Remy Bonjasky, Semmy Schilt and Alistair Overeem). The remaining four titles were won by Branko Cikatić of Croatia in 1993, Andy Hug of Switzerland in 1996, Mark Hunt of New Zealand in 2001 and Mirko Filipović of Croatia in 2012.
Some of the top kickboxing promotions in the world are:
Some of the top kickboxing promoters in the world are:
Kickboxing has a number of different rulesets. For example, American kickboxing and/or American full contact karate restricts to strikes using punches and higher kicks; whereas some other arts often regarded as "kickboxing" allow low kicks and even knee strikes, elbows, and grappling maneuvers. All forms of kickboxing use an identical scoring system, however. A winner is declared during the bout if there is a submission (fighter quits or fighter's corner throws in the towel), knockout (KO), or referee stoppage (technical knockout, or TKO). If all of the rounds expire with no knockout then the fight is scored by a team of 3 judges. The judges determine a winner based on their scoring of each round. A split decision indicates a disagreement between the judges, while a unanimous decision indicates that all judges saw the fight the same way and all have declared the same winner.
Full contact rules, or American kickboxing, is essentially a mixture of Western boxing and traditional karate. The male kickboxers are bare-chested wearing kickboxing trousers and protective gear including: mouth-guard, hand-wraps, . boxing gloves, groin-guard, shin-pads, and kick-boots and protective helmet (for amateurs and those under 16). Female kickboxers will wear a sports bra and chest protection in addition to the male clothing/protective gear.
Notable fighters under full contact rules include, Dennis Alexio, Joe Lewis, Rick Roufus, Jean-Yves Thériault, Benny Urquidez, Bill Wallace, Demetrius Havanas, Billy Jackson, Pete Cunningham, and Don "The Dragon" Wilson
Rules:
Semi-contact rules or Points Fighting, is the variant of American kickboxing most similar to karate, since it consists in fighting for the purpose of scoring points with an emphasis on delivery, speed, and technique. Under such rules, fights are held on the tatami, presenting the belts to classify the fighters in order of experience and ability. The male kickboxers wear shirts and kickboxing trousers as well as protective gear including: mouth-guard, hand-wraps, . boxing gloves, groin-guard, shin-pads, kick-boots, and headgear. The female kickboxers will wear a sports bra and chest protection in addition to the male clothing/protective gear.
Notable fighters under semi-contact rules include Raymond Daniels, Michael Page, and Gregorio Di Leo.
Rules:
International rules, or freestyle kickboxing (also known simply as kickboxing in Europe and Low Kick in the United States), contrasts with full contact rules in that it also allows low kicks. The male kickboxers are bare-chested wearing kickboxing trousers or shorts and protective gear including: mouth-guard, hand-wraps, shin-wraps, . boxing gloves and groin-guard. The female kickboxers will wear a sports bra and chest protection in addition to the male clothing/protective gear.
Notable fighters under international rules include Rick Roufus and Abraham Roqueñi.
Rules:
Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, rules usually sees bouts contested over 5, 3 minute rounds and male fighters bare-chested wearing shorts and protective gear including: mouth-guard, hand-wraps, shin-wraps, . boxing gloves, groin-guard and sometimes "prajioud" arm bands. The female Thaiboxers will wear a sports bra and chest protection in addition to the male clothing/protective gear. Muay Thai is unique in that it is the only style of kickboxing that allows elbows, knees, clinch fighting, throws, sweeps and low kicks. Groin strikes were allowed until the 1980s in international Muay Thai and are still permitted in Thailand itself (though the boxers wear cups to lessen the impact). Kicking to mid-body and head are scored highly generating a large number of points on judges' scorecards. Moreover, kicking is still judged highly even if the kick was blocked. In contrast, punching is worth fewer points.
Notable fighters under Muay Thai rules include Apidej Sit Hrun, Buakaw Por. Pramuk, Changpuek Kiatsongrit, Rob Kaman, Ramon Dekkers, Coban Lookchaomaesaitong, Dieselnoi Chor Thanasukarn, Saenchai P.K. Saenchaimuaythaigym, Samart Payakaroon and Yodsanklai Fairtex.
Rules:
Oriental rules, also known as K-1 rules and Japanese kickboxing or Dutch-style kickboxing, began to be developed by the Japanese boxing promoter Osamu Noguchi and Karate practitioner Tatsuo Yamada, and was also affected by the European Muay Thai rules, which was first installed in Netherlands in the 1970s. It was the first combat sport that adopted the name of "kickboxing" in 1966, later termed "Japanese kickboxing" as a retronym. The primary difference between the original Thai rules and the Dutch counterpart was the prohibition of the use of elbows and multiple knees to the head, for preventing premature stoppage, which can be resulted from facial cuts, so the Thai boxing matches can become more accessible for TV viewers. Oriental rules bouts were traditionally fought over 5, 3-minute rounds but 3 round bouts have since popular. The male kickboxers are bare-chested wearing shorts (although trousers and karate gis have been worn) and protective gear including: mouth-guard, hand-wraps, shin-wraps, .
Notable fighters under K-1 rules include Semmy Schilt, Ernesto Hoost, Albert Kraus, Masato, Peter Aerts, Remy Bonjasky, Giorgio Petrosyan, Buakaw, and Andy Souwer.
Rules:
Sanshou, or Sanda, (also known as Chinese boxing) is a form of kickboxing originally developed by the Chinese military based upon the study and practices of traditional Kung fu and modern combat fighting techniques; it combines traditional kickboxing, which include close range and rapid successive punches and kicks, with wrestling, takedowns, throws, sweeps, kick catches, and in some competitions, even elbow and knee strikes. The male fighters are bare-chested wearing shorts and protective gear including: mouth-guard, hand-wraps, boxing gloves and groin-guard. The female kickboxers will wear a sports bra and chest protection in addition to the male clothing/protective gear.
Notable fighters under Sanshou rules include Pat Barry, Zhang Tiequan, Liu Hailong, Cung Le, Shahbulat Shamhalaev and Shamil Zavurov.
Rules:
Shoot boxing is a unique style of kickboxing popular in Japan that utilizes standing submissions such as chokeholds, armlocks and wristlocks in addition to kicks, punches, knees and throws. The male fighters are bare-chested wearing skin tight trousers and protective gear including: mouth-guard, hand-wraps, . boxing gloves and groin-guard. The female kickboxers will wear a sports bra and chest protection in addition to the male clothing/protective gear.
Notable fighters under shoot boxing rules include Rena Kubota, Kenichi Ogata, Hiroki Shishido, Ai Takahashi and Andy Souwer.
Rules:
Lethwei is a type of kickboxing originating from Myanmar that features minimal rules and protective equipment. Lethwei not only allows the use of headbutts but actually emphasizes it, and fighters wear no gloves. Bouts can only be won with a knockout, either a proper or a technical. Uniquely, after one knockout and two minutes rest, the knocked out fighter may still choose to continue the fight once, unless they are knocked out in the final round. There are no points; if no knockout happens before the end of the fifth round, the fight is declared a draw. Male fighters are bare-chested and wear shorts. Protective gear consists of a mouth-guard, groin-guard, and wraps around hands and feet. Female fighters wear a sports bra and chest protection in addition to the male clothing and protective gear.
Rules:
Punching techniques are very much identical to boxing punches, including
The standard kicking techniques are:
There are a large number of special or variant kicking techniques, including spinning kicks, jumping kicks, and other variants such as
Spinning versions of the back, side, hook and axe kicks can also be performed along with jumping versions of all kicks.
The knee and elbow techniques in Japanese kickboxing, indicative of its Muay Thai heritage, are the main difference that separates this style from other kickboxing rules.
See "ti sok" and "ti khao" for details.
There are three main defensive positions (guards or styles) used in kickboxing. Within each style, there is considerable variation among fighters, as some fighters may have their guard higher for more head protection while others have their guard lower to provide better protection against body punches. Many fighters vary their defensive style throughout a bout in order to adapt to the situation of the moment, choosing the position best suited to protect them.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16748
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Korea
Korea is a region in East Asia; since 1945 it has been divided into what are now two distinct sovereign states: North Korea (officially the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea") and South Korea (officially the "Republic of Korea"). Korea consists of the Korean Peninsula, Jeju Island, and several minor islands near the peninsula. It is bordered by China to the northwest and Russia to the northeast. It is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait and the Sea of Japan (East Sea).
During the first half of the 1st millennium, Korea was divided between the three competing states of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla, together known as the "Three Kingdoms of Korea". In the second half of the 1st millennium, Silla defeated and conquered Baekje and Goguryeo, leading to the "Unified Silla" period. Meanwhile, Balhae formed in the north, superseding former Goguryeo. Unified Silla eventually collapsed into three separate states due to civil war, ushering in the Later Three Kingdoms. Toward the end of the 1st millennium, Goguryeo was resurrected as Goryeo, which defeated the two other states and unified the Korean Peninsula as a single sovereign state. Around the same time, Balhae collapsed and its last crown prince fled south to Goryeo. Goryeo (also spelled as "Koryŏ"), whose name developed into the modern exonym "Korea", was a highly cultured state that created the world's first metal movable type in 1234. However, multiple incursions by the Mongol Empire during the 13th century greatly weakened the nation, which eventually agreed to become a vassal state after decades of fighting. Following military resistance under King Gongmin that ended Mongol political influence in Goryeo, severe political strife followed, and Goryeo eventually fell to a coup led by General Yi Seong-gye, who established Joseon in 17 July 1392.
The first 200 years of the Joseon era were marked by relative peace. During this period, the Korean alphabet was created by Sejong the Great in the 15th century and there was increasing influence of Confucianism. During the later part of the dynasty, Korea's isolationist policy earned it the Western nickname of the "Hermit Kingdom". By the late 19th century, the country became the object of imperial design by the Empire of Japan. After the First Sino-Japanese War, despite the Korean Empire's effort to modernize, the country was annexed by Japan in 1910 and ruled by it until the end of World War II in August 1945.
In 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed on the surrender of Japanese forces in Korea in the aftermath of World War II, leaving Korea partitioned along the 38th parallel. The North was under Soviet occupation and the South under U.S. occupation. These circumstances soon became the basis for the division of Korea by the two superpowers, exacerbated by their inability to agree on the terms of Korean independence. The Communist-inspired government in the North received backing from the Soviet Union in opposition to the pro-Western government in the South, leading to Korea's division into two political entities: North Korea (officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea), and South Korea (officially the Republic of Korea). Tensions between the two resulted in the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. With involvement by foreign troops, the war ended in a stalemate in 1953, but without a formalized peace treaty. This status contributes to the high tensions that continue to divide the peninsula. Both governments of the two Koreas claim to be the sole legitimate government of the region.
"Korea" is the modern spelling of "Corea", a name attested in English as early as 1614. Korea was transliterated as "Cauli" in The Travels of Marco Polo, of the Chinese (MC "Kawlej", mod. "Gāolì"). This was the Hanja for the Korean kingdom of Goryeo (), which ruled most of the Korean peninsula during Marco Polo's time. Korea's introduction to the West resulted from trade and contact with merchants from Arabic lands, with some records dating back as far as the 9th century. Goryeo's name was a continuation of Goguryeo (Koguryŏ) the northernmost of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, which was officially known as Goryeo beginning in the 5th century. The original name was a combination of the adjective "go" ("high, lofty") with the name of a local Yemaek tribe, whose original name is thought to have been either * "walled city," inferred from some toponyms in Chinese historical documents) or * "center"). With expanding British and American trade following the opening of Korea in the late 19th century, the spelling "Korea" appeared and gradually grew in popularity; its use in transcribing East Asian languages avoids the issues caused by the separate hard and soft Cs existing in English vocabulary derived from the Romance languages. The name Korea is now commonly used in English contexts by both North and South Korea.
In South Korea, Korea as a whole is referred to as lit. "country of the "Han""). The name references "Samhan", referring to the Three Kingdoms of Korea, not the ancient confederacies in the southern Korean Peninsula. Although written in Hanja as , , or , this "Han" has no relation to the Chinese place names or peoples who used those characters but was a or "Gan") of a native Korean word that seems to have had the meaning "big" or "great", particularly in reference to leaders. It has been tentatively linked with the title "khan" used by the nomads of Manchuria and Central Asia.
In North Korea, Japan, China and Vietnam, Korea as a whole is referred to as ), ("Chōsen"), ("Cháoxiǎn"/"Jīusīn"), "" () lit. "[land of the] Morning Calm"). "Great Joseon" was the name of the kingdom ruled by the Joseon dynasty from 1393 until their declaration of the short-lived Great Korean Empire in 1897. King Taejo had named them for the earlier who ruled northern Korea from its legendary prehistory until their conquest in 108 by China's Han Empire. This "go" is the Hanja and simply means "ancient" or "old"; it is a modern usage to distinguish the ancient Joseon from the later dynasty. "Joseon" itself is the modern Korean pronunciation of but it is unclear whether this was a transcription of a native Korean name (OC *"T[r]awser", MC "Trjewsjen") or a partial translation into Chinese of the Korean capital whose meaning has been reconstructed as "Morning Land" or "Mountain".
The Korean Peninsula is a peninsula located in East Asia. It extends southwards for about from continental Asia into the Pacific Ocean and is surrounded by the Sea of Japan (East Sea) to the east and the Yellow Sea (West Sea) to the west, the Korea Strait connecting the two bodies of water. To the northwest, the Amnok River separates the peninsula from China and to the northeast, the Duman River separates it from China and Russia. Notable islands include Jeju Island, Ulleung Island, Dokdo.
The southern and western parts of the peninsula have well-developed plains, while the eastern and northern parts are mountainous. The highest mountain in Korea is Mount Paektu (2,744 m), through which runs the border with China. The southern extension of Mount Paektu is a highland called Gaema Heights. This highland was mainly raised during the Cenozoic orogeny and partly covered by volcanic matter. To the south of Gaema Gowon, successive high mountains are located along the eastern coast of the peninsula. This mountain range is named Baekdudaegan. Some significant mountains include Mount Sobaek or Sobaeksan (1,439 m), Mount Kumgang (1,638 m), Mount Seorak (1,708 m), Mount Taebaek (1,567 m), and Mount Jiri (1,915 m). There are several lower, secondary mountain series whose direction is almost perpendicular to that of Baekdudaegan. They are developed along the tectonic line of Mesozoic orogeny and their directions are basically northwest.
Unlike most ancient mountains on the mainland, many important islands in Korea were formed by volcanic activity in the Cenozoic orogeny. Jeju Island, situated off the southern coast, is a large volcanic island whose main mountain Mount Halla or Hallasan (1950 m) is the highest in South Korea. Ulleung Island is a volcanic island in the Sea of Japan, the composition of which is more felsic than Jeju-do. The volcanic islands tend to be younger, the more westward.
Because the mountainous region is mostly on the eastern part of the peninsula, the main rivers tend to flow westwards. Two exceptions are the southward-flowing Nakdong River and Seomjin River. Important rivers running westward include the Amnok River, the Chongchon River, the Taedong River, the Han River, the Geum River, and the Yeongsan River. These rivers have vast flood plains and provide an ideal environment for wet-rice cultivation.
The southern and southwestern coastlines of the peninsula form a well-developed ria coastline, known as "Dadohae-jin" in Korean. Its convoluted coastline provides mild seas, and the resulting calm environment allows for safe navigation, fishing, and seaweed farming. In addition to the complex coastline, the western coast of the Korean Peninsula has an extremely high tidal amplitude (at Incheon, around the middle of the western coast. It can get as high as 9 m). Vast tidal flats have been developing on the south and west coastlines.
The Korean Peninsula has a temperate climate with comparatively fewer typhoons than other countries in East Asia. Due to the peninsula's position, it has a unique climate influenced from Siberia in the north, the Pacific Ocean in the east and the rest of Eurasia in the west. The peninsula has four distinct seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter.
As influence from Siberia weakens, temperatures begin to increase while the high pressure begins to move away. If the weather is abnormally dry, Siberia will have more influence on the peninsula leading to wintry weather such as snow.
During June at the start of the summer, there tends to be a lot of rain due to the cold and wet air from the Sea of Okhotsk and the hot and humid air from the Pacific Ocean combining. When these fronts combine, it leads to a so-called rainy season with often cloudy days with rain, which is sometimes very heavy. The hot and humid winds from the south west blow causing an increasing amount of humidity and this leads to the fronts moving towards Manchuria in China and thus there is less rain and this is known as midsummer; temperatures can exceed daily at this time of year.
Usually, high pressure is heavily dominant during autumn leading to clear conditions. Furthermore, temperatures remain high but the humidity becomes relatively low.
The weather becomes increasingly dominated by Siberia during winter and the jet stream moves further south causing a drop in temperature. This season is relatively dry with some snow falling at times.
Animal life of the Korean Peninsula includes a considerable number of bird species and native freshwater fish. Native or endemic species of the Korean Peninsula include Korean hare, Korean water deer, Korean field mouse, Korean brown frog, Korean pine and Korean spruce. The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with its forest and natural wetlands is a unique biodiversity spot, which harbours eighty-two endangered species. Korea once hosted many Siberian tigers, but as the number of people affected by the tigers increased, the tigers were killed in the Joseon Dynasty and the Siberian tigers in the South Korea became extinct during the Japanese colonial era period. It has been confirmed that Siberian tigers are only on the side of North Korea now.
There are also approximately 3,034 species of vascular plants.
The Korean Academy claimed ancient hominid fossils originating from about 100,000 in the lava at a stone city site in Korea. Fluorescent and high-magnetic analyses indicate the volcanic fossils may be from as early as 300,000 . The best preserved Korean pottery goes back to the paleolithic times around 10,000 and the Neolithic period begins around 6000 .
According to legend, Dangun, a descendant of Heaven, established Gojoseon in 2333 . In 108 , the Han dynasty defeated Gojoseon and installed four commanderies in the northern Korean peninsula. Three of the commanderies fell or retreated westward within a few decades, but the Lelang Commandery remained as a center of cultural and economic exchange with successive Chinese dynasties for four centuries. By 313, Goguryeo annexed all of the Chinese commanderies.
The Proto–Three Kingdoms period, sometimes called the Multiple States Period, is the earlier part of what is commonly called the Three Kingdoms Period, following the fall of Gojoseon but before Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla fully developed into kingdoms.
This time period saw numerous states spring up from the former territories of Gojoseon, which encompassed northern Korea and southern Manchuria. With the fall of Gojoseon, southern Korea entered the Samhan period.
Located in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, Samhan refers to the three confederacies of Mahan, Jinhan, and Byeonhan. Mahan was the largest and consisted of 54 states. Byeonhan and Jinhan both consisted of twelve states, bringing a total of 78 states within the Samhan. These three confederacies eventually developed into Baekje, Silla, and Gaya.
The Three Kingdoms of Korea consisted of Goguryeo, Silla, and Baekje. Silla and Baekje controlled the southern half of the Korean Peninsula, maintaining the former Samhan territories, while Goguryeo controlled the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria and the Liaodong Peninsula, uniting Buyeo, Okjeo, Dongye, and other states in the former Gojoseon territories.
Goguryeo was a highly militaristic state; it was a powerful empire and one of the great powers in East Asia, reaching its zenith in the 5th century when its territories expanded to encompass most of Manchuria to the north, parts of Inner Mongolia to the west, parts of Russia to the east, and the Seoul region to the south. Goguryeo experienced a golden age under Gwanggaeto the Great and his son Jangsu, who both subdued Baekje and Silla during their times, achieving a brief unification of the Three Kingdoms of Korea and becoming the most dominant power on the Korean Peninsula. In addition to contesting for control of the Korean Peninsula, Goguryeo had many military conflicts with various Chinese dynasties, most notably the Goguryeo–Sui War, in which Goguryeo defeated a huge force said to number over a million men. In 642, the powerful general Yeon Gaesomun led a coup and gained complete control over Goguryeo. In response, Emperor Tang Taizong of China led a campaign against Goguryeo, but was defeated and retreated. After the death of Tang Taizong, his son Emperor Tang Gaozong allied with the Korean kingdom of Silla and invaded Goguryeo again, but was unable to overcome Goguryeo's stalwart defenses and was defeated in 662. However, Yeon Gaesomun died of a natural cause in 666 and Goguryeo was thrown into chaos and weakened by a succession struggle among his sons and younger brother, with his eldest son defecting to Tang and his younger brother defecting to Silla. The Tang-Silla alliance finally conquered Goguryeo in 668. After the collapse of Goguryeo, Tang and Silla ended their alliance and fought over control of the Korean Peninsula. Silla succeeded in gaining control over most of the Korean Peninsula, while Tang gained control over Goguryeo's northern territories. However, 30 years after the fall of Goguryeo, a Goguryeo general by the name of Dae Joyeong founded the Korean-Mohe state of Balhae and successfully expelled the Tang presence from much of the former Goguryeo territories.
The southwestern Korean kingdom of Baekje was founded around modern-day Seoul by a Goguryeo prince, a son of the founder of Goguryeo. Baekje absorbed all of the Mahan states and subjugated most of the western Korean peninsula (including the modern provinces of Gyeonggi, Chungcheong, and Jeolla, as well as parts of Hwanghae and Gangwon) to a centralised government; during the expansion of its territory, Baekje acquired Chinese culture and technology through maritime contacts with the Southern Dynasties. Baekje was a great maritime power; its nautical skill, which made it the Phoenicia of East Asia, was instrumental in the dissemination of Buddhism throughout East Asia and continental culture to Japan. Historic evidence suggests that Japanese culture, art, and language were influenced by the kingdom of Baekje and Korea itself; Baekje also played an important role in transmitting advanced Chinese culture to the Japanese archipelago. Baekje was once a great military power on the Korean Peninsula, most notably in the 4th century during the rule of Geunchogo when its influence extended across the sea to Liaoxi and Shandong in China, taking advantage of the weakened state of Former Qin, and Kyushu in the Japanese archipelago; however, Baekje was critically defeated by Gwanggaeto the Great and declined.
Although later records claim that Silla was the oldest of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, it is now believed to have been the last kingdom to develop. By the 2nd century, Silla existed as a large state in the southeast, occupying and influencing its neighboring city-states. In 562, Silla annexed the Gaya confederacy, which was located between Baekje and Silla. The Three Kingdoms of Korea often warred with each other and Silla was often dominated by Baekje and Goguryeo. Silla was the smallest and weakest of the three, but it used cunning diplomatic means to make opportunistic pacts and alliances with the more powerful Korean kingdoms, and eventually Tang China, to its great advantage. In 660, King Muyeol ordered his armies to attack Baekje. General Kim Yu-shin, aided by Tang forces, conquered Baekje after defeating General Gyebaek at the Battle of Hwangsanbeol. In 661, Silla and Tang attacked Goguryeo but were repelled. King Munmu, son of Muyeol and nephew of General Kim Yu-shin, launched another campaign in 667 and Goguryeo fell in the following year.
Beginning in the 6th century, Silla's power gradually extended across the Korean Peninsula. Silla first annexed the adjacent Gaya confederacy in 562. By the 640s, Silla formed an alliance with the Tang dynasty of China to conquer Baekje and later Goguryeo. After conquering Baekje and Goguryeo, Silla repulsed Tang China from the Korean peninsula in 676. Even though Silla unified most of the Korean Peninsula, most of the Goguryeo territories to the north of the Korean Peninsula were ruled by Balhae. Former Goguryeo general or chief of Sumo Mohe Dae Jo-yeong led a group of Goguryeo and Mohe refugees to the Jilin and founded the kingdom of Balhae, 30 years after the collapse of Goguryeo, as the successor to Goguryeo. At its height, Balhae's territories extended from southern Manchuria down to the northern Korean peninsula. Balhae was called the "Prosperous Country in the East".
Later Silla carried on the maritime prowess of Baekje, which acted like the Phoenicia of medieval East Asia, and during the 8th and 9th centuries dominated the seas of East Asia and the trade between China, Korea and Japan, most notably during the time of Jang Bogo; in addition, Silla people made overseas communities in China on the Shandong Peninsula and the mouth of the Yangtze River. Later Silla was a prosperous and wealthy country, and its metropolitan capital of Gyeongju was the fourth largest city in the world. Later Silla was a golden age of art and culture, as evidenced by the Hwangnyongsa, Seokguram, and Emille Bell. Buddhism flourished during this time, and many Korean Buddhists gained great fame among Chinese Buddhists and contributed to Chinese Buddhism, including: Woncheuk, Wonhyo, Uisang, Musang, and Kim Gyo-gak, a Silla prince whose influence made Mount Jiuhua one of the Four Sacred Mountains of Chinese Buddhism.
Later Silla fell apart in the late 9th century, giving way to the tumultuous Later Three Kingdoms period (892–935), and Balhae was destroyed by the Khitans in 926. Goryeo unified the Later Three Kingdoms and received the last crown prince and much of the ruling class of Balhae, thus bringing about a unification of the two successor nations of Goguryeo.
Goryeo was founded in 918 and replaced Silla as the ruling dynasty of Korea. Goryeo's land was at first what is now South Korea and about 1/3 of North Korea, but later on managed to recover most of the Korean peninsula. Momentarily, Goryeo advanced to parts of Jiandao while conquering the Jurchens, but returned the territories due to the harsh climate and difficulties in defending them. The name "Goryeo" (高麗) is a short form of "Goguryeo" (高句麗) and was first used during the time of King Jangsu. Goryeo regarded itself as the successor of Goguryeo, hence its name and efforts to recover the former territories of Goguryeo. Wang Geon, the founder of Goryeo, was of Goguryeo descent and traced his ancestry to a noble Goguryeo clan. He made Kaesong, his hometown, the capital.
During this period, laws were codified and a civil service system was introduced. Buddhism flourished and spread throughout the peninsula. The development of celadon industries flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries. The publication of the Tripitaka Koreana onto more than 80,000 wooden blocks and the invention of the world's first metal movable type in the 13th century attest to Goryeo's cultural achievements.
Goryeo had to defend frequently against attacks by nomadic empires, especially the Khitans and the Mongols. Goryeo had a hostile relationship with the Khitans, because the Khitan Empire had destroyed Balhae, also a successor state of Goguryeo. In 993, the Khitans, who had established the Liao dynasty in 907, invaded Goryeo, demanding that it make amity with them. Goryeo sent the diplomat Seo Hui to negotiate, who successfully persuaded the Khitans to let Goryeo expand to the banks of the Amnok River, citing that in the past the land belonged to Goguryeo, the predecessor of Goryeo. During the Goryeo–Khitan War, the Khitan Empire invaded Korea twice more in 1009 and 1018, but was defeated.
After defeating the Khitan Empire, which was the most powerful empire of its time, Goryeo experienced a golden age that lasted a century, during which the Tripitaka Koreana was completed, and there were great developments in printing and publishing, promoting learning and dispersing knowledge on philosophy, literature, religion, and science; by 1100, there were 12 universities that produced famous scholars and scientists.
Goryeo was invaded by the Mongols in seven major campaigns from the 1230s until the 1270s, but was never conquered. Exhausted after decades of fighting, Goryeo sent its crown prince to the Yuan capital to swear allegiance to the Mongols; Kublai Khan accepted, and married one of his daughters to the Korean crown prince, and the dynastic line of Goryeo continued to survive under the overlordship of the Mongol Yuan dynasty as a semi-autonomous vassal state and compulsory ally. The two nations became intertwined for 80 years as all subsequent Korean kings married Mongol princesses, and the last empress of the Yuan dynasty was a Korean princess.
In the 1350s, King Gongmin was free at last to reform the Goryeo government when the Yuan dynasty began to crumble. Gongmin had various problems that needed to be dealt with, which included the removal of pro-Mongol aristocrats and military officials, the question of land holding, and quelling the growing animosity between the Buddhists and Confucian scholars. During this tumultuous period, Goryeo momentarily conquered Liaoyang in 1356, repulsed two large invasions by the Red Turbans in 1359 and 1360, and defeated the final attempt by the Yuan to dominate Goryeo when General Choe Yeong defeated a Mongol tumen in 1364. During the 1380s, Goryeo turned its attention to the Wokou threat and used naval artillery created by Choe Museon to annihilate hundreds of pirate ships.
In 1392, the general Yi Seong-gye overthrew the Goryeo dynasty after he staged a coup and defeated General Choe Yeong. Yi Seong-gye named his new dynasty Joseon and moved the capital from Kaesong to Hanseong (formerly Hanyang; modern-day Seoul) and built the Gyeongbokgung palace. In 1394, he adopted Confucianism as the country's official ideology, resulting in much loss of power and wealth by the Buddhists. The prevailing philosophy of the Joseon dynasty was Neo-Confucianism, which was epitomized by the seonbi class, scholars who passed up positions of wealth and power to lead lives of study and integrity.
Joseon was a nominal tributary state of China but exercised full sovereignty, and maintained the highest position among China's tributary states, which also included countries such as the Ryukyu Kingdom, Vietnam, Burma, Brunei, Laos, Thailand, and the Philippines, among others. In addition, Joseon received tribute from Jurchens and Japanese until the 17th century, and had a small enclave in the Ryukyu Kingdom that engaged in trade with Siam and Java.
During the 15th and 16th centuries, Joseon enjoyed many benevolent rulers who promoted education and science. Most notable among them was Sejong the Great (r. 1418–50), who personally created and promulgated Hangul, the Korean alphabet. This golden age saw great cultural and scientific advancements, including in printing, meteorological observation, astronomy, calendar science, ceramics, military technology, geography, cartography, medicine, and agricultural technology, some of which were unrivaled elsewhere. Joseon implemented a class system that consisted of "yangban" the noble class, "jungin" the middle class, "yangin" the common class, and "cheonin" the lowest class, which included occupations such as butchers, tanners, shamans, entertainers, and "nobi", the equivalent of slaves, bondservants, or serfs.
In 1592 and again in 1597, the Japanese invaded Korea; the Korean military at the time was unprepared and untrained, due to two centuries of peace on the Korean Peninsula. Toyotomi Hideyoshi intended to conquer China and India through the Korean Peninsula, but was defeated by strong resistance from the Righteous Army, the naval superiority of Admiral Yi Sun-sin and his turtle ships, and assistance from Wanli Emperor of Ming China. However, Joseon experienced great destruction, including a tremendous loss of cultural sites such as temples and palaces to Japanese pillaging, and the Japanese brought back to Japan an estimated 100,000–200,000 noses cut from Korean victims. Less than 30 years after the Japanese invasions, the Manchus took advantage of Joseon's war-weakened state and invaded in 1627 and 1637, and then went on to conquer the destabilized Ming dynasty.
After normalizing relations with the new Qing dynasty, Joseon experienced a nearly 200-year period of peace. Kings Yeongjo and Jeongjo led a new renaissance of the Joseon dynasty during the 18th century.
In the 19th century, the royal in-law families gained control of the government, leading to mass corruption and weakening of the state, with severe poverty and peasant rebellions spreading throughout the country. Furthermore, the Joseon government adopted a strict isolationist policy, earning the nickname "the hermit kingdom", but ultimately failed to protect itself against imperialism and was forced to open its borders, beginning an era leading into Japanese imperial rule.
Beginning in 1871, Japan began to exert more influence in Korea, forcing it out of China's traditional sphere of influence. As a result of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Qing dynasty had to give up such a position according to Article 1 of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which was concluded between China and Japan in 1895. That same year, Empress Myeongseong of Korea was assassinated by Japanese agents.
In 1897, the Joseon dynasty proclaimed the Korean Empire (1897–1910). King Gojong became emperor. During this brief period, Korea had some success in modernizing the military, economy, real property laws, education system, and various industries. Russia, Japan, France, and the United States all invested in the country and sought to influence it politically.
In 1904, the Russo-Japanese War pushed the Russians out of the fight for Korea. In Manchuria on 26 October 1909, An Jung-geun assassinated the former Resident-General of Korea, Itō Hirobumi, for his role in trying to force Korea into occupation.
In 1910, an already militarily occupied Korea was a forced party to the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty. The treaty was signed by Lee Wan-Yong, who was given the General Power of Attorney by the Emperor. However, the Emperor is said to have not actually ratified the treaty according to Yi Tae-jin. There is a long dispute whether this treaty was legal or illegal due to its signing under duress, threat of force and bribes.
Korean resistance to the brutal Japanese occupation was manifested in the nonviolent March 1st Movement of 1919, during which 7,000 demonstrators were killed by Japanese police and military. The Korean liberation movement also spread to neighbouring Manchuria and Siberia.
Over five million Koreans were conscripted for labour beginning in 1939, and tens of thousands of men were forced into Japan's military. Nearly 400,000 Korean labourers died. Approximately 200,000 girls and women, mostly from China and Korea, were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military. In 1993, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono acknowledged the terrible injustices faced by these euphemistically named "comfort women".
During the Japanese annexation, the Korean language was suppressed in an effort to eradicate Korean national identity. Koreans were forced to take Japanese surnames, known as Sōshi-kaimei. Traditional Korean culture suffered heavy losses, as numerous Korean cultural artifacts were destroyed or taken to Japan. To this day, valuable Korean artifacts can often be found in Japanese museums or among private collections. One investigation by the South Korean government identified 75,311 cultural assets that were taken from Korea, 34,369 in Japan and 17,803 in the United States. However, experts estimate that over 100,000 artifacts actually remain in Japan. Japanese officials considered returning Korean cultural properties, but to date this has not occurred. Korea and Japan still dispute the ownership of the Dokdo islets, located east of the Korean Peninsula.
There was significant emigration to the overseas territories of the Empire of Japan during the Japanese occupation period, including Korea. By the end of World War II, there were over 850,000 Japanese settlers in Korea. After World War II, most of these overseas Japanese repatriated to Japan.
In 1945, with the surrender of Japan, the United Nations developed plans for a trusteeship administration, the Soviet Union administering the peninsula north of the 38th parallel and the United States administering the south. The politics of the Cold War resulted in the 1948 establishment of two separate governments, North Korea and South Korea.
The aftermath of World War II left Korea partitioned along the 38th parallel, with the north under Soviet occupation and the south under US occupation supported by other allied states. Consequently, North Korea, a Soviet-style socialist republic was established in the north and South Korea; a Western-style regime, was established in the South.
North Korea is a one-party state, now centred on Kim Il-sung's Juche ideology, with a centrally planned industrial economy. South Korea is a multi-party state with a capitalist market economy, alongside membership in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Group of Twenty. The two states have greatly diverged both culturally and economically since their partition, though they still share a common traditional culture and pre-Cold War history.
Since the 1960s, the South Korean economy has grown enormously and the economic structure was radically transformed. In 1957, South Korea had a lower per capita GDP than Ghana, and by 2008 it was 17 times as high as Ghana's.
According to R. J. Rummel, forced labor, executions, and concentration camps were responsible for over one million deaths in North Korea from 1948 to 1987; others have estimated 400,000 deaths in concentration camps alone. Estimates based on the most recent North Korean census suggest that 240,000 to 420,000 people died as a result of the 1990s famine and that there were 600,000 to 850,000 unnatural deaths in North Korea from 1993 to 2008. In South Korea, as guerrilla activities expanded, the South Korean government used strong measures against peasants, such as forcefully moving their families from guerrilla areas. According to one estimate, these measures resulted in 36,000 people killed, 11,000 people wounded, and 432,000 people displaced.
The Korean War broke out when Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea, though neither side gained much territory as a result. The Korean Peninsula remained divided, the Korean Demilitarized Zone being the "de facto" border between the two states.
In June 1950 North Korea invaded the South, using Soviet tanks and weaponry. During the Korean War (1950–53) more than 1.2 million people died and the three years of fighting throughout the nation effectively destroyed most cities. The war ended in an at approximately the Military Demarcation Line, but the two governments are officially at war. In 2018, the leaders of North Korea and South Korea officially signed the Panmunjom Declaration, announcing that they will work to end the conflict.
The combined population of the Koreas is about 76 million (North Korea: 25 million, South Korea: 51 million). Korea is chiefly populated by a highly homogeneous ethnic group, the Koreans, who speak the Korean language. The number of foreigners living in Korea has also steadily increased since the late 20th century, particularly in South Korea, where more than 1 million foreigners reside. It was estimated in 2006 that only 26,700 of the old Chinese community now remain in South Korea. However, in recent years, immigration from mainland China has increased; 624,994 persons of Chinese nationality have immigrated to South Korea, including 443,566 of ethnic Korean descent. Small communities of ethnic Chinese and Japanese are also found in North Korea.
Korean is the official language of both North and South Korea, and (along with Mandarin) of Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in the Manchuria area of China. Worldwide, there are up to 80 million speakers of the Korean language. South Korea has around 50 million speakers while North Korea around 25 million. Other large groups of Korean speakers through Korean diaspora are found in China, the United States, Japan, former Soviet Union and elsewhere.
The classification of Korean is debated. Some linguists place it in the Altaic language family; others consider it to be a language isolate. Korean is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Like Japanese and Vietnamese, Korean has borrowed much vocabulary from the Chinese or created vocabulary on Chinese models.
Modern Korean is written almost exclusively in the script of the Korean alphabet (known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosungul in China and North Korea), which was invented in the 15th century. Korean is sometimes written with the addition of some Chinese characters called Hanja; however, this is only occasionally seen nowadays. While Hangul may appear logographic, it is actually a phonemic alphabet organised into syllabic blocks. Each block consists of at least two of the 24 hangul letters ("jamo"): at least one each of the 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Historically, the alphabet had several additional letters (see obsolete jamo). For a phonological description of the letters, see Korean phonology.
In ancient Chinese texts, Korea is referred to as "Rivers and Mountains Embroidered on Silk" (, ) and "Eastern Nation of Decorum" (, ). Individuals are regarded as one year old when they are born, as Koreans reckon the pregnancy period as one year of life for infants, and age increments increase on New Year's Day rather than on the anniversary of birthdays. Thus, one born immediately before New Year's Day may only be a few days old in western reckoning, but two years old in Korea. Accordingly, a Korean person's stated age (at least among fellow Koreans) will be one or two years more than their age according to western reckoning. However, western reckoning is sometimes applied with regard to the concept of legal age; for example, the legal age for purchasing alcohol or cigarettes in the Republic of Korea is 19, which is measured according to western reckoning.
Korean literature written before the end of the Joseon Dynasty is called "Classical" or "Traditional." Literature, written in Chinese characters (hanja), was established at the same time as the Chinese script arrived on the peninsula. Korean scholars were writing poetry in the classical Korean style as early as the 2nd century , reflecting Korean thoughts and experiences of that time. Classical Korean literature has its roots in traditional folk beliefs and folk tales of the peninsula, strongly influenced by Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.
Modern literature is often linked with the development of hangul, which helped spread literacy from the aristocracy to the common people. Hangul, however, only reached a dominant position in Korean literature in the second half of the 19th century, resulting in a major growth in Korean literature. "Sinsoseol", for instance, are novels written in hangul.
The Korean War led to the development of literature centered on the wounds and chaos of war. Much of the post-war literature in South Korea deals with the daily lives of ordinary people, and their struggles with national pain. The collapse of the traditional Korean value system is another common theme of the time.
Traditional Korean music includes combinations of the folk, vocal, religious and ritual music styles of the Korean people. Korean music has been practiced since prehistoric times. Korean music falls into two broad categories. The first, Hyangak, literally means "The local music" or "Music native to Korea", a famous example of which is Sujechon, a piece of instrumental music often claimed to be at least 1,300 years old. The second, "yangak", represents a more Western style.
Confucian tradition has dominated Korean thought, along with contributions by Buddhism, Taoism, and Korean Shamanism. Since the middle of the 20th century, however, Christianity has competed with Buddhism in South Korea, while religious practice has been suppressed in North Korea. Throughout Korean history and culture, regardless of separation; the influence of traditional beliefs of Korean Shamanism, Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism have remained an underlying religion of the Korean people as well as a vital aspect of their culture; all these traditions have coexisted peacefully for hundreds of years up to today despite strong Westernisation from Christian missionary conversions in the South or the pressure from the Juche government in the North.
According to 2005 statistics compiled by the South Korean government, about 46% of citizens profess to follow no particular religion. Christians account for 29.2% of the population (of which are Protestants 18.3% and Catholics 10.9%) and Buddhists 22.8%.
Islam in South Korea is practiced by about 45,000 natives (about 0.09% of the population) in addition to some 100,000 foreign workers from Muslim countries.
Koreans traditionally believe that the taste and quality of food depend on its spices and sauces, the essential ingredients to making a delicious meal. Therefore, soybean paste, soy sauce, "gochujang" or red pepper paste and kimchi are some of the most important staples in a Korean household.
Korean cuisine was greatly influenced by the geography and climate of the Korean Peninsula, which is known for its cold autumns and winters, therefore there are many fermented dishes and hot soups and stews.
Korean cuisine is probably best known for kimchi, a side dish which uses a distinctive fermentation process of preserving vegetables, most commonly cabbage. Kimchi is said to relieve the pores on the skin, thereby reducing wrinkles and providing nutrients to the skin naturally. It is also healthy, as it provides necessary vitamins and nutrients. Gochujang, a traditional Korean sauce made of red pepper is also commonly used, often as pepper (chilli) paste, earning the cuisine a reputation for spiciness.
Bulgogi (roasted marinated meat, usually beef), galbi (marinated grilled short ribs), and samgyeopsal (pork belly) are popular meat entrees. Fish is also a popular commodity, as it is the traditional meat that Koreans eat. Meals are usually accompanied by a soup or stew, such as galbitang (stewed ribs) or doenjang jjigae (fermented bean paste soup). The center of the table is filled with a shared collection of sidedishes called banchan.
Other popular dishes include "bibimbap", which literally means "mixed rice" (rice mixed with meat, vegetables, and red pepper paste), and naengmyeon (cold noodles).
Instant noodles, or "ramyeon", is a popular snack food. Koreans also enjoy food from "pojangmachas" (street vendors), which serve tteokbokki, rice cake and fish cake with a spicy gochujang sauce; "gimbap", made of steamed white rice wrapped in dried laver seaweed; fried squid; and glazed sweet potato. Soondae, a sausage made of cellophane noodles and pork blood, is widely eaten.
Additionally, some other common snacks include "Choco Pie", shrimp crackers, "bbeongtwigi" (puffed rice grains), and "nurungji" (slightly burnt rice). Nurungji can be eaten as it is or boiled with water to make a soup. Nurungji can also be eaten as a snack or a dessert.
Korea is unique among Asian countries in its use of metal chopsticks. Metal chopsticks have been discovered in archaeological sites belonging to the ancient Korean kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla.
The modern South Korean school system consists of six years in elementary school, three years in middle school, and three years in high school. Students are required to go to elementary and middle school, and do not have to pay for their education, except for a small fee called a "School Operation Support Fee" that differs from school to school. The Programme for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the OECD, ranks South Korea's science education as the third best in the world and being significantly higher than the OECD average.
South Korea ranks second on math and literature and first in . Although South Korean students often rank high on international comparative assessments, the education system is criticised for emphasising too much upon passive learning and memorization. The South Korean education system is rather notably strict and structured as compared to its counterparts in most Western societies.
The North Korean education system consists primarily of universal and state funded schooling by the government. The national literacy rate for citizens 15 years of age and above is over 99 percent. Children go through one year of kindergarten, four years of primary education, six years of secondary education, and then on to universities. The most prestigious university in the DPRK is Kim Il-sung University. Other notable universities include Kim Chaek University of Technology, which focuses on computer science, Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, which trains working level diplomats and trade officials, and Kim Hyong Jik University, which trains teachers.
One of the best known artifacts of Korea's history of science and technology is the Cheomseongdae (첨성대, ), a 9.4-meter high observatory built in 634.
The earliest known surviving Korean example of woodblock printing is the Mugujeonggwang Great Dharani Sutra. It is believed to have been printed in Korea in 750–51, which if correct, would make it older than the Diamond Sutra.
During the Goryeo Dynasty, metal movable type printing was invented by Choe Yun-ui in 1234. This invention made printing easier, more efficient and also increased literacy, which observed by Chinese visitors was seen to be so important where it was considered to be shameful to not be able to read. The Mongol Empire later adopted Korea's movable type printing and spread as far as Central Asia. There is conjecture as to whether or not Choe's invention had any influence on later printing inventions such as Gutenberg's Printing press. When the Mongols invaded Europe they inadvertently introduced different kinds of Asian technology.
During the Joseon period, the Turtle Ship was invented, which were covered by a wooden deck and iron with thorns, as well as other weapons such as the bigyeokjincheolloe cannon (비격진천뢰, ) and the hwacha.
The Korean alphabet hangul was also invented during this time by King Sejong the Great.
North Korea and South Korea usually compete as two separate nations in international events. There are, however, a few examples of them having competed as one entity, under the name Korea.
While association football remains one of the most popular sports in South Korea, the martial art of taekwondo is considered to be the national sport. Baseball and golf are also popular.
Taekwon-Do is Korea's most famous martial art and sport. It combines combat techniques, self-defence, sport and exercise. Taekwon-Do has become an official Olympic sport, starting as a demonstration event in 1988 (when South Korea hosted the Games in Seoul) and becoming an official medal event in 2000. The two major Taekwon-Do federations were founded in Korea. The two are the International Taekwon-Do Federation and the World Taekwondo Federation.
Hapkido is a modern Korean martial art with a grappling focus that employs joint locks, throws, kicks, punches and other striking attacks like attacks against pressure points. Hapkido emphasizes circular motion, non-resisting movements and control of the opponent. Practitioners seek to gain advantage through footwork and body positioning to employ leverage, avoiding the pure use of strength against strength.
Ssireum is a traditional form of wrestling that has been practiced in Korea for thousands of years, with evidence discovered from Goguryeo of Korea's Three Kingdoms Period (57 to 688). Ssireum is the traditional national sport of Korea. During a match, opponents grip each other by sash belts wrapped around the waist and the thigh, attempting to throw their competitor to the sandy ground of the ring. The first opponent to touch the ground with any body part above the knee or to lose hold of their opponent loses the round.
Ssireum competitions are traditionally held twice a year, during the Dano Festival (the 5th day of the fifth lunar month) and Chuseok (the 15th day of the 8th lunar month). Competitions are also held throughout the year as a part of festivals and other events.
Taekkyon is a traditional martial art, considered the oldest form of fighting technique of Korea. Practiced since centuries and especially popular during the Joseon dynasty, two forms co-existed: one for practical use, the other for sport. This form was usually practiced alongside Ssireum during festivals and competitions between villages. Nonetheless, Taekkyon almost disappeared during the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War.
Though lost in North Korea, Taekkyon has enjoyed a spectacular revival from the 1980s in South Korea. It is the only martial art in the world (with Ssireum) recognized as a National Treasure of South Korea and a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Samiljeol, Independence Movement Day, commemorates Korea's declaration of independence from Japanese occupation on 1 March 1919. The name is derived from Korean 삼 "sam" 'three', 일 "il" 'one,' and 절 "jeol" 'day', the date of the uprising in 1919. Korea was annexed to the Empire of Japan on 29 August 1910 following the imposed Japan-Korea Treaty. On 1 March 1919, Korean presented their resistance towards Japan and Japanese occupation with a declaration of independence. Following the conclusion of World War II, Korea was liberated from Japan and its independence restored. The newly established Korean government set aside 1 March as a national holiday to commemorate the sacrifices borne in the long struggle for Korean independence.
Hyunchoongil is the national holiday in Korea commemorating those who fought and died for the nation. In August 1948, only a few years after Korea achieved its independence from Japan, the Korean War, in Korea also known as the 6.25 war, broke out between North and South Korea. During this war, approximately 400,000 soldiers and some one million citizens were killed or injured. In 1953, North and South Korea agreed to a cease-fire, and three years later the Korean government established Hyungchoogil to commemorate the soldiers who fought in the Korean War. Subsequent to its establishment, Hyungchoogil was reinterpreted as a day of remembrance for those who died defending Korea in all conflicts, not only during the Korean War.
Gwangbokjeol is the day for celebrating liberation of the country from Japan in 1945 as well as celebrating the establishment of Korean government in 1948. Gwangbok means "returned light" representing gaining national sovereignty from Japan. It was first declared to be national holiday in 1949 October 1. On this date every year, the president of Korea visits Independence Hall, and invites diplomatic envoys from many countries and all social standings in countries to Cheongwadae (the Blue House, the Korean presidential residence).
Hangul Day (also spelled as Hangeul Day) is a day that celebrates the creation of the Hunminjeongeum (Hangul, Korean alphabet), which was inscribed to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 1997. Hangul was created by Sejong the Great in 1443 and proclaimed in 1446. Before the creation of Hangul, people in Korea (known as Joseon at the time) primarily wrote using Classical Chinese alongside native phonetic writing systems that predate Hangul by hundreds of years, including idu, hyangchal, gugyeol, and gakpil. However, due to the fundamental differences between the Korean and Chinese languages, and the large number of characters needed to be learned, there was much difficulty in learning how to write using Chinese characters for the lower classes, who often didn't have the privilege of education. To assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people. Hangul Day was founded in 1926 during the Japanese occupation by members of the Korean Language Society, whose goal was to preserve the Korean language during a time of rapid forced Japanization. Today, both South Korea and North Korea celebrate Hangul Day as a national holiday.
Sources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16749
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Kleene star
In mathematical logic and computer science, the Kleene star (or Kleene operator or Kleene closure) is a unary operation, either on sets of strings or on sets of symbols or characters. In mathematics
it is more commonly known as the free monoid construction. The application of the Kleene star to a set "V" is written as "V"*. It is widely used for regular expressions, which is the context in which it was introduced by Stephen Kleene to characterize certain automata, where it means "zero or more".
The set "V"* can also be described as the set of finite-length strings that can be generated by concatenating arbitrary elements of "V", allowing the use of the same element multiple times. If "V" is either the empty set ∅ or the singleton set {ε}, then "V"* = {ε}; if "V" is any other finite set or countably infinite set, then "V"* is a countably infinite set.
The operators are used in rewrite rules for generative grammars.
Given a set "V"
define
and define recursively the set
If "V" is a formal language, then "V""i", the "i"-th power of the set "V", is a shorthand for the concatenation of set "V" with itself "i" times. That is, "V""i" can be understood to be the set of all strings that can be represented as the concatenation of "i" strings in "V".
The definition of Kleene star on "V" is
Notice that the Kleene star operator is an idempotent unary operator: ("V"*)* = "V"* for any set "V" of strings or characters.
In some formal language studies, (e.g. AFL theory) a variation on the Kleene star operation called the "Kleene plus" is used. The Kleene plus omits the "V"0 term in the above union. In other words, the Kleene plus on "V" is
For every set "L", the Kleene plus of "L" (denoted "L"+) equals the concatenation of "L" with "L"*; this holds because every element of "L"+ must either be composed from one element of "L" and finitely many non-empty terms in "L" or is just an element of "L" (where "L" itself is retrieved by taking "L" concatenated with ε).
Conversely, "L"* = {ε} ∪ "L"+.
Example of Kleene star applied to set of strings:
Example of Kleene plus applied to set of characters:
Kleene star applied to the same character set:
Example of Kleene star applied to the empty set:
Example of Kleene plus applied to the empty set:
where concatenation is an associative and noncommutative product, sharing these properties with the Cartesian product of sets.
Example of Kleene plus and Kleene star applied to the singleton set containing the empty string:
Strings form a monoid with concatenation as the binary operation and ε the identity element. The Kleene star is defined for any monoid, not just strings.
More precisely, let ("M", ⋅) be a monoid, and "S" ⊆ "M". Then "S"* is the smallest submonoid of "M" containing "S"; that is, "S"* contains the neutral element of "M", the set "S", and is such that if "x","y" ∈ "S"*, then "x"⋅"y" ∈ "S"*.
Furthermore, the Kleene star is generalized by including the *-operation (and the union) in the algebraic structure itself by the notion of complete star semiring.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16750
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Korean language
The Korean language ( / "hanguk-eo"; / "chosŏn-mal") is an East Asian language spoken by about 77 million people. It is a member of the Koreanic language family and is the official and national language of both Koreas: North Korea and South Korea, with different standardized official forms used in each country. It is a recognised minority language in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of Jilin province, China. It is also spoken in parts of Sakhalin, Russia, and Central Asia.
Historical and modern linguists classify Korean as a language isolate; however, it does have a few extinct relatives, which together with Korean itself and the Jeju language (spoken in the Jeju Province and considered somewhat distinct) form the Koreanic language family. The linguistic homeland of Korean is suggested to be somewhere in Manchuria.
Modern Korean descends from Middle Korean, which in turn descends from Old Korean, which descends from the Proto-Koreanic language which is generally suggested to have its linguistic homeland somewhere in Manchuria. Whitman (2012) suggests that the proto-Koreans, already present in northern Korea, expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula at around 300 BC and coexisted with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them). Both had influence on each other and a later founder effect diminished the internal variety of both language families.
Chinese characters arrived in Korea (see Sino-Xenic pronunciations for further information) together with Buddhism during the Proto-Three Kingdoms era in the 1st century BC. It was adapted for Korean and became known as Hanja, and remained as the main script for writing Korean through over a millennium alongside various phonetic scripts that were later invented such as Idu, Gugyeol and Hyangchal. Mainly privileged elites were educated to read and write in Hanja. However, most of the population was illiterate.
In the 15th century, King Sejong the Great personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system known today as Hangul. He felt that Hanja was inadequate to write Korean and that this was the cause of its very restricted use; Hangul was designed to either aid in reading Hanja or replace Hanja entirely. Introduced in the document ""Hunminjeongeum"", it was called ""eonmun"" (colloquial script) and quickly spread nationwide to increase literacy in Korea. Hangul was widely used by all the Korean classes but often treated as ""amkeul"" (script for female) and disregarded by privileged elites, whereas Hanja was regarded as ""jinseo"" (true text). Consequently, official documents were always written in Hanja during the Joseon era. Since most people couldn't understand Hanja, Korean kings sometimes released public notices entirely written in Hangul as early as the 16th century for all Korean classes, including uneducated peasants and slaves. By the 17th century, Korean elites Yangban and their slaves exchanged Hangul letters; that indicates a high literacy rate of Hangul during the Joseon era. Today, Hanja is largely unused in everyday life due to its inconvenience, but it is still important for historical and linguistic studies. Neither South Korea or North Korea opposes the learning of Hanja, though they are not officially used in North Korea anymore, and their usage in South Korea is mainly reserved for specific circumstances, such as newspapers, scholarly papers, and disambiguation.
Since the Korean War, through 70 years of separation, North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variations in pronunciation and vocabulary chosen, but these minor differences can be found in any of the Korean dialects and still largely mutually intelligible.
The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in both South Korea and North Korea.
The English word "Korean" is derived from Goryeo, which is thought to be the first Korean dynasty known to Western nations. Korean people in the former USSR refer to themselves as "Koryo-saram" and/or "Koryo-in" (literally, "Koryo/Goryeo person(s)"), and call the language "Koryo-mal."
In South Korea, the Korean language is referred to by many names including "hanguk-eo" ("Korean language"), "hanguk-mal" ("Korean speech") and "uri-mal" ("our language"). In ""hanguk-eo"" and ""hanguk-mal"", the first part of the word, ""hanguk"" was taken from the name of the Korean Empire (). The ""Han"" (韓) in "Hanguk" and "Daehan Jeguk" is derived from Samhan, in reference to the Three Kingdoms of Korea (not the ancient confederacies in the southern Korean Peninsula), while ""-eo"" and ""-mal"" mean "language" and "speech", respectively. Korean is also simply referred to as "guk-eo", literally "national language". This name is based on the same Han characters, meaning "nation" + "language" ("國語"), that are also used in Taiwan and Japan to refer to their respective national languages.
In North Korea and China, the language is most often called "Joseon-mal", or more formally, "Joseon-o". This is taken from the North Korean name for Korea (Joseon), a name retained from the Joseon dynasty until the proclamation of the Korean Empire, which in turn was annexed by the Empire of Japan.
In mainland China, following the establishment of diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1992, the term "Cháoxiǎnyǔ" or the short form "Cháoyǔ" has normally been used to refer to the standard language of North Korea and Yanbian, whereas "Hánguóyǔ" or the short form "Hányǔ" is used to refer to the standard language of South Korea.
Some older English sources also use the spelling "Corea" to refer to the nation, and its inflected form for the language, culture and people, "Korea" becoming more popular in the late 1800s according to Google's NGram English corpus of 2015.
Korean is considered by most linguists to be a language isolate, though it is commonly included by proponents of the now generally rejected Altaic family.
The hypothesis that Korean could be related to Japanese has had some supporters due to some overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical features that have been elaborated upon by such researchers as Samuel E. Martin and Roy Andrew Miller. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (1991) found about 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese–Korean 100-word Swadesh list. Some linguists concerned with the issue, including Vovin, have argued that the indicated similarities between Japanese and Korean are not due to any genetic relationship, but rather to a "sprachbund" effect and heavy borrowing, especially from ancient Korean into Western Old Japanese. A good example might be Middle Korean "sàm" and Japanese "asá", meaning "hemp". This word seems to be a cognate, but although it is well attested in Western Old Japanese and Northern Ryukyuan languages, in Eastern Old Japanese it only occurs in compounds, and it is only present in three dialects of the Southern Ryukyuan language group. Also, the doublet "wo" meaning "hemp" is attested in Western Old Japanese and Southern Ryukyuan languages. It is thus plausible to assume a borrowed term. (see Classification of the Japonic languages or Comparison of Japanese and Korean for further details on a possible relationship.)
Another lesser-known theory is the Dravido-Korean languages theory which suggests a relation with Dravidian in India. Some of the common features in the Korean and Dravidian languages are that they share some similar vocabulary, are agglutinative, and follow the SOV order; in both languages, nominals and adjectives follow the same syntax, particles are post-positional, and modifiers always precede modified words. However, typological similarities such as these could have arisen by chance.
The Khitan language has many vocabulary items similar to Korean that are not found in Mongolian or Tungusic languages. This suggests a strong Korean presence or influence on Khitan.
Korean is spoken by the Korean people in both South Korea and North Korea, and by the Korean diaspora in many countries including the People's Republic of China, the United States, Japan, and Russia. Currently, Korean is the fourth most popular foreign language in China, following English, Japanese, and Russian. Korean-speaking minorities exist in these states, but because of cultural assimilation into host countries, not all ethnic Koreans may speak it with native fluency.
Korean is the official language of South Korea and North Korea. It is also one of the two official languages of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.
In North Korea, the regulatory body is the Language Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences (, "Sahoe Gwahagweon Eohag Yeonguso"). In South Korea, the regulatory body for Korean is the Seoul-based National Institute of the Korean Language, which was created by presidential decree on January 23, 1991.
Established pursuant to Article 9, Section 2, of the Framework Act on the National Language, the King Sejong Institute is a public institution set up to coordinate the government's project of propagating Korean language and culture; it also supports the King Sejong Institute, which is the institution's overseas branch. The King Sejong Institute was established in response to:
The Topik Korea Institute is a lifelong educational center affiliated with a variety of Korean universities in Seoul, South Korea, whose aim is to promote Korean language and culture, support local Korean teaching internationally, and facilitate cultural exchanges.
The institute is sometimes compared to language and culture promotion organizations such as the King Sejong Institute. Unlike that organization, however, Topik Korea Institutes operate within established universities and colleges around the world, providing educational materials.
Korean has numerous small local dialects (called "mal" () [literally "speech"], "saturi" (), or "bang'eon" ( in Korean). The standard language ("pyojun-eo" or "pyojun-mal") of both South Korea and North Korea is based on the dialect of the area around Seoul (which, as Hanyang, was the capital of Joseon-era Korea for 500 years), though the northern standard after the Korean War has been influenced by the dialect of P'yŏngyang. All dialects of Korean are similar to each other and largely mutually intelligible (with the exception of dialect-specific phrases or non-Standard vocabulary unique to dialects), though the dialect of Jeju Island is divergent enough to be sometimes classified as a separate language. One of the more salient differences between dialects is the use of tone: speakers of the Seoul dialect make use of vowel length, whereas speakers of the Gyeongsang dialect maintain the pitch accent of Middle Korean. Some dialects are conservative, maintaining Middle Korean sounds (such as "z, β, ə") which have been lost from the standard language, whereas others are highly innovative.
There is substantial evidence for a history of extensive dialect levelling, or even convergent evolution or intermixture of two or more originally distinct linguistic stocks, within the Korean language and its dialects. Many Korean dialects have basic vocabulary that is etymologically distinct from vocabulary of identical meaning in Standard Korean or other dialects, for example "garlic chives" translated into Gyeongsang dialect () but in Standard Korean, it is (). This suggests that the Korean Peninsula may have at one time been much more linguistically diverse than it is at present. See also the Japanese–Koguryoic languages hypothesis.
Nonetheless, the separation of the two Korean states has resulted in increasing differences among the dialects that have emerged over time. Since the allies of the newly-founded nations split the Korean peninsula in half after 1945, the newly formed Korean nations have since borrowed vocabulary extensively from their respective allies. As the Soviet Union helped industrialize North Korea and establish it as a communist state, the North Koreans therefore borrowed a number of Russian terms. Likewise, since the United States helped South Korea extensively to develop militarily, economically, and politically, South Koreans therefore borrowed extensively from English.
The differences among northern and southern dialects have become so significant that many North Korean defectors reportedly have had great difficulty communicating with South Koreans after having initially settled into South Korea. In response to the diverging vocabularies, an app called Univoca was designed to help North Korean defectors learn South Korean terms by translating them into North Korean ones. More information can be found on the page North-South differences in the Korean language.
Aside from the standard language, there are few clear boundaries between Korean dialects, and they are typically partially grouped according to the regions of Korea.
1 The semivowels and are represented in Korean writing by modifications to vowel symbols (see below).
2 only at the end of a syllable
The IPA symbol (a subscript double straight quotation mark, shown here with a placeholder circle) is used to denote the tensed consonants . Its official use in the Extensions to the IPA is for 'strong' articulation, but is used in the literature for faucalized voice. The Korean consonants also have elements of stiff voice, but it is not yet known how typical this is of faucalized consonants. They are produced with a partially constricted glottis and additional subglottal pressure in addition to tense vocal tract walls, laryngeal lowering, or other expansion of the larynx.
is closer to a near-open central vowel (), though is still used for tradition.
is aspirated and becomes an alveolo-palatal before or for most speakers (but see North–South differences in the Korean language). This occurs with the tense fricative and all the affricates as well. At the end of a syllable, changes to (example: beoseot () 'mushroom').
Traditionally, was disallowed at the beginning of a word. It disappeared before , and otherwise became . However, the inflow of western loanwords changed the trend, and now word-initial (mostly from English loanwords) are pronounced as a free variation of either or . The traditional prohibition of word-initial became a morphological rule called "initial law" () in South Korea, which pertains to Sino-Korean vocabulary. Such words retain their word-initial in North Korea.
All obstruents (plosives, affricates, fricatives) at the end of a word are pronounced with no audible release, .
Plosive stops become nasal stops before nasal stops.
Hangul spelling does not reflect these assimilatory pronunciation rules, but rather maintains the underlying, partly historical morphology. Given this, it is sometimes hard to tell which actual phonemes are present in a certain word.
One difference between the pronunciation standards of North and South Korea is the treatment of initial , and initial . For example,
Grammatical morphemes may change shape depending on the preceding sounds. Examples include "-eun/-neun" () and "-i/-ga" (). Sometimes sounds may be inserted instead. Examples include "-eul/-reul" (), "-euro/-ro" (), "-eseo/-seo" (), "-ideunji/-deunji" () and "-iya/-ya" (). However, "-euro/-ro" is somewhat irregular, since it will behave differently after a rieul consonant.
Some verbs may also change shape morphophonemically.
Korean is an agglutinative language. The Korean language is traditionally considered to have nine parts of speech. For details, see Korean parts of speech. Modifiers generally precede the modified words, and in the case of verb modifiers, can be serially appended. The basic form of a Korean sentence is subject–object–verb, but the verb is the only required and immovable element and word order is highly flexible, as in many other agglutinative languages.
The relationship between a speaker or writer and his or her subject and audience is paramount in Korean grammar. The relationship between speaker/writer and subject referent is reflected in "honorifics", whereas that between speaker/writer and audience is reflected in "speech level".
When talking about someone superior in status, a speaker or writer usually uses special nouns or verb endings to indicate the subject's superiority. Generally, someone is superior in status if they are an older relative, a stranger of roughly equal or greater age, or an employer, teacher, customer, or the like. Someone is equal or inferior in status if they are a younger stranger, student, employee, or the like. Nowadays, there are special endings which can be used on declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences; and both honorific or normal sentences.
Honorifics in traditional Korea were strictly hierarchical. The caste and estate systems possessed patterns and usages much more complex and stratified than those used today. The intricate structure of the Korean honorific system flourished in traditional culture and society. Honorifics in contemporary Korea are now used for people who are psychologically distant. Honorifics are also used for people who are superior in status. For example, older people, teachers, and employers.
There are seven verb paradigms or "speech levels" in Korean, and each level has its own unique set of verb endings which are used to indicate the level of formality of a situation. Unlike honorifics—which are used to show respect towards the referent (the person spoken of) —"speech levels" are used to show respect towards a speaker's or writer's audience (the person spoken to). The names of the seven levels are derived from the non-honorific imperative form of the verb ("hada", "do") in each level, plus the suffix ("che", Hanja: ), which means "style".
The three levels with high politeness (very formally polite, formally polite, casually polite) are generally grouped together as "jondaenmal" (), whereas the two levels with low politeness (formally impolite, casually impolite) are "banmal" () in Korean. The remaining two levels (neutral formality with neutral politeness, high formality with neutral politeness) are neither polite nor impolite.
Nowadays, younger-generation speakers no longer feel obligated to lower their usual regard toward the referent. It is common to see younger people talk to their older relatives with banmal (). This is not out of disrespect, but instead it shows the intimacy and the closeness of the relationship between the two speakers. Transformations in social structures and attitudes in today's rapidly changing society have brought about change in the way people speak.
In general, Korean lacks grammatical gender. As one of the few exceptions, the third-person singular pronoun has two different forms: 그 "geu" (male) and 그녀 "geunyeo" (female). Before 그녀 were invented in need of translating 'she' into Korean, 그 was the only one third-person singular pronoun, and had no grammatical gender.
However, one can still find stronger contrasts between the sexes within Korean speech. Some examples of this can be seen in: (1) softer tone used by women in speech; (2) a married woman introducing herself as someone's mother or wife, not with her own name; (3) the presence of gender differences in titles and occupational terms (for example, a "sajang" is a company president and "yŏsajang" is a female company president.); (4) females sometimes using more tag questions and rising tones in statements, also seen in speech from children.
Between two people of asymmetrical status in a Korean society, people tend to emphasize differences in status for the sake of solidarity. Koreans prefer to use kinship terms, rather than any other terms of reference. In traditional Korean society, women have long been in disadvantaged positions. Korean social structure traditionally was a patriarchically dominated family system that emphasized the maintenance of family lines. This structure has tended to separate the roles of women from those of men.
The core of the Korean vocabulary is made up of native Korean words. A significant proportion of the vocabulary, especially words that denote abstract ideas, are Sino-Korean words, either
The exact proportion of Sino-Korean vocabulary is a matter of debate. Sohn (2001) stated 50–60%. Later, the same author (2006, p. 5) gives an even higher estimate of 65%. Jeong Jae-do, one of the compilers of the dictionary "Urimal Keun Sajeon", asserts that the proportion is not so high. He points out that Korean dictionaries compiled during the colonial period include many unused Sino-Korean words. In his estimation, the proportion of Sino-Korean vocabulary in the Korean language might be as low as 30%.
Most of the vocabulary consists of two sets of words; native Korean and Sino-Korean respectively. It is similar to that of English — native English words and Latinate equivalents such as "water-aqua", "fire-flame", "sea-marine", "two-dual", "sun-solar", "star-stellar". Therefore, just like other Korean words, Korean has two sets of numeral systems. However, unlike English and Latin which belong to the same Indo-European languages family and bear a certain resemblance, Korean and Chinese are genetically unrelated and the two sets of Korean words differ completely from each other. All Sino-Korean morphemes are monosyllabic as in Chinese, whereas native Korean morphemes can be polysyllabic. The Sino-Korean words were deliberately imported alongside corresponding Chinese characters for a written language and everything was supposed to be written in Hanja, so the coexistence of Sino-Korean would be more thorough and systematic than that of Latinate words in English. To a much lesser extent, some words have also been borrowed from Mongolian and other languages.
The vast majority of loanwords other than Sino-Korean come from modern times, approximately 90% of which are from English. Many words have also been borrowed from Western languages such as German via Japanese ( ("areubaiteu") "part-time job", ("allereugi") "allergy", ("gibseu" or "gibuseu") "plaster cast used for broken bones"). Some Western words were borrowed indirectly via Japanese during the Japanese occupation of Korea, taking a Japanese sound pattern, for example "dozen" > "dāsu" > "daseu". Most indirect Western borrowings are now written according to current "Hangulization" rules for the respective Western language, as if borrowed directly. There are a few more complicated borrowings such as "German(y)" (see names of Germany), the first part of whose endonym "Deutschland" the Japanese approximated using the kanji "doitsu" that were then accepted into the Korean language by their Sino-Korean pronunciation: "dok" + "il" = "Dogil". In South Korean official use, a number of other Sino-Korean country names have been replaced with phonetically oriented "Hangeulizations" of the countries' endonyms or English names.
Because of such a prevalence of English in modern South Korean culture and society, lexical borrowing is inevitable. English-derived Korean, or 'Konglish' (), is increasingly used. The vocabulary of the South Korean dialect of the Korean language is roughly 5% loanwords (excluding Sino-Korean vocabulary). However, due to North Korea's isolation, such influence is lacking in North Korean speech.
Korean uses words adapted from English in ways that may seem strange to native English speakers. For example, "fighting" () is a term of encouragement like 'come on'/'go (on)' in English. Something that is 'service' () is free or 'on the house'. A building referred to as an 'aparteu' () is an 'apartment' (but in fact refers to a residence more akin to a condominium) and a type of pencil that is called a 'sharp' () is a mechanical pencil. Like other borrowings, many of these idiosyncrasies, including all the examples listed above, appear to be imported into Korean via Japanese, or influenced by Japanese. Many English words introduced via Japanese pronunciation have been reformed as in 멜론 (melon) which was once called 메론 (meron) as in Japanese.
North Korean vocabulary shows a tendency to prefer native Korean over Sino-Korean or foreign borrowings, especially with recent political objectives aimed at eliminating foreign influences on the Korean language in the North. In the early years, the North Korean government tried to eliminate Sino-Korean words. Consequently, South Korean may have several Sino-Korean or foreign borrowings which are not in North Korean.
Before the creation of the modern Korean alphabet, known as Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea and as Hangul in South Korea, people in Korea (known as Joseon at the time) primarily wrote using Classical Chinese alongside native phonetic writing systems that predate Hangul by hundreds of years, including idu, hyangchal, gugyeol, and gakpil. However, due to the fundamental differences between the Korean and Chinese languages and the large number of characters to be learned, the lower classes, who often didn't have the privilege of education, had much difficulty in learning how to write using Chinese characters. To assuage this problem, King Sejong () created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people.
The Korean alphabet was denounced and looked down upon by the "yangban" aristocracy, who deemed it too easy to learn, but it gained widespread use among the common class, and was widely used to print popular novels which were enjoyed by the common class. With growing Korean nationalism in the 19th century, the Gabo Reformists' push, and the promotion of Hangul in schools, in 1894, Hangul displaced Hanja as Korea's national script. Hanja are still used to a certain extent in South Korea, where they are sometimes combined with Hangul, but this method is slowly declining in use, even though students learn Hanja in school.
Below is a chart of the Korean alphabet's symbols and their canonical IPA values:
The letters of the Korean alphabet are not written linearly like most alphabets, but instead arranged into blocks that represent syllables. So, while the word "bibimbap" is written as eight characters in a row in English, in Korean it is written 비빔밥, as three syllable blocks in a row. The syllable blocks are then written left to right, top to bottom.
Modern Korean is written with spaces between words, a feature not found in Chinese or Japanese (except when Japanese is written exclusively in hiragana, as in children's books). Korean punctuation marks are almost identical to Western ones. Traditionally, Korean was written in columns, from top to bottom, right to left, but it is now usually written in rows, from left to right, top to bottom.
The Korean language used in the North and the South exhibits differences in pronunciation, spelling, grammar and vocabulary.
In North Korea, palatalization of is optional, and can be pronounced between vowels.
Words that are written the same way may be pronounced differently, such as the examples below. The pronunciations below are given in Revised Romanization, McCune–Reischauer and Hangul, the last of which represents what the Korean characters would be if one were to write the word as pronounced.
* Similar pronunciation is used in the North whenever the hanja "" is attached to a Sino-Korean word ending in , or . (In the South, this rule only applies when it is attached to any single-character Sino-Korean word.)
Some words are spelled differently by the North and the South, but the pronunciations are the same.
Some words have different spellings and pronunciations in the North and the South. Most of the official languages of North Korea are from the northwest (Pyeongan dialect), and the standard language of South Korea is the standard language (Seoul language close to Gyeonggi- dialect). some of which were given in the "Phonology" section above:
In general, when transcribing place names, North Korea tends to use the pronunciation in the original language more than South Korea, which often uses the pronunciation in English. For example:
Some grammatical constructions are also different:
Some vocabulary is different between the North and the South:
In the North, guillemets and are the symbols used for quotes; in the South, quotation marks equivalent to the English ones, and , are standard, although and are also used.
For native English speakers, Korean is generally considered to be one of the most difficult languages to master despite the relative ease of learning Hangul. For instance, the United States' Defense Language Institute places Korean in Category IV, which also includes Japanese, Chinese (e.g. Mandarin, Cantonese & Shanghainese) and Arabic. This means that 63 weeks of instruction (as compared to just 25 weeks for Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish) are required to bring an English-speaking student to a limited working level of proficiency in which they have "sufficient capability to meet routine social demands and limited job requirements" and "can deal with concrete topics in past, present, and future tense." Similarly, the Foreign Service Institute's School of Language Studies places Korean in Category IV, the highest level of difficulty.
The study of the Korean language in the United States is dominated by Korean American heritage language students; in 2007 they were estimated to form over 80% of all students of the language at non-military universities. However, Sejong Institutes in the United States have noted a sharp rise in the number of people of other ethnic backgrounds studying Korean between 2009 and 2011; they attribute this to rising popularity of South Korean music and television shows. In 2018 it was reported that the rise in K-Pop was responsible for the increase in people learning the language in US universities.
There are two widely used tests of Korean as a foreign language: the Korean Language Proficiency Test (KLPT) and the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK). The Korean Language Proficiency Test, an examination aimed at assessing non-native speakers' competence in Korean, was instituted in 1997; 17,000 people applied for the 2005 sitting of the examination. The TOPIK was first administered in 1997 and was taken by 2,274 people. Since then the total number of people who have taken the TOPIK has surpassed 1 million, with more than 150,000 candidates taking the test in 2012. TOPIK is administered in 45 regions within South Korea and 72 nations outside of South Korea, with a significant portion being administered in Japan and North America, which would suggest the targeted audience for TOPIK is still primarily foreigners of Korean heritage. This is also evident in TOPIK's website, where the examination is introduced as intended for Korean heritage students.
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Kyle MacLachlan
Kyle Merritt MacLachlan (; born February 22, 1959) is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Dale Cooper in "Twin Peaks" (1990–1991; 2017) and its film prequel "" (1992), as well as roles in two of David Lynch's films: Paul Atreides in "Dune" (1984) and Jeffrey Beaumont in "Blue Velvet" (1986). MacLachlan's other film roles include Lloyd Gallagher in "The Hidden" (1987), Ray Manzarek in "The Doors" (1991), Cliff Vandercave in "The Flintstones" (1994), Zack Carey in "Showgirls" (1995), and the voice of Riley's father in "Inside Out" (2015).
He has had prominent roles in television shows including appearing as Trey MacDougal in "Sex and the City" (2000–2002), Orson Hodge in "Desperate Housewives" (2006–2012), The Captain in "How I Met Your Mother" (2010–2014), the Mayor of Portland in "Portlandia" (2011–2018) and Calvin Zabo in "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." (2014–2015).
MacLachlan has won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama (1990), and was nominated in the same category in 2017, for playing the role of Dale Cooper in "Twin Peaks". He has also been nominated for two Emmy Awards for "Twin Peaks".
MacLachlan was born the first of three boys at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital in Yakima, Washington. His mother, Catherine ("née" Stone; 1933-1986), was a public relations director for a school district and a homemaker who was active in community arts programs. His father, Kent Alan MacLachlan (born McLachlan; 1933-2011), was a stockbroker and lawyer. Kyle has Scottish, Cornish, and German ancestry. He grew up in Yakima, the eldest of three boys. His two younger brothers, Craig and Kent Jr., live in the Seattle area. MacLachlan graduated from Eisenhower High School in Yakima. His mother left his father when he was 17, and his parents divorced in his senior year of high school in 1977.
MacLachlan was introduced to stage acting by his mother when she became director of a youth theater program for teenagers that she helped set up in Yakima. She also sent him to piano lessons from the age of 9 to 14, when he also began to study classical singing. While in high school, he performed in plays and in class musicals, acting in his first play aged 15. For his senior year, MacLachlan played the lead role of Brindsley Miller in a production of Peter Shaffer's one-act play "Black Comedy" and also performed as Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady". In 1982, he graduated cum laude with a BFA in drama from the University of Washington (UW), as a student of the Professional Actor Training Program. He initially planned to major in business and also studied classical voice at UW, but changed his focus to acting.
The first film MacLachlan worked on was "The Changeling" (1980), part of which was shot on the University of Washington campus. He was paid $10 as an extra.
MacLachlan made his film debut in "Dune" (1984) in the starring role of Paul Atreides. While still in college, MacLachlan was appearing in Molière's "Tartuffe" in a Seattle-area theater. A casting agent for "Dune" producer Dino de Laurentiis was looking for a young actor to star in the film, and multiple people recommended MacLachlan. After several screen tests, he hit it off with director David Lynch, aided by their common Pacific Northwest backgrounds, and succeeded in winning the part.
After "Dune" flopped and met with poor reviews from critics, MacLachlan found it difficult to find work. He moved to Los Angeles in 1985, and auditioned for several films, including "Top Gun", but failed to win any roles, eventually dropping his agent, Creative Artists Agency.
Finally, Lynch cast MacLachlan in the starring role of Jeffrey Beaumont in "Blue Velvet" (1986), which was received more positively. He starred in the 1987 Science Fiction Action film "The Hidden" as FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher.
MacLachlan further collaborated with Lynch in the ABC television series "Twin Peaks" (1990–91), playing Special Agent Dale Cooper, reprising that role for Lynch's 1992 prequel film "". Lynch commented on those roles in a "GQ" story about MacLachlan: "Kyle plays innocents who are interested in the mysteries of life. He's the person you trust enough to go into a strange world with." MacLachlan also said he considered Lynch one of his mentors that had a "monumental impact" on him.
MacLachlan appeared as musician Ray Manzarek in Oliver Stone's 1991 film "The Doors", about the band of the same name. He had previously turned down Stone's offer to play Chris in the 1986 movie "Platoon", which ultimately went to Charlie Sheen. In the 1993 film version of Franz Kafka's "The Trial", with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, MacLachlan played the lead role of the persecuted Josef K.
MacLachlan co-starred with Samuel L. Jackson as a rookie prison guard in John Frankenheimer's 1994 Emmy-winning HBO film "Against the Wall" about the Attica prison riots. In 1994, he was also featured in "The Flintstones", a live-action movie adaptation of the animated sitcom of the same name, portraying Cliff Vandercave, the movie's primary antagonist, opposite John Goodman and Rick Moranis.
In 1995, MacLachlan starred in Paul Verhoeven's "Showgirls". The movie was heavily panned by critics and it collected a record seven Golden Raspberry Awards. MacLachlan recalls that when he watched "Showgirls" for the first time before the premiere, he thought it was "horrible". But he later realised that the movie was "inadvertently funny" and embraced for its campiness. According to MacLachlan, although he skipped the movie's press tour, he had sat through the whole screening, contrary to reports that he walked out.
In the 1990s, MacLachlan was offered by NBC to be one of the lead actors on the then-new soap opera "Passions" as a powerful, wealthy villain and head of a multimillion-dollar company, but MacLachlan turned it down.
From 2000 to 2002, MacLachlan had a recurring role in the American television series "Sex and the City", portraying Dr. Trey MacDougal, the one-time husband of Charlotte York (Kristin Davis). MacLachlan played King Claudius in the 2000 film "Hamlet" based on William Shakespeare's play. In the video game "Grand Theft Auto III" released in 2001, he voiced the character of the sociopathic real-estate developer Donald Love. In 2002 he made his West End debut in John Kolvenbach's "On an Average Day" with Woody Harrelson.
In 2003, MacLachlan made his Broadway debut as Aston in Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker" with Patrick Stewart. He portrayed the spirit of Cary Grant in the 2004 film "Touch of Pink". His resemblance to Grant had been previously noted in an episode of "Twin Peaks". That same year he also had a guest role in "", in which he played a psychiatrist who shot and killed a sociopathic child who had murdered his son. He was a guest star in the show again in 2011, as a politician whose son is involved in a rape accusation.
In 2006, after starring in the short-lived "In Justice", MacLachlan appeared in "Desperate Housewives" as the mysterious dentist Orson Hodge. He first appeared during the show's second season, and became a full-time cast member at the start of season three. In 2007, MacLachlan was one of the presenters at the London leg of Live Earth benefit concerts. He appeared in the 2008 film "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2". In the English version of the cult 2006 Norwegian animated film "Free Jimmy" released in 2008, he voiced the character of "Marius", a militant animal rights activist.
In 2010, after four years of playing Orson Hodge, MacLachlan decided to quit "Desperate Housewives" as he found the commute from his home in New York City to the set in Los Angeles increasingly difficult since becoming a father in 2008. However, he returned as a guest star in 2012 for season eight, the final season of "Desperate Housewives". He also guest starred as "The Captain" in season 6, 8 and 9 of "How I Met Your Mother" starting in 2010 and with a final appearance in 2014.
In 2011, he began playing his current role as the Mayor of Portland, Oregon, in the IFC comedy "Portlandia". After the end of the short-lived 2012 series "Made in Jersey" where he starred as lawyer Donovan Stark, he was cast as a guest star in "The Good Wife". In 2013 and 2014 he appeared as prosecutor Josh Perotti in four episodes of "The Good Wife". In 2014 and 2015 he appeared in a recurring role on "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." television series as Calvin Zabo / The Doctor. In 2015, he voiced the main character's father in the Pixar animated feature "Inside Out". In January 2015, it was announced that MacLachlan would return as Special Agent Dale Cooper for the new limited television series "Twin Peaks", which debuted on May 21, 2017. In an interview, MacLachlan said he doesn't understand all of Twin Peaks and that fans understand it much more than him.
In 2018, MacLachlan stars as the main antagonist Isaac Izard in the fantasy-horror family film "The House with a Clock in its Walls".
A dedicated wine lover, Kyle is partners with vintner Eric Dunham in "Pursued by Bear", a label of Dunham Cellars in Walla Walla, Washington that started in 2005. The name, suggested over dinner by Fred Savage, comes from a stage direction ("Exit, pursued by a bear") in Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale". It is regarded as one of Washington's highest rated wine labels.
MacLachlan was devastated when his mother died of ovarian cancer in 1986, aged 53, shortly before "Blue Velvet" was released. She had been diagnosed while he was filming "Dune" in 1983, and delayed informing him of the diagnosis. She had fought the cancer for years. His father died of post-surgery complications in 2011.
He was in a relationship with "Blue Velvet" co-star Laura Dern for three-and-a-half years from 1985 to 1989. Subsequently he was in a relationship with "Twin Peaks" co-star Lara Flynn Boyle for two-and-a-half years. In 1992, after his relationship with Boyle ended, he began a relationship with supermodel Linda Evangelista after they met at a photo shoot they did together for Barneys New York. According to MacLachlan, they had been engaged for a few years when their six-year relationship ended in 1998.
A year later, he met and began a relationship with publicist Desiree Gruber. Gruber runs her own public relations agency; she became an executive producer of "Project Runway" in 2004. MacLachlan moved to New York City because he was filming "Sex and the City" and Gruber was based there. They were married on April 20, 2002. Their son, Callum Lyon MacLachlan, was born in Los Angeles in 2008. The family has residences in Los Angeles and New York.
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Kevlar
Kevlar is a heat-resistant and strong synthetic fiber, related to other aramids such as Nomex and Technora. Developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont in 1965, this high-strength material was used first commercially in the early 1970s as a replacement for steel in racing tires. Typically it is spun into ropes or fabric sheets that can be used as such or as an ingredient in composite material components.
Kevlar has many applications, ranging from bicycle tires and racing sails to bulletproof vests, because of its high tensile strength-to-weight ratio; by this measure it is five times stronger than steel. It also is used to make modern marching drumheads that withstand high impact. When used as a woven material, it is suitable for mooring lines and other underwater applications.
A similar fiber called Twaron with the same chemical structure was developed by Akzo in the 1970s; commercial production started in 1986, and Twaron is now manufactured by Teijin.
Poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide – branded Kevlar – was invented by Polish-American chemist Stephanie Kwolek while working for DuPont, in anticipation of a gasoline shortage. In 1964, her group began searching for a new lightweight strong fiber to use for light, but strong, tires. The polymers she had been working with at the time, poly-p-phenylene-terephthalate and polybenzamide, formed liquid crystal while in solution, something unique to those polymers at the time.
The solution was "cloudy, opalescent upon being stirred, and of low viscosity" and usually was thrown away. However, Kwolek persuaded the technician, Charles Smullen, who ran the spinneret, to test her solution, and was amazed to find that the fiber did not break, unlike nylon. Her supervisor and her laboratory director understood the significance of her discovery and a new field of polymer chemistry quickly arose. By 1971, modern Kevlar was introduced. However, Kwolek was not very involved in developing the applications of Kevlar. Kevlar 149 was invented by Dr. Jacob Lahijani of Dupont in the 1980s.
Kevlar is synthesized in solution from the monomers 1,4-phenylene-diamine ("para"-phenylenediamine) and terephthaloyl chloride in a condensation reaction yielding hydrochloric acid as a byproduct. The result has liquid-crystalline behavior, and mechanical drawing orients the polymer chains in the fiber's direction. Hexamethylphosphoramide (HMPA) was the solvent initially used for the polymerization, but for safety reasons, DuPont replaced it by a solution of "N"-methyl-pyrrolidone and calcium chloride. As this process had been patented by Akzo (see above) in the production of Twaron, a patent war ensued.
Kevlar (poly paraphenylene terephthalamide) production is expensive because of the difficulties arising from using concentrated sulfuric acid, needed to keep the water-insoluble polymer in solution during its synthesis and spinning.
Several grades of Kevlar are available:
The ultraviolet component of sunlight degrades and decomposes Kevlar, a problem known as "UV degradation", and so it is rarely used outdoors without protection against sunlight.
When Kevlar is spun, the resulting fiber has a tensile strength of about 3,620 MPa, and a relative density of 1.44. The polymer owes its high strength to the many inter-chain bonds. These inter-molecular hydrogen bonds form between the carbonyl groups and N"H" centers. Additional strength is derived from aromatic stacking interactions between adjacent strands. These interactions have a greater influence on Kevlar than the van der Waals interactions and chain length that typically influence the properties of other synthetic polymers and fibers such as Dyneema. The presence of salts and certain other impurities, especially calcium, could interfere with the strand interactions and care is taken to avoid inclusion in its production. Kevlar's structure consists of relatively rigid molecules which tend to form mostly planar sheet-like structures rather like silk protein.
Kevlar maintains its strength and resilience down to cryogenic temperatures (−196 °C); in fact, it is slightly stronger at low temperatures. At higher temperatures the tensile strength is immediately reduced by about 10–20%, and after some hours the strength progressively reduces further. For example: enduring 160 °C (320 °F) for 500 hours, reduces strength by about 10%; and enduring 260 °C (500 °F) for 70 hours, reduces strength by about 50%.
Kevlar is often used in the field of cryogenics for its low thermal conductivity and high strength relative to other materials for suspension purposes. It is most often used to suspend a paramagnetic salt enclosure from a superconducting magnet mandrel in order to minimize any heat leaks to the paramagnetic material. It is also used as a thermal standoff or structural support where low heat leaks are desired.
Kevlar is a well-known component of personal armor such as combat helmets, ballistic face masks, and ballistic vests. The PASGT helmet and vest used by United States military forces, use Kevlar as a key component in their construction. Other military uses include bulletproof face masks and spall liners used to protect the crews of armoured fighting vehicles. "Nimitz"-class aircraft carriers use Kevlar reinforcement in vital areas. Civilian applications include: high heat resistance uniforms worn by firefighters, body armour worn by police officers, security, and police tactical teams such as SWAT.
Kevlar is used to manufacture gloves, sleeves, jackets, chaps and other articles of clothing designed to protect users from cuts, abrasions and heat. Kevlar-based protective gear is often considerably lighter and thinner than equivalent gear made of more traditional materials.
It is used for motorcycle safety clothing, especially in the areas featuring padding such as shoulders and elbows. In fencing it is used in the protective jackets, breeches, plastrons and the bib of the masks. It is increasingly being used in the "peto", the padded covering which protects the picadors' horses in the bullring. Speed skaters also frequently wear an under-layer of Kevlar fabric to prevent potential wounds from skates in the event of a fall or collision.
In "kyudo", or Japanese archery, it may be used as an alternative to more expensive hemp for bow strings. It is one of the main materials used for paraglider suspension lines. It is used as an inner lining for some bicycle tires to prevent punctures. In table tennis, plies of Kevlar are added to custom ply blades, or paddles, in order to increase bounce and reduce weight. Tennis racquets are sometimes strung with Kevlar. It is used in sails for high performance racing boats.
In 2013, with advancements in technology, Nike used Kevlar in shoes for the first time. It launched the Elite II Series, with enhancements to its earlier version of basketball shoes by using Kevlar in the anterior as well as the shoe laces. This was done to decrease the elasticity of the tip of the shoe in contrast to nylon used conventionally as Kevlar expanded by about 1% against nylon which expanded by about 30%. Shoes in this range included LeBron, HyperDunk and Zoom Kobe VII. However these shoes were launched at a price range much higher than average cost of basketball shoes. It was also used in the laces for the Adidas F50 adiZero Prime football boot.
Several companies, including Continental AG, manufacture cycle tires with Kevlar to protect against punctures.
Folding-bead bicycle tires, introduced to cycling by Tom Ritchey in 1984, use Kevlar as a bead in place of steel for weight reduction and strength. A side effect of the folding bead is a reduction in shelf and floor space needed to display cycle tires in a retail environment, as they are folded and placed in small boxes.
Kevlar has also been found to have useful acoustic properties for loudspeaker cones, specifically for bass and mid range drive units. Additionally, Kevlar has been used as a strength member in fiber optic cables such as the ones used for audio data transmissions.
Kevlar can be used as an acoustic core on bows for string instruments. Kevlar's physical properties provide strength, flexibility, and stability for the bow's user. To date, the only manufacturer of this type of bow is CodaBow.
Kevlar is also presently used as a material for tailcords (a.k.a. tailpiece adjusters), which connect the tailpiece to the endpin of bowed string instruments.
Kevlar is sometimes used as a material on marching snare drums. It allows for an extremely high amount of tension, resulting in a cleaner sound. There is usually a resin poured onto the Kevlar to make the head airtight, and a nylon top layer to provide a flat striking surface. This is one of the primary types of marching snare drum heads. Remo's Falam Slam patch is made with Kevlar and is used to reinforce bass drum heads where the beater strikes.
Kevlar is used in the woodwind reeds of Fibracell. The material of these reeds is a composite of aerospace materials designed to duplicate the way nature constructs cane reed. Very stiff but sound absorbing Kevlar fibers are suspended in a lightweight resin formulation.
Kevlar is sometimes used in structural components of cars, especially high-value performance cars such as the Ferrari F40
The chopped fiber has been used as a replacement for asbestos in brake pads. Indeed, aramids release a lower level of airborne fibres than asbestos brakes. Asbestos fibres are known for their carcinogenic properties.
Wicks for fire dancing props are made of composite materials with Kevlar in them. Kevlar by itself does not absorb fuel very well, so it is blended with other materials such as fiberglass or cotton. Kevlar's high heat resistance allows the wicks to be reused many times.
Kevlar is sometimes used as a substitute for Teflon in some non-stick frying pans.
The fiber is used in woven rope and in cable, where the fibers are kept parallel within a polyethylene sleeve. The cables have been used in suspension bridges such as the bridge at Aberfeldy in Scotland. They have also been used to stabilize cracking concrete cooling towers by circumferential application followed by tensioning to close the cracks. Kevlar is widely used as a protective outer sheath for optical fiber cable, as its strength protects the cable from damage and kinking. When used in this application it is commonly known by the trademarked name Parafil.
Kevlar was used by scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology as a base textile for an experiment in electricity-producing clothing. This was done by weaving zinc oxide nanowires into the fabric. If successful, the new fabric will generate about 80 milliwatts per square meter.
A retractable roof of over 60,000 square feet (5,575 square metres) of Kevlar was a key part of the design of Montreal's Olympic stadium for the 1976 Summer Olympics. It was spectacularly unsuccessful, as it was completed 10 years late and replaced just 10 years later in May 1998 after a series of problems.
Kevlar can be found as a reinforcing layer in rubber bellows expansion joints and rubber hoses, for use in high temperature applications, and for its high strength. It is also found as a braid layer used on the outside of hose assemblies, to add protection against sharp objects.
A thin Kevlar window has been used by the NA48 experiment at CERN to separate a vacuum vessel from a vessel at nearly atmospheric pressure, both 192 cm in diameter. The window has provided vacuum tightness combined with reasonably small amount of material (only 0.3% to 0.4% of radiation length).
The Motorola RAZR Family, the Motorola Droid Maxx, and the OnePlus 2 have a Kevlar backplate, chosen over other materials such as carbon fiber due to its resilience and lack of interference with signal transmission.
The Kevlar fiber/epoxy matrix composite materials can be used in marine current turbines (MCT) or wind turbines due to their high specific strength and light weight compared to other fibers.
Aramid fibers are widely used for reinforcing composite materials, often in combination with carbon fiber and glass fiber. The matrix for high performance composites is usually epoxy resin. Typical applications include monocoque bodies for F1 racing cars, helicopter rotor blades, tennis, table tennis, badminton and squash rackets, kayaks, cricket bats, and field hockey, ice hockey and lacrosse sticks.
Kevlar 149 is an alternative in certain parts of light aircraft construction. The wing leading edge is one application, Kevlar being less prone than carbon or glass fiber to break in bird collision.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16759
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Kosovo War
The Kosovo War was an armed conflict in Kosovo that started in late February 1998 and lasted until 11 June 1999. It was fought by the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e. Serbia and Montenegro), which controlled Kosovo before the war, and the Kosovo Albanian rebel group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with air support from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) from 24 March 1999, and ground support from the Albanian army.
The KLA, formed in the early 1990s to fight against Serbian persecution of Kosovo Albanians, initiated its first campaign in 1995 when it launched attacks against Serbian law enforcement in Kosovo. In June 1996 the group claimed responsibility for acts of sabotage targeting Kosovo police stations. In 1997, the organisation acquired a large amount of arms through weapons smuggling from Albania, following a rebellion in which weapons were looted from the country's police and army posts. In early 1998, KLA attacks targeting Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo resulted in an increased presence of Serb paramilitaries and regular forces who subsequently began pursuing a campaign of retribution targeting KLA sympathisers and political opponents; this campaign killed 1,500 to 2,000 civilians and KLA combatants.
After attempts at a diplomatic solution failed, NATO intervened, justifying the campaign in Kosovo as a "humanitarian war". This precipitated a mass expulsion of Kosovar Albanians as the Yugoslav forces continued to fight during the aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia (March–June 1999). By 2000, investigations had recovered the remains of almost three thousand victims of all ethnicities, and in 2001 a United Nations administered Supreme Court, based in Kosovo, found that there had been "a systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments", but that Yugoslav troops had tried to remove rather than eradicate the Albanian population.
The war ended with the Kumanovo Treaty, with Yugoslav and Serb forces agreeing to withdraw from Kosovo to make way for an international presence. The Kosovo Liberation Army disbanded soon after this, with some of its members going on to fight for the UÇPMB in the Preševo Valley and others joining the National Liberation Army (NLA) and Albanian National Army (ANA) during the armed ethnic conflict in Macedonia, while others went on to form the Kosovo Police. After the war, a list was compiled which documented that over 13,500 people were killed or went missing during the two year conflict. The Yugoslav and Serb forces caused the displacement of between 1.2 million to 1.45 million Kosovo Albanians. After the war, around 200,000 Serbs, Romani and other non-Albanians fled Kosovo and many of the remaining civilians were victims of abuse. Serbia became home to the highest number of refugees and internally displaced persons in Europe.
The NATO bombing campaign has remained controversial, as it did not gain the approval of the UN Security Council and because it caused at least 488 Yugoslav civilian deaths, including substantial numbers of Kosovar refugees.
The modern Albanian-Serbian conflict has its roots in the expulsion of the Albanians 1877–1878 from areas that became incorporated into the Principality of Serbia. Tensions between the Serbian and Albanian communities in Kosovo simmered throughout the 20th century and occasionally erupted into major violence, particularly during the First Balkan War (1912–13), World War I (1914–18), and World War II (1939–45). After 1945 the socialist government under Josip Broz Tito systematically repressed all manifestations of nationalism throughout Yugoslavia, seeking to ensure that no republic or nationality gained dominance over the others. In particular, Tito diluted the power of Serbia—the largest and most populous republic—by establishing autonomous governments in the Serbian province of Vojvodina in the north and Kosovo and Metohija in the south. Kosovo's borders did not precisely match the areas of ethnic Albanian settlement in Yugoslavia (significant numbers of Albanians remained in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia). Kosovo's formal autonomy, established under the 1945 Yugoslav constitution, initially meant relatively little in practice. The secret police (the UDBA) cracked down hard on nationalists. In 1956 a number of Albanians went on trial in Kosovo on charges of espionage and subversion. The threat of separatism was in fact minimal, as the few underground groups aiming for union with Albania had little political significance. Their long-term impact became substantial, though, as some—particularly the Revolutionary Movement for Albanian Unity, founded by Adem Demaçi—would eventually form the political core of the Kosovo Liberation Army (founded in 1990). Demaci himself was imprisoned in 1964 along with many of his followers. Yugoslavia underwent a period of economic and political crisis in 1969, as a massive government program of economic reform widened the gap between the rich north and poor south of the country.
Student demonstrations and riots in Belgrade in June 1968 spread to Kosovo in November, but Yugoslav security forces quelled them. Tito conceded some of the students' demands—in particular, representative powers for Albanians in both the Serbian and Yugoslav state bodies and better recognition of the Albanian language. The University of Pristina was established as an independent institution in 1970, ending a long period when the institution had been run as an outpost of Belgrade University. The lack of Albanian-language educational materials in Yugoslavia hampered Albanian education in Kosovo, so an agreement was struck with Albania itself to supply textbooks.
In 1969 the Serbian Orthodox Church ordered its clergy to compile data on the ongoing problems of Serbs in Kosovo, seeking to pressure the government in Belgrade to do more to protect the interests of Serbs there.
In 1974 Kosovo's political status improved further when a new Yugoslav constitution granted an expanded set of political rights. Along with Vojvodina, Kosovo was declared a province and gained many of the powers of a fully-fledged republic: a seat on the federal presidency and its own assembly, police force and national bank.
Provincial power was still exercised by the Communist Party, but now devolved mainly to ethnic Albanian communists. Tito's death on 4 May 1980 ushered in a long period of political instability, worsened by growing economic crisis and nationalist unrest. The first major outbreak occurred in Kosovo's main city, Pristina, when a protest of University of Pristina students over long queues in their university canteen rapidly escalated and in late March and early April 1981 spread throughout Kosovo, causing mass demonstrations in several towns. The disturbances were quelled by the Presidency of Yugoslavia proclaiming a state of emergency, sending in riot police and the army, which resulted in numerous casualties.
Communist hard-liners instituted a fierce crackdown on nationalism of all kinds. Kosovo endured a heavy secret-police presence throughout most of the 1980s that ruthlessly suppressed any unauthorised nationalist manifestations, both Albanian and Serbian. According to a report quoted by Mark Thompson, as many as 580,000 inhabitants of Kosovo were arrested, interrogated, interned or reprimanded. Thousands of these lost their jobs or were expelled from their educational establishments. During this time tension between the Albanian and Serbian communities continued to escalate.
In February 1982 a group of priests from Serbia proper petitioned their bishops to ask "why the Serbian Church is silent" and why it did not campaign against "the destruction, arson and sacrilege of the holy shrines of Kosovo". Such concerns did attract interest in Belgrade. Stories appeared from time to time in the Belgrade media claiming that Serbs and Montenegrins were being persecuted. There was a perception among Serbian nationalists that Serbs were being driven out of Kosovo.
In addition to all this, the worsening state of Kosovo's economy made the province a poor choice for Serbs seeking work. Albanians, as well as Serbs, tended to favor their compatriots when hiring new employees, but the number of jobs was too few for the population. Kosovo was the poorest entity of Yugoslavia: the average per capita income was $795, compared with the national average of $2,635.
In 1981 it was reported that some 4,000 Serbs moved from Kosovo to central Serbia after the Kosovo Albanian riots in March that resulted in several Serb deaths and the desecration of Serbian Orthodox architecture and graveyards. Serbia reacted with a plan to reduce the power of Albanians in the province and a propaganda campaign that claimed Serbs were being pushed out of the province primarily by the growing Albanian population, rather than the bad state of the economy. 33 nationalist formations were dismantled by Yugoslav police, who sentenced some 280 people (800 fined, 100 under investigation) and seized arms caches and propaganda material.
In 1987 David Binder wrote in "The New York Times" about the growing ethnic tension in Yugoslavia and rising nationalism among Albanians in Kosovo and referred to the Paraćin massacre, where an ethnic Albanian soldier in the JNA killed four fellow soldiers. Binder also—writing of Slobodan Milošević's deposing of Dragiša Pavlović as head of Belgrade's party organisation shortly before—wrote that "Mr. Milosevic accused Mr. Pavlovic of being an appeaser who was soft on Albanian radicals", and that "Mr. Milosevic and his supporters appear to be staking their careers on a strategy of confrontation with the Kosovo ethnic Albanians". The article quotes the Federal Secretary for National Defence, Fleet Adm. Branko Mamula, who claimed that "from 1981 to 1987, 216 illegal Albanian organisations with 1,435 members were discovered in the JNA". Mamula had also said that ethnic Albanian subversives had been preparing for "killing officers and soldiers, poisoning food and water, sabotage, breaking into weapons arsenals and stealing arms and ammunition, desertion and causing flagrant nationalist incidents in army units".
In Kosovo an increasingly poisonous atmosphere between Serbs and Albanians led to wild rumors being spread and otherwise trivial incidents being blown out of proportion. It was against this tense background that the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) conducted a survey of Serbs who had left Kosovo in 1985 and 1986, which concluded that a considerable number had left under pressure from Albanians.
The so-called SANU Memorandum, leaked in September 1986, was a draft document that focused on the political difficulties facing Serbs in Yugoslavia, pointing to Tito's deliberate hobbling of Serbia's power and the difficulties faced by Serbs outside Serbia proper. It paid special attention to Kosovo, arguing that the Kosovo Serbs were being subjected to "physical, political, legal and cultural genocide" in an "open and total war" that had been ongoing since the spring of 1981. It claimed that Kosovo's status in 1986 was a worse historical defeat for the Serbs than any event since liberation from the Ottomans in 1804, thus ranking it above such catastrophes as the World war occupations. The Memorandum's authors claimed that 200,000 Serbs had moved out of the province over the previous 20 years and warned that there would soon be none left "unless things change radically." The remedy, according to the Memorandum, was for "genuine security and unambiguous equality for all peoples living in Kosovo and Metohija [to be] established" and "objective and permanent conditions for the return of the expelled [Serbian] nation [to be] created." It concluded that "Serbia must not be passive and wait and see what the others will say, as it has done so often in the past." The SANU Memorandum provoked split reactions: Albanians saw it as a call for Serbian supremacy at the local level, claiming the Serb emigrants had left Kosovo for economic reasons, while the Slovenes and Croats saw a threat in the call for a more assertive Serbia. Serbs were divided: many welcomed it, while the Communist old guard strongly attacked its message. One of those who denounced it was Serbian Communist Party official Slobodan Milošević.
In November 1988 Kosovo's head of the provincial committee was arrested. In March 1989 Milošević announced an "anti-bureaucratic revolution" in Kosovo and Vojvodina, curtailing their autonomy as well as imposing a curfew and a state of emergency in Kosovo due to violent demonstrations, resulting in 24 deaths (including two policemen). Milošević and his government claimed that the constitutional changes were necessary to protect Kosovo's remaining Serbs against harassment from the Albanian majority.
On 17 November 1988 Kaqusha Jashari and Azem Vllasi were forced to resign from the leadership of the League of Communists of Kosovo (LCK). In early 1989 the Serbian Assembly proposed amendments to the Constitution of Serbia that would remove the word "Socialist" from the Serbian Republic's title, establish multi-party elections, remove the independence of institutions of the autonomous provinces such as Kosovo and rename Kosovo as the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. In February Kosovar Albanians demonstrated in large numbers against the proposal, emboldened by striking miners. Serbs in Belgrade protested against the Kosovo Albanian's separatism. On 3 March 1989 the Presidency of Yugoslavia imposed special measures assigning responsibility for public security to the federal government. On 23 March the Assembly of Kosovo voted to accept the proposed amendments although most Albanian delegates abstained. In early 1990 Kosovar Albanians held mass demonstrations against the special measures, which were lifted on 18 April 1990 and responsibility for public security was again assigned to Serbia.
On 8 May 1989 Milošević became President of the Presidency of Serbia, which was confirmed on 6 December. On 22 January 1990 the 14th congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) abolished the party's position as the only legal political party in Yugoslavia. In January 1990 the Yugoslav government announced it would press ahead with the creation of a multi-party system.
On 26 June 1990 Serbian authorities closed the Kosovo Assembly, citing special circumstances. On 1 or 2 July 1990 Serbia approved the new amendments to the Constitution of Serbia in a referendum. Also on 2 July, 114 ethnic Albanian delegates of the 180-member Kosovo Assembly declared Kosovo an independent republic within Yugoslavia. On 5 July the Serbian Assembly dissolved the Kosovo Assembly. Serbia also dissolved the provincial executive council and assumed full and direct control of the province. Serbia took over management of Kosovo's principal Albanian-language media, halting Albanian-language broadcasts. On 4 September 1990 Kosovar Albanians observed a 24-hour general strike, virtually shutting down the province.
On 16 or 17 July 1990 the League of Communists of Serbia (LCS) combined with the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Serbia to become the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), and Milošević became its first president. On 8 August 1990 several amendments to the federal Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) Constitution were adopted enabling the establishment of a multi-party election system.
On 7 September 1990 the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo was promulgated by the disbanded Assembly of Kosovo. Milošević responded by ordering the arrest of the deputies of the disbanded Assembly of Kosovo. The new controversial Serbian Constitution was promulgated on 28 September 1990. Multi-party elections were held in Serbia on 9 and 26 December 1990 after which Milošević became President of Serbia. In September 1991 Kosovar Albanians held an unofficial referendum in which they voted overwhelmingly for independence. On 24 May 1992 Kosovar Albanians held unofficial elections for an assembly and president of the Republic of Kosovo.
On 5 August 1991 the Serbian Assembly suspended the Priština daily "Rilindja", following the Law on Public Information of 29 March 1991 and establishment of the "Panorama" publishing house on 6 November which incorporated "Rilindja", which was declared unconstitutional by the federal authorities. United Nations Special Rapporteur Tadeusz Mazowiecki reported on 26 February 1993 that the police had intensified their repression of the Albanian population since 1990, including depriving them of their basic rights, destroying their educations system, and large numbers of political dismissals of civil servants.
Ibrahim Rugova, first President of the Republic of Kosova, pursued a policy of passive resistance which succeeded in maintaining peace in Kosovo during the earlier wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia during the early 1990s. As evidenced by the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), this came at the cost of increasing frustration among Kosovo's Albanian population. In the mid-1990s, Rugova pleaded for a United Nations peacekeeping force for Kosovo. In 1997, Milošević was promoted to the presidency of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (comprising Serbia and Montenegro since its inception in April 1992).
Continuing repression convinced many Albanians that only armed resistance would change the situation. On 22 April 1996, four attacks on Serbian security personnel were carried out almost simultaneously in different parts of Kosovo. The KLA, a hitherto-unknown organisation, subsequently claimed responsibility. The nature of the KLA was at first mysterious. It initially seemed that their only goals were to stop repression from Yugoslav authorities.
As stated by Jakup Krasniqi, who was the spokesman of the group, the KLA was formed by some members from the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), a political party led by Rugova. The KLA and LDK shared the common goal of ending repression from Belgrade and making Kosovo independent, but the KLA was opposed to 'internal rule' of Kosovo by the LDK.
KLA goals also included the establishment of a Greater Albania, a state stretching into surrounding FYR Macedonia, Montenegro and southern Serbia. In July 1998, in an interview for Der Spiegel, Jakup Krasniqi publicly announced that the KLA's goal was the unification of all Albanian-inhabited lands. Sulejman Selimi, a General Commander of KLA in 1998–1999, said:
While Rugova promised to uphold the minority rights of Serbs in Kosovo, the KLA was much less tolerant. Selimi stated that "Serbs who have blood on their hands would have to leave the Kosovo".
It is widely believed that the KLA received financial and material support from the Kosovo Albanian diaspora. In early 1997, Albania collapsed into chaos following the fall of President Sali Berisha. Military stockpiles were looted with impunity by criminal gangs, with much of the hardware ending up in western Kosovo and boosting the growing KLA arsenal. Bujar Bukoshi, shadow Prime Minister in exile (in Zürich, Switzerland), created a group called FARK (Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosova), which was reported to have been disbanded and absorbed by the KLA in 1998. The Yugoslav government considered the KLA to be "terrorists" and "insurgents" who indiscriminately attacked police and civilians, while most Albanians saw the KLA as "freedom fighters".
In 1998, the US State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organisation, and in 1999 the Republican Policy Committee of the US Senate expressed its troubles with the "effective alliance" of the Democratic Clinton administration with the KLA due to "numerous reports from reputable unofficial sources". In 2004, John Pilger claimed that for six years prior to 1998, the KLA had been regarded by the US as a terrorist group. Early in 1998, US envoy Robert Gelbard referred to the KLA as terrorists; responding to criticism, he later clarified to the House Committee on International Relations that "while it has committed 'terrorist acts,' it has 'not been classified legally by the U.S. Government as a terrorist organization.'" In June 1998, he held talks with two men who claimed they were political leaders of the KLA. In 2000, a BBC documentary called "Moral Combat – Nato at War" showed how the United States now sought a relationship with the group. While the US officially described the KLA as terrorists, author Alastair MacKenzie claims the KLA received training by the Americans' closest NATO-ally, the United Kingdom, since 1998 in a training camp in the mountains above the northern Albanian town of Bajram Curri.
Meanwhile, the US held an "outer wall of sanctions" on Yugoslavia which had been tied to a series of issues, including Kosovo. These were maintained despite the agreement at Dayton to end all sanctions. The Clinton administration claimed that the agreement bound Yugoslavia to hold discussions with Rugova over Kosovo.
The crisis escalated in December 1997 at the Peace Implementation Council meeting in Bonn, where the international community (as defined in the Dayton Agreement) agreed to give the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina sweeping powers, including the right to dismiss elected leaders. At the same time, Western diplomats insisted that Kosovo be discussed, and that Yugoslavia be responsive to Albanian demands there. The delegation from Yugoslavia stormed out of the meetings in protest. This was followed by the return of the Contact Group that oversaw the last phases of the Bosnian conflict and declarations from European powers demanding that Yugoslavia solve the problem in Kosovo.
KLA attacks intensified, centering on the Drenica valley area with the compound of Adem Jashari being a focal point. Days after Robert Gelbard described the KLA as a terrorist group, Serbian police responded to the KLA attacks in the Likošane area, and pursued some of the KLA to Čirez, resulting in the deaths of 16 Albanian fighters and four Serbian policemen. The KLA's goal was to merge its Drenica stronghold with their stronghold in Albania proper, and this would shape the first few months of the fighting.
Despite some accusations of summary executions and killings of civilians, condemnations from Western capitals were not as voluble as they would become later. Serb police began to pursue Jashari and his followers in the village of Donje Prekaze. On March 5, 1998, a massive firefight at the Jashari compound led to the massacre of 60 Albanians, of which eighteen were women and ten were under the age of sixteen. The event provoked massive condemnation from western capitals. Madeleine Albright said that "this crisis is not an internal affair of the FRY".
On March 24, Yugoslav forces surrounded the village of Glodjane and attacked a rebel compound there. Despite superior firepower, the Yugoslav forces failed to destroy the KLA unit, which had been their objective. Although there were deaths and severe injuries on the Albanian side, the insurgency in Glodjane was far from stamped out. It was in fact to become one of the strongest centres of resistance in the upcoming war.
A new Yugoslav government was formed at this time, led by the Socialist Party of Serbia and the Serbian Radical Party. Ultra-nationalist Radical Party chairman Vojislav Šešelj became a deputy prime minister. This increased the dissatisfaction with the country's position among Western diplomats and spokespersons.
In early April, Serbia arranged for a referendum on the issue of foreign interference in Kosovo. Serbian voters decisively rejected foreign interference in the crisis. Meanwhile, the KLA claimed much of the area in and around Deçan and ran a territory based in the village of Glodjane, encompassing its surroundings. On May 31, 1998, the Yugoslav army and the Serb Ministry of the Interior police began an operation to clear the border of the KLA. NATO's response to this offensive was mid-June's Operation Determined Falcon, a NATO show of force over the Yugoslav borders.
During this time, Yugoslav President Milošević reached an arrangement with Boris Yeltsin of Russia to stop offensive operations and prepare for talks with the Albanians, who refused to talk to the Serbian side throughout the crisis, but would talk with the Yugoslav government. In fact, the only meeting between Milošević and Ibrahim Rugova happened on 15 May in Belgrade, two days after Richard Holbrooke announced that it would take place. Holbrooke threatened Milošević that if he did not obey, "what's left of your country will implode". A month later, Holbrooke visited the border areas affected by the fighting in early June, where he was famously photographed with the KLA. The publication of these images sent a signal to the KLA, its supporters and sympathisers, and to observers in general, that the US was decisively backing the KLA and the Albanian population in Kosovo.
The Yeltsin agreement required Milošević to allow international representatives to set up a mission in Kosovo to monitor the situation there. The Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission (KDOM) began operations in early July 1998. The US government welcomed this part of the agreement, but denounced the initiative's call for a mutual cease fire. Rather, the US demanded that the Serbian-Yugoslavian side should cease fire "without linkage ... to a cessation in terrorist activities".
All through June and into mid-July, the KLA maintained its advance. The KLA surrounded Peć and Đakovica, and set up an interim capital in the town of Mališevo (north of Orahovac). KLA troops infiltrated Suva Reka and the northwest of Pristina. They moved on to capture the Belacevec coal pits in late June, threatening energy supplies in the region. Their tactics as usual focused mainly on guerrilla and mountain warfare, and harassing and ambushing Yugoslav forces and Serb police patrols.
The tide turned in mid-July when the KLA captured Orahovac. On 17 July 1998, two nearby villages, Retimlije and Opteruša, were also captured, while less systematic events took place in the larger Serb-populated village of Velika Hoča. The Orthodox monastery of Zociste from Orehovac—famous for the relics of the Saints Kosmas and Damianos and revered also by local Albanians—was robbed, its monks deported to a KLA prison camp, and, while empty, the monastery church and all its buildings were levelled to the ground by mining. This led to a series of Serb and Yugoslav offensives which would continue into the beginning of August.
A new set of KLA attacks in mid-August triggered Yugoslavian operations in south-central Kosovo, south of the Pristina-Peć road. This wound down with the capture of Klečka on August 23 and the discovery of a KLA-run crematorium in which some of their victims were found. The KLA began an offensive on September 1 around Prizren, causing Yugoslavian military activity there. In western Kosovo, around Peć, another offensive caused condemnation as international officials expressed fear that a large column of displaced people would be attacked.
In early mid-September, for the first time, KLA activity was reported in northern Kosovo around Podujevo. Finally, in late September, a determined effort was made to clear the KLA out of the northern and central parts of Kosovo and out of the Drenica valley itself. During this time many threats were made from Western capitals but these were tempered somewhat by the elections in Bosnia, as they did not want Serbian Democrats and Radicals to win. Following the elections, the threats intensified once again, but a galvanising event was needed. They got it on September 28, when the mutilated corpses of a family were discovered by KDOM outside the village of Gornje Obrinje. The bloody image of a child's doll and streams of displaced persons rallied the international community to action.
Morale was a serious problem for Serb forces; intelligence surveys found that many soldiers disagreed with their comrades' actions. One tank commander reported, "for the entire time I was in Kosovo, I never saw an enemy soldier and my unit was never once involved in firing at enemy targets. The tanks which cost $2.5 million each were used to slaughter Albanian children... I am ashamed".
When retreating from Kosovo after NATO intervention, Yugoslav units appeared combat effective with high morale and displaying large holdings of undamaged equipment. Weeks before the end of hostilities, David Fromkin noted that "it seemed possible that NATO unity might crack before Yugoslav morale did." The announcement by President Clinton that the US would not deploy ground troops gave a tremendous boost to Serbian morale.
On 9 June 1998, US President Bill Clinton declared a "national emergency" (state of emergency) due to the "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" imposed by Yugoslavia and Serbia over the Kosovo War.
On 23 September 1998, acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1199. This expressed 'grave concern' at reports reaching the Secretary General that over 230,000 people had been displaced from their homes by 'the excessive and indiscriminate use of force by Serbian security forces and the Yugoslav Army', demanding that all parties in Kosovo and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia cease hostilities and maintain a ceasefire. On 24 September the North Atlantic Council (NAC) of NATO issued an "activation warning" taking NATO to an increased level of military preparedness for both a limited air option and a phased air campaign in Kosovo. The other major issue for those who saw no option but to resort to the use of force was the estimated 250,000 displaced Albanians, 30,000 of whom were out in the woods, without warm clothing or shelter, with winter fast approaching.
Meanwhile, the US Ambassador to the Republic of Macedonia, Christopher Hill, was leading shuttle diplomacy between an Albanian delegation, led by Rugova, and the Yugoslav and Serbian authorities. These meetings were shaping the peace plan to be discussed during a period of planned NATO occupation of Kosovo. During a period of two weeks, threats intensified, culminating in NATO's Activation Order being given. NATO was ready to begin airstrikes, and Richard Holbrooke went to Belgrade in the hope of reaching an agreement with Milošević. Officially, the international community demanded an end to fighting. It specifically demanded that Yugoslavia end its offensives against the KLA whilst attempting to convince the KLA to drop its bid for independence. Attempts were made to persuade Milošević to permit NATO peacekeeping troops to enter Kosovo. This, they argued, would allow for the Christopher Hill peace process to proceed and yield a peace agreement.
On 13 October 1998, the North Atlantic Council issued activation orders for the execution of both limited air strikes and a phased air campaign in Yugoslavia which would begin in approximately 96 hours. On 15 October the NATO Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) Agreement for a ceasefire was signed, and the deadline for withdrawal was extended to 27 October. Difficulties implementing the agreement were reported, as clashes continued between government troops and the guerrillas. The Serbian withdrawal commenced on or around 25 October 1998, and Operation Eagle Eye commenced on 30 October.
The KVM was a large contingent of unarmed Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) peace monitors (officially known as verifiers) that moved into Kosovo. Their inadequacy was evident from the start. They were nicknamed the "clockwork oranges" in reference to their brightly coloured vehicles. Fighting resumed in December 1998 after both sides broke the ceasefire, and this surge in violence culminated in the killing of Zvonko Bojanić, the Serb mayor of the town of Kosovo Polje. Yugoslav authorities responded by launching a crackdown against KLA militants.
The January to March 1999 phase of the war brought increasing insecurity in urban areas, including bombings and murders. Such attacks took place during the Rambouillet talks in February and as the Kosovo Verification Agreement unraveled in March. Killings on the roads continued and increased. There were military confrontations in, among other places, the Vučitrn area in February and the heretofore unaffected Kačanik area in early March.
On 15 January 1999 the Račak massacre occurred when "45 Kosovan Albanian farmers were rounded up, led up a hill and massacred". The bodies had been discovered by OSCE monitors, including Head of Mission William Walker, and foreign news correspondents. Yugoslavia denied a massacre took place. The Račak massacre was the culmination of the conflict between the KLA and Yugoslav forces that had continued throughout the winter of 1998–1999. The incident was immediately condemned as a massacre by the Western countries and the United Nations Security Council, and later became the basis of one of the charges of war crimes leveled against Milošević and his top officials. This massacre was the turning point of the war. NATO decided that the conflict could only be settled by introducing a military peacekeeping force under the auspices of NATO, to forcibly restrain the two sides. Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, had been subjected to heavy firefights and segregation according to OSCE reports.
On 30 January 1999 NATO issued a statement announcing that the North Atlantic Council had agreed that "the NATO Secretary General may authorise air strikes against targets on FRY territory" to "[compel] compliance with the demands of the international community and [to achieve] a political settlement". While this was most obviously a threat to the Milošević government, it also included a coded threat to the Albanians: any decision would depend on the "position and actions of the Kosovo Albanian leadership and all Kosovo Albanian armed elements in and around Kosovo."
Also on 30 January 1999 the Contact Group issued a set of "non-negotiable principles" which made up a package known as "Status Quo Plus"—effectively the restoration of Kosovo's pre-1990 autonomy within Serbia, plus the introduction of democracy and supervision by international organisations. It also called for a peace conference to be held in February 1999 at the Château de Rambouillet, outside Paris.
The Rambouillet talks began on 6 February 1999, with NATO Secretary General Javier Solana negotiating with both sides. They were intended to conclude by 19 February. The FR Yugoslavian delegation was led by then president of Serbia Milan Milutinović, while Milošević himself remained in Belgrade. This was in contrast to the 1995 Dayton conference that ended the war in Bosnia, where Milošević negotiated in person. The absence of Milošević was interpreted as a sign that the real decisions were being made back in Belgrade, a move that aroused criticism in Yugoslavia as well as abroad; Kosovo's Serbian Orthodox bishop Artemije traveled all the way to Rambouillet to protest that the delegation was wholly unrepresentative. At this time speculation about an indictment of Milošević for war crimes was rife, so his absence may have been motivated by fear of arrest.
The first phase of negotiations was successful. In particular, a statement was issued by the Contact Group co-chairmen on 23 February 1999 that the negotiations "have led to a "consensus" on substantial autonomy for Kosovo, including on mechanisms for free and fair elections to democratic institutions, for the governance of Kosovo, for the protection of human rights and the rights of members of national communities; and for the establishment of a fair judicial system". They went on to say that "a political framework is now in place", leaving the further work of finalising "the implementation Chapters of the Agreement, including the modalities of the "invited international" civilian and military presence in Kosovo".
While the accords did not fully satisfy the Albanians, they were much too radical for the Yugoslavs, who responded by substituting a drastically revised text that even Russia (ally of FR Yugoslavia) found unacceptable. It sought to reopen the painstakingly negotiated political status of Kosovo and deleted all of the proposed implementation measures. Among many other changes in the proposed new version, it eliminated the entire chapter on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction, removed virtually all international oversight and dropped any mention of invoking "the will of the people [of Kosovo]" in determining the final status of the province.
On 18 March 1999, the Albanian, US, and British delegations signed what became known as the Rambouillet Accords, while the Yugoslav and Russian delegations refused. The accords called for NATO administration of Kosovo as an autonomous province within Yugoslavia, a force of 30,000 NATO troops to maintain order in Kosovo; an unhindered right of passage for NATO troops on Yugoslav territory, including Kosovo; and immunity for NATO and its agents to Yugoslav law. They would have also permitted a continuing Yugoslav army presence of 1,500 troops for border monitoring, backed by up to 1,000 troops to perform command and support functions, as well as a small number of border police, 2,500 ordinary MUP for public security purposes (although these were expected to draw down and to be transformed), and 3,000 local police.
Although the Yugoslav Government cited military provisions of Appendix B of the Rambouillet provisions as the reason for its objections, claiming that it was an unacceptable violation of Yugoslavia's sovereignty, these provisions were essentially the same as had been applied to Bosnia for the SFOR (Stabilisation Force) mission there after the Dayton Agreement in 1995. The two sides did not discuss the issue in detail because of their disagreements on more fundamental problems. In particular, the Serb side rejected the idea of any NATO troop presence in Kosovo to replace their security forces, preferring unarmed UN observers. Milošević himself had refused to discuss the annex after informing NATO that it was unacceptable, even after he was asked to propose amendments to the provisions which would have made them acceptable.
After the failure at Rambouillet and the alternative Yugoslav proposal, international monitors from the OSCE withdrew on 22 March, to ensure their safety ahead of the anticipated NATO bombing campaign. On 23 March, the Serbian assembly accepted the principle of autonomy for Kosovo, as well as the non-military aspects of the agreement, but rejected a NATO troop presence.
In a 2009 judgement regarding six former Serb leaders charged with war crimes in Kosovo, the ICTY noted that the causes of the breakdown in the negotiations at Rambouillet were complex and stated that "international negotiators did not take an entirely even-handed approach to the respective positions of the parties and tended to favour the Kosovo Albanians." It further recorded that, according to a witness, on 14 April 1999, at a meeting initiated by the White House with representatives of the Serbian-American community, president Clinton had stated that "the provision for allowing a referendum for the Albanians in Kosovo went too far and that, if he were in the shoes of Milošević, he probably would not have signed the draft [Rambouillet] agreement either."
On 23 March 1999 at 21:30 UTC, Richard Holbrooke returned to Brussels and announced that peace talks had failed and formally handed the matter to NATO for military action. Hours before the announcement, Yugoslavia announced on national television it had declared a state of emergency, citing an imminent threat of war and began a huge mobilisation of troops and resources.
On 23 March 1999 at 22:17 UTC, the Secretary General of NATO, Javier Solana, announced he had directed the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), US Army General Wesley Clark, to "initiate air operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia." On 24 March at 19:00 UTC, NATO started its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
The NATO bombing campaign lasted from 24 March to 11 June 1999, involving up to 1,000 aircraft operating mainly from bases in Italy and aircraft carriers stationed in the Adriatic. Tomahawk cruise missiles were also extensively used, fired from aircraft, ships, and submarines. With the exception of Greece, all NATO members were involved to some degree. Over the ten weeks of the conflict, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions. For the German Air Force ("Luftwaffe"), it was the second time it had participated in a conflict since World War II, after the Bosnian War.
The proclaimed goal of the NATO operation was summed up by its spokesman as "Serbs out, peacekeepers in, refugees back". That is, Yugoslav troops would have to leave Kosovo and be replaced by international peacekeepers to ensure that the Albanian refugees could return to their homes. The campaign was initially designed to destroy Yugoslav air defences and high-value military targets. It did not go very well at first, with bad weather hindering many sorties early on. NATO had seriously underestimated Milošević's will to resist: few in Brussels thought that the campaign would last more than a few days, and although the initial bombardment was not insignificant, it did not match the intensity of the bombing of Baghdad in 1991.
NATO military operations switched increasingly to attacking Yugoslav units on the ground, hitting targets as small as individual tanks and artillery pieces, as well as continuing with the strategic bombardment. This activity was heavily constrained by politics, as each target needed to be approved by all nineteen member states. Montenegro was bombed on several occasions, but NATO eventually desisted to prop up the precarious position of its anti-Milošević leader, Milo Đukanović.
At the start of May, a NATO aircraft attacked an Albanian refugee convoy, believing it was a Yugoslav military convoy, killing around fifty people. NATO admitted its mistake five days later, and the Yugoslavs accused NATO of deliberately attacking the refugees. A later report conducted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) opined that "civilians were not deliberately attacked in this incident", and that "neither the aircrew nor their commanders displayed the degree of recklessness in failing to take precautionary measures which would sustain criminal charges." On May 7, NATO bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and outraging Chinese public opinion. The United States and NATO later apologised for the bombing, saying that it occurred because of an outdated map provided by the CIA, although this was challenged by a joint report from "The Observer" (UK) and "Politiken" (Denmark) newspapers, which claimed that NATO intentionally bombed the embassy because it was being used as a relay station for Yugoslav army radio signals. The report by the newspaper contradicts findings in the same report by the ICTY which stated that the root of the failures in target location "appears to stem from the land navigation techniques employed by an intelligence officer." In another incident at the Dubrava prison in Kosovo in May 1999, the Yugoslav government attributed as many as 95 civilian deaths to NATO bombing of the facility after NATO cited Serbian and Yugoslav military activity in the area; a Human Rights Watch report later concluded that at least nineteen ethnic Albanian prisoners had been killed by the bombing, but that an uncertain number – probably more than 70 – were killed by Serbian Government forces in the days immediately following the bombing.
By the start of April, the conflict appeared little closer to a resolution, and NATO countries began to seriously consider conducting ground operations in Kosovo. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was a strong advocate of ground forces and pressured the United States to agree; his strong stance caused some alarm in Washington as US forces would be making the largest contribution to any offensive. US President Bill Clinton was extremely reluctant to commit US forces for a ground offensive. Instead, Clinton authorised a CIA operation to look into methods to destabilise the Yugoslav government without training KLA troops. At the same time, Finnish and Russian diplomatic negotiators continued to try to persuade Milošević to back down. Tony Blair would order 50,000 British soldiers to be made ready for a ground offensive: most of the available British Army.
Milošević finally recognised that Russia would not intervene to defend Yugoslavia despite Moscow's strong anti-NATO rhetoric. He thus accepted the conditions offered by a Finnish–Russian mediation team and agreed to a military presence within Kosovo headed by the UN, but incorporating NATO troops.
The Norwegian special forces Hærens Jegerkommando and Forsvarets Spesialkommando cooperated with the KLA in gathering intelligence information. Preparing for an invasion on 12 June, Norwegian special forces worked with the KLA on the Ramno mountain on the border between Macedonia and Kosovo and acted as scouts to monitor events in Kosovo. Together with British special forces, Norwegian special forces were the first to cross over the border into Kosovo. According to Keith Graves with the television network Sky News, the Norwegians were in Kosovo two days prior to the entry of other forces and were among the first into Pristina. The Hærens Jegerkommando's and Forsvarets Spesialkommando's job was to clear the way between the contending parties and to make local deals to implement the peace deal between the Serbians and the Kosovo Albanians.
On 3 June 1999, Milošević accepted the terms of an international peace plan to end the fighting, with the national parliament adopting the proposal amid contentious debate with delegates coming close to fistfights at some points. On 10 June, the North Atlantic Council ratified the agreement and suspended air operations.
On 12 June, after Milošević accepted the conditions, the NATO-led peacekeeping Kosovo Force (KFOR) of 30,000 soldiers began entering Kosovo. KFOR had been preparing to conduct combat operations, but in the end, its mission was only peacekeeping. The force was based upon the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps headquarters commanded by then Lieutenant General Mike Jackson of the British Army. It consisted of British forces (a brigade built from 4th Armored and 5th Airborne Brigades), a French Army Brigade, a German Army brigade, which entered from the west, while other forces advanced from the south, and Italian Army and United States Army brigades.
The first NATO troops to enter Pristina on the 12th of June 1999 were Norwegian special forces from Forsvarets Spesialkommando (FSK) and soldiers from the British Special Air Service 22 Regiment, although to NATO's diplomatic embarrassment Russian troops arrived at the airport first. Norwegian soldiers were the first to come into contact with Russian troops at the airport. FSK's mission was to level the negotiating field between the belligerent parties, and to fine-tune the detailed, local deals needed to implement the peace deal between the Serbians and the Kosovo Albanians.
The US contribution, known as the Initial Entry Force, was led by the 1st Armored Division, commanded by Brigadier General Peterson, and was spearheaded by a platoon from the 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment attached to the British Forces. Other units included 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 10th Special Forces Group(Airborne) from Stuttgart Germany and Fort Carson, Colorado, TF 1–6 Infantry (1-6 infantry with C Co 1-35AR) from Baumholder, Germany, the 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment from Schweinfurt, Germany, and Echo Troop, 4th Cavalry Regiment, also from Schweinfurt, Germany. Also attached to the US force was the Greek Army's 501st Mechanised Infantry Battalion. The initial US forces established their area of operation around the towns of Uroševac, the future Camp Bondsteel, and Gnjilane, at Camp Monteith, and spent four months—the start of a stay which continues to date—establishing order in the southeast sector of Kosovo.
During the initial incursion, the US soldiers were greeted by Albanians cheering and throwing flowers as US soldiers and KFOR rolled through their villages. Although no resistance was met, three US soldiers from the Initial Entry Force were killed in accidents.
On 1 October 1999, approximately 150 paratroopers from Alpha Company, 1/508th Airborne Battalion Combat Team from Vicenza, Italy parachuted into Uroševac as part of Operation Rapid Guardian. The purpose of the mission was primarily to warn Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević of NATO resolve and of its rapid military capability. One US soldier, Army Ranger Sgt. Jason Neil Pringle, was killed during operations after his parachute failed to deploy. The paratroopers of the 1/508th then joined paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne and KFOR in patrolling various areas of Kosovo, without incident, through 3 October 1999.
On 15 December 1999, Staff Sergeant Joseph Suponcic of 3rd Battalion/10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) was killed, when the HMMWV in which he was a passenger struck an anti-tank mine planted by Albanians and meant for the Russian contingent with which SSG Suponcic's team was patrolling in Kosovska Kamenica.
Following the military campaign, the involvement of Russian peacekeepers proved to be tense and challenging to the NATO Kosovo force. The Russians expected to have an independent sector of Kosovo, only to be unhappily surprised with the prospect of operating under NATO command. Without prior communication or coordination with NATO, Russian peacekeeping forces entered Kosovo from Bosnia and Herzegovina and occupied Pristina International Airport ahead of the arrival of NATO forces. This resulted in an incident during which NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark's wish to forcibly block the runways with NATO vehicles, to prevent any Russian reinforcement, was refused by KFOR commander General Mike Jackson.
In 2010, James Blunt described in an interview how his unit was given the assignment of securing Pristina during the advance of the 30,000-strong peacekeeping force and how the Russian army had moved in and taken control of the city's airport before his unit's arrival. Blunt shared a part in the difficult task of addressing the potentially violent international incident. According to Blunt's account there was a stand-off with the Russians, and NATO Supreme Commander Clark gave provisional orders to over-power them. Whilst these were questioned by Blunt, they were rejected by General Jackson, with the now famous line, "I'm not having my soldiers responsible for starting World War III."
In June 2000, arms trading relations between Russia and Yugoslavia were exposed, which led to retaliation and bombings of Russian checkpoints and area police stations. Outpost Gunner was established on a high point in the Preševo Valley by Echo Battery 1/161 Field Artillery in an attempt to monitor and assist with peacekeeping efforts in the Russian Sector. Operating under the support of ⅔ Field Artillery, 1st Armored Division, the Battery was able to successfully deploy and continuously operate a Firefinder Radar system, which allowed the NATO forces to keep a closer watch on activities in the Sector and the Preševo Valley. Eventually a deal was struck whereby Russian forces operated as a unit of KFOR but not under the NATO command structure.
Because of the country's restrictive media laws, the Yugoslav media carried little coverage of events in Kosovo, and the attitude of other countries to the humanitarian disaster that was occurring there. Thus, few members of the Yugoslav public expected NATO intervention, instead thinking that a diplomatic agreement would be reached.
Support for the Kosovan War and, in particular, the legitimacy of NATO's bombing campaign came from a variety of sources. In a 2009 article, David Clark claimed "Every member of NATO, every EU country, and most of Yugoslavia's neighbours, supported military action." Statements from the leaders of United States, Czech Republic and United Kingdom, respectively, described the war as one "upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace", "the first war for values" and one "to avert what would otherwise be a humanitarian disaster in Kosovo." Others included the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan who was reported by some sources as acknowledging that the NATO action was legitimate who emphasised that there were times when the use of force was legitimate in the pursuit of peace though Annan stressed that the "[UN Security] Council should have been involved in any decision to use force." The distinction between the legality and legitimacy of the intervention was further highlighted in two separate reports. One was conducted by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, entitled "The Kosovo Report", which found that:
It concluded that "the NATO military intervention was illegal but legitimate", The second report was published by the NATO Office of Information and Press which reported that, "the human rights violations committed on a large scale in Kosovo provide an incontestable ground with reference to the humanitarian aspect of NATO's intervention." Some critics note that NATO did not have the backing of the United Nations Security Council meant that its intervention had no legal basis, but according to some legal scholars, "there are nonetheless certain bases for that action that are not legal, but justified."
Aside from politicians and diplomats, commentators and intellectuals also supported the war. Michael Ignatieff called NATOs intervention a "morally justifiable response to ethnic cleansing and the resulting flood of refugees, and not the cause of the flood of refugees" while Christopher Hitchens said NATO intervened only, "when Serbian forces had resorted to mass deportation and full-dress ethnic "cleansing." Writing in "The Nation", Richard A. Falk wrote that, "the NATO campaign achieved the removal of Yugoslav military forces from Kosovo and, even more significant, the departure of the dreaded Serbian paramilitary units and police" while an article in "The Guardian" wrote that for Mary Kaldor, Kosovo represented a laboratory on her thinking for human security, humanitarian intervention and international peacekeeping, the latter two which she defined as, "a genuine belief in the equality of all human beings; and this entails a readiness to risk lives of peacekeeping troops to save the lives of others where this is necessary." Reports stated there had been no peace between Albanians and Serbs, citing the deaths of 1,500 Albanians and displacement of 270,000 prior to NATO intervention.
Some criticised the NATO intervention as a political diversionary tactic, coming as it did on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, pointing to the fact that coverage of the bombing directly replaced coverage of the scandal in US news cycles. Also, some point out that before the bombing, rather than there being an unusually bloody conflict, the KLA was not engaged in a widespread war against Yugoslav forces and the death toll among all concerned (including ethnic Albanians) skyrocketed following NATO intervention. In a post-war report released by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the organization also noted "the pattern of the expulsions and the vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage once the NATO air war began on March 24".
US President Clinton, his administration and NATO governments were accused of inflating the number of Kosovo Albanians killed by state forces. The conservative
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Kent
Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west. The county also shares borders with Essex along the estuary of the River Thames (connected by land via High Speed 1 and the Dartford Crossing), and with the French department of Pas-de-Calais through the Channel Tunnel. The county town is Maidstone.
Kent was the first British territory conquered and settled by Germanic and Nordic tribes with the Nordic originating Jutes from the Jutland area of Denmark and South Sweden settling in Kent and nearby areas of the South East. Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, the oldest cathedral in England, has been the seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury since the conversion of England to Christianity that began in the 6th century with Saint Augustine. Rochester Cathedral in Medway is England's second-oldest cathedral. Located between London and the Strait of Dover, which separates England from mainland Europe, Kent has been the setting for both conflict and diplomacy, including the Battle of Britain in World War II and the Leeds Castle peace talks of 1978 and 2004.
England relied on the county's ports to provide warships through much of its history; the Cinque Ports in the 12th–14th centuries and Chatham Dockyard in the 16th–20th centuries were of particular importance. France can be seen clearly in fine weather from Folkestone and the White Cliffs of Dover. Hills in the form of the North Downs and the Greensand Ridge span the length of the county and in the series of valleys in between and to the south are most of the county's .
Because of its relative abundance of fruit-growing and hop gardens, Kent is known as 'The Garden of England'.
Kent's economy is greatly diversified; haulage, logistics, and tourism are major industries. In northwest Kent industries include extraction of aggregate building materials, printing and scientific research. Coal mining has also played its part in Kent's industrial heritage. Large parts of Kent are within the London commuter belt and its strong transport connections to the capital and the nearby continent make Kent a high-income county. Twenty-eight per cent of the county forms part of two Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty: the North Downs and The High Weald.
The name "Kent" is believed to be of British Celtic origin and was known in Old English as "Cent", "Cent lond", "Centrice" (all pronounced with a 'hard C' as 'Kent-'). In Latin sources Kent is mentioned as "Cantia", "Canticum". The meaning is explained by some researchers as 'coastal district,' or 'corner-land, land on the edge' (compare Welsh "cant" 'bordering of a circle, tire, edge,' Breton "cant" 'circle'). If so, the name could be etymologically related to the placename Cantabria, historically a Celtic-speaking coastal region in pre-Roman Iberia, today an autonomous community of Spain.
The area has been occupied since the Palaeolithic era, as attested by finds from the quarries at Swanscombe. The Medway megaliths were built during the Neolithic era. There is a rich sequence of Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Roman era occupation, as indicated by finds and features such as the Ringlemere gold cup and the Roman villas of the Darent valley.
The modern name of Kent is derived from the Brythonic word "kantos" meaning "rim" or "border", or possibly from a homonymous word "kanto" "horn, hook" (< PIE *kn̥g-tó, cfr. "Cornwall" < "cornus" "horn"). This describes the eastern part of the current county area as a border land or coastal district. Julius Caesar had described the area as "um", or home of the Cantiaci in 51 BC. The extreme west of the modern county was by the time of Roman Britain occupied by Iron Age tribes, known as the Regnenses. Caesar wrote that the people of Kent were 'by far the most civilised inhabitants of Britain'.
Kent became a kingdom of the Jutes during the 5th century and was known as "Cantia" from about 730 and recorded as "Cent" in 835. The early medieval inhabitants of the county were known as the "Cantwara", or Kent people. The city of Canterbury was the largest in Kent.
In 597, Pope Gregory I appointed the religious missionary (who became Saint Augustine of Canterbury after his death) as the first Archbishop of Canterbury. In the previous year, Augustine successfully converted the pagan King Æthelberht of Kent to Christianity. The Diocese of Canterbury became England's first Episcopal See with first cathedral and has since remained England's centre of Christianity. The second designated English cathedral was in Kent at Rochester Cathedral.
In the 11th century, the people of Kent adopted the motto "Invicta", meaning "undefeated" or "unconquered". This naming followed the invasion of Britain by William of Normandy as he was unable to subdue the county and they negotiated favourable terms. The Kent people's continued resistance against the Normans led to Kent's designation as a semi-autonomous county palatine in 1067. Under the nominal rule of William's half-brother Odo of Bayeux, the county was granted similar powers to those granted in the areas bordering Wales and Scotland.
Kent was traditionally partitioned into East and West Kent, and into lathes and hundreds. The traditional border of East and West Kent was the county's main river, the Medway. Men and women from east of the Medway are Men (or Maids) of Kent, those from the west are Kentishmen or Kentish Maids.
During the medieval and early modern period, Kent played a major role in several of England's most notable rebellions, including the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler,
Jack Cade's Kent rebellion of 1450, and Wyatt's Rebellion of 1554 against Queen Mary I.
The Royal Navy first used the River Medway in 1547. By the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) a small dockyard had been established at Chatham. By 1618, storehouses, a ropewalk, a drydock, and houses for officials had been built downstream from Chatham.
By the 17th century, tensions between Britain and the powers of the Netherlands and France led to increasing military build-up in the county. Forts were built all along the coast following the raid on the Medway, a successful attack by the Dutch navy on the shipyards of the Medway towns in 1667.
The 18th century was dominated by wars with France, during which the Medway became the primary base for a fleet that could act along the Dutch and French coasts. When the theatre of operation moved to the Atlantic, this role was assumed by Portsmouth and Plymouth, with Chatham concentrating on shipbuilding and ship repair. As an indication of the area's military importance, the first Ordnance Survey map ever drawn was a one-inch map of Kent, published in 1801. Many of the Georgian naval buildings still stand.
In the early 19th century, smugglers were very active on the Kent coastline. Gangs such as The Aldington Gang brought spirits, tobacco and salt to the county, and transported goods such as wool across the sea to France.
In 1889 the County of London was created and took over responsibility for local administration of parts of north-west Kent. These included the towns of Deptford, Greenwich, Woolwich, Lee, Eltham, Charlton, Kidbrooke and Lewisham. In 1900, however, Kent absorbed the district of Penge. Some of Kent is contiguous with the Greater London sprawl, notably parts of Dartford.
During the Second World War much of the Battle of Britain was fought in the skies over Kent.
Between June 1944 and March 1945 more than 10,000 V1 flying bombs, or "Doodlebugs", were fired towards London from bases in Northern France. Although many were destroyed by aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons, both London and Kent were hit by around 2,500 of these bombs.
After the war Kent's borders changed several more times. In 1965 the London boroughs of Bromley and Bexley were created from nine towns formerly in Kent. In 1998 Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham and Rainham left the administrative county of Kent to form the Unitary Authority of Medway. Plans for another unitary authority in north-west Kent were dropped, but in 2016 consultations began between five Kent local authorities (Canterbury, Thanet, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe, and Ashford) with a view to forming a new unitary authority for East Kent, outside the auspices of Kent County Council.
For almost nine centuries a small part of present-day East London (the North Woolwich, London E16 area), formed part of Kent. The most likely reason for this is that in 1086 Hamon, dapifer and Sheriff of Kent, owned the manor and, perhaps illegally, annexed it to Kent. It ceased to be considered part of the county in 1965 upon creation of the London Borough of Newham.
Kent is one of the warmest parts of Britain. On 10 August 2003, in the hamlet of Brogdale near Faversham the temperature reached , the then hottest temperature ever officially recorded in the United Kingdom.
Kent is in the southeastern corner of England. It borders the Thames Estuary and the North Sea to the north, and the Straits of Dover and the English Channel to the south. France is across the Strait.
The major geographical features of the county are based on a series of ridges and valleys running east–west across the county. These are the results of erosion of the Wealden dome, a dome across Kent and Sussex created by alpine movements 20–10 million years ago. This dome consists of an upper layer of chalk above successive layers of Upper Greensand, Gault Clay, Lower Greensand, Weald Clay, and Wealden sandstone. The ridges and valleys formed when the exposed clay eroded faster than the exposed chalk, greensand, or sandstone.
Sevenoaks, Maidstone, Ashford, and Folkestone are built on greensand, while Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells are built on sandstone. Dartford, Gravesend, the Medway towns, Sittingbourne, Faversham, Canterbury, Deal, and Dover are built on chalk. The easterly section of the Wealden dome has been eroded away by the sea, and cliffs such as the White Cliffs of Dover are present where a chalk ridge known as the North Downs meets the coast. Spanning Dover and Westerham is the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
The Wealden dome is a Mesozoic structure lying on a Palaeozoic foundation, which can often create the right conditions for coal formation. This is found in East Kent roughly between Deal, Canterbury, and Dover. The Coal Measures within the Westphalian Sandstone are about deep, and are subject to flooding. They occur in two major troughs, which extend under the English Channel.
Seismic activity has occasionally been recorded in Kent, though the epicentres were offshore. In 1382 and 1580 there were two earthquakes exceeding 6.0 on the Richter Scale. In 1776, 1950, and on 28 April 2007 there were earthquakes of around 4.3. The 2007 earthquake caused physical damage in Folkestone. A further quake on 22 May 2015 measured 4.2 on the Richter Scale. It was centred in the Sandwich area of east Kent at about ten miles below the surface. There was little if any damage reported.
The coastline of Kent is continuously changing, due to tectonic uplift and coastal erosion. Until about 960, the Isle of Thanet was an island, separated by the Wantsum channel, formed around a deposit of chalk; over time, the channels silted up with alluvium. Similarly Romney Marsh and Dungeness have been formed by accumulation of alluvium.
Kent's principal river, the River Medway, rises near East Grinstead in Sussex and flows eastwards to Maidstone. Here it turns north and breaks through the North Downs at Rochester, then joins the estuary of the River Thames near Sheerness. The Medway is some long. The river is tidal as far as Allington lock, but in earlier times, cargo-carrying vessels reached as far upstream as Tonbridge. The Medway has captured the head waters of other rivers such as the River Darent. Other rivers of Kent include the River Stour in the east.
A 2014 study found that Kent shares significant reserves of shale oil with other neighbouring counties, totalling 4.4 billion barrels of oil, which then Business and Energy Minister Michael Fallon said "will bring jobs and business opportunities" and significantly help with UK energy self-sufficiency. Fracking in the area is required to achieve these objectives; it has been opposed by environmental groups.
At the 2011 census, Kent, including Medway, had 1,727,665 residents (18.0% of which in Medway); had 711,847 households (17.5% of which in Medway) and had 743,436 dwellings (14.8% of which in Medway). 51.1% of Kent's population excluding Medway was female — as to Medway, this proportion was 50.4%.
The tables below provide statistics for the administrative county of Kent, that is, excluding Medway.
Kent County Council (KCC) and its 12 district councils administer most of the county (3352 km²), while the Medway Towns Council, a unitary authority and commonly called Medway Council, administers the more densely populated remainder (192 km²). Together they have around 300 town and parish councils. Kent County Council's headquarters are in Maidstone, while Medway's offices are at Gun Wharf, Chatham.
At the 2013 county council elections, control of Kent County Council was held by the Conservatives, who won 44 of the council's 83 seats. 17 seats were won by the United Kingdom Independence Party, 13 by the Labour Party, 7 by the Liberal Democrats, 1 by the Green Party and 1 by the Swanscombe and Greenhithe Residents Association. At the 2007 local elections, control of Medway Council was held by the Conservatives; 33 of the council's 55 seats were held by the Conservatives, 13 by the Labour Party, 8 by the Liberal Democrats and 1 by an Independent. All but one of Kent's district councils are controlled by the Conservatives: a minority Labour administration took control of Thanet District in December 2011 after a Conservative councillor defected to the Independent group. In the council elections of May 2015 the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) took control of the Council, the first and so far only one in the UK. In October 2015 UKIP lost overall control following a series of resignations, although remaining the largest party, only for UKIP to regain control once more following ward elections in August 2016.
At the national level, Kent is represented in Parliament by 17 MPs, all of whom were Conservative until the general election of June 2017. At that election Canterbury elected Rosie Duffield, the first ever Labour MP to hold the seat since the constituency was formed in 1918.
At the 2001 UK census, employment statistics for the residents in Kent, including Medway, were as follows: 41.1% in full-time employment, 12.4% in part-time employment, 9.1% self-employed, 2.9% unemployed, 2.3% students with jobs, 3.7% students without jobs, 12.3% retired, 7.3% looking after home or family, 4.3% permanently sick or disabled, and 2.7% economically inactive for other reasons. Of residents aged 16–74, 16% had a higher education qualification or the equivalent, compared to 20% nationwide.
The average hours worked per week by residents of Kent were 43.1 for males and 30.9 for females. Their industry of employment was 17.3% retail, 12.4% manufacturing, 11.8% real estate, 10.3% health and social work, 8.9% construction, 8.2% transport and communications, 7.9% education, 6.0% public administration and defence, 5.6% finance, 4.8% other community and personal service activities, 4.1% hotels and restaurants, 1.6% agriculture, 0.8% energy and water supply, 0.2% mining, and 0.1% private households. This is higher than the whole of England for construction and transport/communications and lower for manufacturing.
Kent is sometimes known as the "Garden of England" for its abundance of orchards and hop gardens. Distinctive hop-drying buildings called oasts are common in the countryside, although many have been converted into dwellings. Nearer to London, market gardens also flourish. Kent is the main area for hazelnut production in the UK.
However, in recent years, there has been a significant drop in agriculture, and industry and services are increasing their utilisation of the area. This is illustrated by the following table of economic indicator gross value added (GVA) between 1995 and 2000 (figures are in £ millions).
North Kent is heavily industrialised with cement-making at Northfleet and Cuxton, brickmaking at Sittingbourne, shipbuilding on the Medway and Swale, engineering and aircraft design and construction at Rochester, chemicals at Dartford and papermaking at Swanley, and oil refining at Grain. A steel mini mill in Sheerness and a rolling mill in Queenborough.There are two nuclear power stations at Dungeness, although the older one, built in 1965, was closed at the end of 2006.
Cement-making, papermaking, and coal-mining were important industries in Kent during the 19th and 20th centuries. Cement came to the fore in the 19th century when massive building projects were undertaken. The ready supply of chalk and huge pits between Stone and Gravesend bear testament to that industry. There were also other workings around Burham on the tidal Medway. Chalk, gravel and clay were excavated on Dartford Heath for centuries.
Kent's original paper mills stood on streams like the River Darent, tributaries of the River Medway, and on the River Stour. Two 18th century mills were on the River Len and at Tovil on the River Loose. In the late 19th century huge modern mills were built at Dartford and Northfleet on the River Thames and at Kemsley on The Swale. In pre-industrial times, almost every village and town had its own windmill or watermill, with over 400 windmills known to have stood at some time. Twenty-eight survive within the county today, plus two replica mills and a further two in that part of Kent now absorbed into London. All the major rivers in the county were used to power watermills.
From about 1900, several coal pits operated in East Kent. The Kent Coalfield was mined during the 20th century at several collieries,
including Chislet, Tilmanstone, Betteshanger, and the Snowdown Colliery, which ran from 1908 to 1986.
The west of the county (including Tunbridge Wells, Tonbridge, and Sevenoaks) has less than 50% of the average claimant count for low incomes or worklessness as the coastal districts of Dover, Folkestone and Hythe, and Thanet (chiefly three resorts: Ramsgate, Broadstairs, and Margate). West and Central Kent have long had many City of London commuters.
Kent's geographical location between the Straits of Dover and London has influenced its architecture, as has its Cretaceous geology and its good farming land and fine building clays. Kent's countryside pattern was determined by a gavelkind inheritance system that generated a proliferation of small settlements. There was no open-field system, and the large tracts were owned by the two great abbeys, Christ Church, Canterbury and St Augustine's Abbey, that did not pass into the hands of the king during the Reformation. Canterbury Cathedral is the United Kingdom's metropolitan cathedral; it was founded in AD 598 and displays architecture from all periods. There are nine Anglo-Saxon churches in Kent. Rochester Cathedral is England's second-oldest cathedral, the present building built in the Early English Style. These two dioceses ensured that every village had a parish church.
The sites of Richborough Castle and Dover Castle, along with two strategic sites along Watling Street, were fortified by the Romans and Normans. Other important sites include Canterbury city walls and Rochester Castle. There remained a need to defend London and thus Kent. Deal Castle, Walmer Castle, Sandown Castle (whose remains were eroded by the sea in the 1990s) were constructed in late mediaeval times, and HM Dockyard, at Chatham and its surrounding castles and forts—Upnor Castle, Great Lines, and Fort Amherst—more recently.
Kent has three unique vernacular architecture forms: the oast house, the Wealden hall house, and Kentish peg-tiles.
Kent has bridge trusts to maintain its bridges, and though the great bridge (1387) at Rochester was replaced there are medieval structures at Aylesford, Yalding and Teston. With the motorways in the late twentieth century came the M2 motorway bridge spanning the Medway and the Dartford tunnel and the Dartford Bridge spanning the Thames.
Kent has provided inspiration for several notable writers and artists. Canterbury's religious role gave rise to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", a key development in the English language. The father of novelist Charles Dickens worked at the Chatham Dockyard; in many of his books, the celebrated novelist featured the scenery of Chatham, Rochester, and the Cliffe marshes. During the late 1930s, Nobel Prize-awarded novelist William Golding worked as a teacher at Maidstone Grammar School, where he met his future wife Ann Brookfield. William Caxton, who first introduced the printing press to England, was born in Kent; the recent invention was key in helping many Kent dialect words and spellings to become standard in English.
A number of significant artists came from Kent, including Thomas Sidney Cooper, a painter of landscapes, often incorporating farm animals, Richard Dadd, a maker of faery paintings, and Mary Tourtel, the creator of the children's book character, Rupert Bear. The artist Clive Head was also born in Kent. The landscape painter J. M. W. Turner spent part of his childhood in the town of Margate in East Kent, and regularly returned to visit it throughout his life. The East Kent coast inspired many of his works, including some of his most famous seascapes. Kent has also been the home to artists including Frank Auerbach, Tracey Emin and Stass Paraskos.
Kent was also the location of the largest number of art schools in the country during the nineteenth century, estimated by the art historian David Haste, to approach two hundred. This is believed to be the result of Kent being a front line county during the Napoleonic Wars. At this time, before the invention of photography, draughtsmen were used to draw maps and topographical representations of the fields of battle, and after the wars ended many of these settled permanently in the county in which they had been based. Once the idea of art schools had been established, even in small towns in Kent, the tradition continued, although most of the schools were very small one-man operations, each teaching a small number of daughters of the upper classes how to draw and make watercolour paintings. Nonetheless, some of these small art schools developed into much larger organisations, including Canterbury College of Art, founded by Thomas Sidney Cooper in 1868, which is today the University for the Creative Arts.
The county's largest theatre is the Marlowe Theatre in the centre of Canterbury. Other venues for live music include Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone and the Assembly Hall in Tunbridge Wells.
It re-opened, after being completely rebuilt, in October 2011. Music festivals that take place in Kent include Chilled in a Field Festival, Electric Gardens, Hop Farm Festival, In the Woods Festival, and Lounge On The Farm.
With the Roman invasion, a road network was constructed to connect London to the Channel ports of Dover, Lympne and Richborough. The London–Dover road was Watling Street. These roads are now approximately the A2, B2068, A257, and the A28. The A2 runs through Dartford (A207), Gravesend, Rochester, Canterbury, and Dover; the A20 through Eltham, Wrotham, Maidstone, Charing, Ashford. Hythe, Folkestone and Dover; the A21 around Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells and on to Hastings in East Sussex. In the 1960s, two motorways were built; the M2 from Medway to Faversham, and the M20 from Swanley to Folkestone. Part of the M25 runs through Kent, from Westerham to the Dartford Crossing. The M26 motorway, built-in 1980, provides a short link between the M25 at Sevenoaks and the M20 near Wrotham. Kent currently has more motorways by distance than any other county in the UK, with sections of the M2, M20, M25 and M26 totalling within the extents of the ceremonial county.
The medieval Cinque Ports, except for the Port of Dover, have all now silted up. The Medway Estuary has been an important port and naval base for 500 years. The River Medway is tidal up to Allington and navigable up to Tonbridge. Kent's two canals are the Royal Military Canal between Hythe and Rye, which still exists, and the Thames and Medway Canal between Strood and Gravesend. Built-in 1824, it was purchased in 1846 by the railways, which partially backfilled it. Container ports are at Ramsgate and Thamesport. Following the closures across the lower Medway, and the Swale to the Isle of Sheppey, during the 20th century, the Woolwich Ferry is the only domestic ferry that runs in the broadest definition of the county.
The earliest locomotive-driven passenger-carrying railway in Britain was the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway which opened in 1830. This and the London and Greenwich Railway later merged into South Eastern Railway (SER).
By the 1850s, SER's networks had expanded to Ashford, Ramsgate, Canterbury, Tunbridge Wells, and the Medway towns. SER's major London termini were London Bridge, Charing Cross, and Cannon Street. Kent also had a second major railway, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway (LCDR). Originally the East Kent Railway in 1858, it linked the northeast Kent coast with London terminals at Victoria and Blackfriars.
The two companies merged in 1899, forming the South Eastern and Chatham Railway (SECR), further amalgamated with other railways by the Railways Act 1921 to form the Southern Railway. Britain's railways were nationalised in 1948, forming British Railways (shortened to British Rail in the mid-1960s). The railways were privatised in 1996 and most Kent passenger services were franchised to Connex South Eastern. Following financial difficulties, Connex lost the franchise and was replaced by South Eastern Trains and after Southeastern.
The Channel Tunnel was completed in 1994 and High Speed 1 in November 2007 with a London terminus at St Pancras. A new station, Ebbsfleet International, opened between Dartford and Gravesend, serving northern Kent. The high speed lines will be utilised to provide a faster train service to coastal towns like Ramsgate and Folkestone. This station is in addition to the existing station at Ashford International, which has suffered a massive cut in service as a result.
In addition to the "main line" railways, there are several light, heritage, and industrial railways in Kent. There are three heritage, standard gauge railways; Spa Valley Railway near Tunbridge Wells on the old Tunbridge Wells West branch, East Kent Railway on the old East Kent coalfield area and the Kent and East Sussex Railway on the Weald around Tenterden. In addition, there is the gauge, Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway on the southeast Kent coast along the Dungeness peninsula. Finally, there is the , industrial Sittingbourne & Kemsley Light Railway, previously the Bowaters Paper Railway.
Charter flights are provided by Lydd Airport at Lydd.
In 2002, it was revealed that the government was considering building a new four-runway airport on the marshland near the village of Cliffe on Hoo Peninsula. This plan was dropped in 2003 following protests by cultural and environmental groups. However further plans for a Thames Estuary Airport on the Kent coast have subsequently emerged, including the Thames Hub Airport, again sited on the Isle of Grain and designed by Lord Foster, and the London Britannia Airport plan, colloquially known as "Boris Island" due to its being championed by the former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, which would see a six runway airport built on an artificial island to be towards the Shivering Sands area, north-east of Whitstable.
Both of these options were dropped in 2014 in favour of expansion at either Gatwick or Heathrow Airport, the latter finally being the chosen option following Theresa May's installation as Prime Minister in summer 2016.
Kent has four universities: Canterbury Christ Church University with campuses throughout East Kent; University of Kent, with campuses in Canterbury and Medway; University of Greenwich (a London University), with sites at Woolwich, Eltham, London and Medway; the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) also has three of its five campuses in the county.
Although much of Britain adopted a comprehensive education system in the 1970s, Kent County Council (KCC) and Medway Unitary Authority are among around fifteen
local authorities still providing wholly selective education through the eleven-plus examination with students allocated a place at a secondary modern school or at a grammar school.
Together, the two Kent authorities have 38 of the 164 grammar schools remaining in Britain.
Kent County Council has the largest education department of any local council in Britain,
providing school places for over 289,000 pupils.
In 2005–06, Kent County Council and Medway introduced a standardised school year, based on six terms, as recommended by the Local Government Association in its 2000 report, "The Rhythms of Schooling".
Kent County Council Local Education Authority maintains 96 secondary schools, of which 33 are selective schools and 63 are secondary modern schools.
Music education is provided by Kent Music (formerly Kent Music School), which has its origins in the 1940s. Kent Music provides services across the county including Kent County Youth Orchestra, Kent Youth Choirs, and an annual summer school at Benenden School.
Kent has the highest number of National Challenge schools in England: schools which are branded 'failing' based on the British Government's floor targets that 30% of pupils achieve at least 5 GCSE grades A* to C. Of the 63 secondary modern schools, 33 missed this target; thus 52% of Kent secondary modern schools (34% out of all 96 maintained secondary schools) are 'failing'.
In association football, Kent's highest ranked football team is Gillingham FC, who play in Football League One. Maidstone United was a Football League side from 1989 until going bankrupt in 1992. Kent clubs in the higher levels of non-league football include the current incarnation of Maidstone United and Dover Athletic playing in the National League along with Ebbsfleet United, who were promoted in 2017. Dartford currently play in National League South, the sixth tier of the English football pyramid.
Kent is represented in cricket by Kent County Cricket Club. The club was a founder member of the County Championship in 1890 and has won the competition, the major domestic first-class cricket competition, seven times. The club is based at the St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury and also plays matches at the Nevill Ground in Royal Tunbridge Wells and the County Cricket Ground, Beckenham. The Kent Women cricket team has won the Women's County Championship seven times since it was established in 1997. Cricket has traditionally been a popular sport in the county and Kent is considered one of the locations in which the game first developed. Teams have represented the county since the early 18th century. The Kent Cricket League is the top level of club competition within Kent and features teams from throughout the county, including areas such as Beckenham and Bexley which were formerly part of the county.
Canterbury Hockey Club and Holcombe Hockey Club both play in the top division in both the men's and women's England Hockey Leagues. Sevenoaks Hockey Club's women first XI plays in the second tier of national competition.
In rugby union, Canterbury RFC play in the fourth-tier of English rugby in the National League 2 South. Gravesend RFC and Tonbridge Juddians both play in the fifth-tier National League 3 London & SE. Blackheath FC, a club within the historic boundaries of the county, play in third-tier National League 1.
In motorsport, the Brands Hatch circuit near Swanley has played host to a number of national and international racing events and hosted 12 runnings of the British Grand Prix in various years between 1964 and 1986.
Kent is home to two National League netball clubs, both based in northwest Kent: Telstars (Premier Division 2) and KCNC (Premier Division 3).
Much of Kent is served by the BBC's South East region, which is based in Tunbridge Wells and provides local news for the county and East Sussex. Its commercial rival is ITV Meridian Ltd, which has a newsroom at The Maidstone Studios despite the main studio being based in Hampshire. Main transmitters providing these services are at West Hougham, near Dover and Blue Bell Hill, between Chatham and Maidstone. A powerful relay transmitter at Tunbridge Wells serves the town and surrounding area. Those parts of Kent closest to London such as Swanley, Westerham, Dartford, Gravesend, and Sevenoaks lie within the ITV London and BBC London areas, taking their television signals from the Crystal Palace transmitter.
Kent has three county-wide stations – BBC Radio Kent, based in Tunbridge Wells; and the commercial stations Heart South and Gold, both based in Whitstable and London.
Most of the county is covered by local radio network KMFM, owned by the KM Group. Since March 2012, programmes have been the same across all seven stations in the network: KMFM Ashford, KMFM Canterbury, KMFM Maidstone, KMFM Medway, KMFM Shepway and White Cliffs Country, KMFM Thanet and KMFM West Kent.
A newly established digital radio platform has been created in Deal. Deal Radio is an online radio station created for the East Kent communities in and around the town of Deal.
The KM Group, KOS Media and Kent Regional News and Media all provide local newspapers for most of the large towns and cities. County-wide papers include the "Kent Messenger", "Kent on Saturday", "Kent on Sunday", and the "Kent and Sussex Courier".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16766
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King James Version
The King James Version (KJV), also known as the King James Bible (KJB), sometimes as the English version of 1611, or simply the Version (AV), is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, commissioned by King James in 1604 and completed as well as published in 1611 under the sponsorship of James VI and I. The books of the King James Version include the 39 books of the Old Testament, an intertestamental section containing 14 books of the Apocrypha, and the 27 books of the New Testament. Noted for its "majesty of style", the King James Version has been described as one of the most important books in English culture and a driving force in the shaping of the English-speaking world.
It was first printed by John Norton & Robert Barker, both the King's Printer, and was the third translation into English approved by the English Church authorities: The first had been the Great Bible, commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII (1535), and the second had been the Bishops' Bible, commissioned in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1568). In Geneva, Switzerland the first generation of Protestant Reformers had produced the Geneva Bible of 1560 from the original Hebrew and Greek scriptures, which was influential in the writing of the Authorized King James Version.
In January 1604, King James convened the Hampton Court Conference, where a new English version was conceived in response to the problems of the earlier translations perceived by the Puritans, a faction of the Church of England.
James gave the translators instructions intended to ensure that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of, and reflect the episcopal structure of, the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy. The translation was done by 6 panels of translators (47 men in all, most of whom were leading biblical scholars in England) who had the work divided up between them: the Old Testament was entrusted to three panels, the New Testament to two, and the Apocrypha to one. In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin. In the "Book of Common Prayer" (1662), the text of the "Authorized Version" replaced the text of the Great Bible for Epistle and Gospel readings (but not for the Psalter, which substantially retained Coverdale's Great Bible version), and as such was authorized by Act of Parliament.
By the first half of the 18th century, the Authorized Version had become effectively unchallenged as the English translation used in Anglican and English Protestant churches, except for the Psalms and some short passages in the "Book of Common Prayer" of the Church of England. Over the course of the 18th century, the "Authorized Version" supplanted the Latin Vulgate as the standard version of scripture for English-speaking scholars. With the development of stereotype printing at the beginning of the 19th century, this version of the Bible became the most widely printed book in history, almost all such printings presenting the standard text of 1769 extensively re-edited by Benjamin Blayney at Oxford, and nearly always omitting the books of the Apocrypha. Today the unqualified title "King James Version" usually indicates this Oxford standard text.
The title of the first edition of the translation, in Early Modern English, was "THE HOLY BIBLE, Conteyning the Old Teſtament, "AND THE NEW: Newly Tranſlated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Tranſlations diligently compared and reuiſed, by his Maiesties ſpeciall Comandement"". The title page carries the words "Appointed to be read in Churches", and F. F. Bruce suggests it was "probably authorised by order in council" but no record of the authorization survives "because the Privy Council registers from 1600 to 1613 were destroyed by fire in January 1618/19".
For many years it was common not to give the translation any specific name. In his "Leviathan" of 1651, Thomas Hobbes referred to it as "the English Translation made in the beginning of the Reign of King James". A 1761 "Brief Account of the various Translations of the Bible into English" refers to the 1611 version merely as "a new, compleat, and more accurate Translation", despite referring to the Great Bible by its name, and despite using the name "Rhemish Testament" for the Douay-Rheims Bible version. Similarly, a "History of England", whose fifth edition was published in 1775, writes merely that "[a] new translation of the Bible, "viz.", that now in Use, was begun in 1607, and published in 1611".
King James's Bible is used as the name for the 1611 translation (on a par with the Genevan Bible or the Rhemish Testament) in Charles Butler's "Horae Biblicae" (first published 1797). Other works from the early 19th century confirm the widespread use of this name on both sides of the Atlantic: it is found both in a "Historical sketch of the English translations of the Bible" published in Massachusetts in 1815, and in an English publication from 1818, which explicitly states that the 1611 version is "generally known by the name of King James's Bible". This name was also found as King James' Bible (without the final "s"): for example in a book review from 1811. The "phrase" "King James's Bible" is used as far back as 1715, although in this case it is not clear whether this is a name or merely a description.
The use of Authorized Version, capitalized and used as a name, is found as early as 1814. For some time before this, descriptive phrases such as "our present, and only publicly authorised version" (1783), "our Authorized version" (1792), and "the authorized version" (1801, uncapitalized) are found. In Britain, the 1611 translation is generally known as the "Authorized Version" today. The term is somewhat of a misnomer because the text itself was never formally "authorized", nor were English parish churches ever ordered to procure copies of it.
King James' Version, evidently a descriptive phrase, is found being used as early as 1814. "The King James Version" is found, unequivocally used as a name, in a letter from 1855. The next year King James Bible, with no possessive, appears as a name in a Scottish source. In the United States, the "1611 translation" (actually editions following the standard text of 1769, see below) is generally known as the King James Version today.
The followers of John Wycliffe undertook the first complete English translations of the Christian scriptures in the 14th century. These translations were banned in 1409 due to their association with the Lollards. The Wycliffe Bible pre-dated the printing press but it was circulated very widely in manuscript form, often inscribed with a date which was earlier than 1409 in order to avoid the legal ban. Because the text of the various versions of the Wycliffe Bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate, and because it also contained no heterodox readings, the ecclesiastical authorities had no practical way to distinguish the banned version; consequently, many Catholic commentators of the 15th and 16th centuries (such as Thomas More) took these manuscripts of English Bibles and claimed that they represented an anonymous earlier orthodox translation.
In 1525, William Tyndale, an English contemporary of Martin Luther, undertook a translation of the New Testament. Tyndale's translation was the first "printed" Bible in English. Over the next ten years, Tyndale revised his New Testament in the light of rapidly advancing biblical scholarship, and embarked on a translation of the Old Testament. Despite some controversial translation choices, and in spite of Tyndale's execution on charges of heresy for having made the translated Bible, the merits of Tyndale's work and prose style made his translation the ultimate basis for all subsequent renditions into Early Modern English. With these translations lightly edited and adapted by Myles Coverdale, in 1539, Tyndale's New Testament and his incomplete work on the Old Testament became the basis for the Great Bible. This was the first "authorised version" issued by the Church of England during the reign of King Henry VIII. When Mary I succeeded to the throne in 1553, she returned the Church of England to the communion of the Roman Catholic faith and many English religious reformers fled the country, some establishing an English-speaking colony at Geneva. Under the leadership of John Calvin, Geneva became the chief international centre of Reformed Protestantism and Latin biblical scholarship.
These English expatriates undertook a translation that became known as the Geneva Bible. This translation, dated to 1560, was a revision of Tyndale's Bible and the Great Bible on the basis of the original languages. Soon after Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, the flaws of both the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible (namely, that the Geneva Bible did not "conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy") became painfully apparent. In 1568, the Church of England responded with the Bishops' Bible, a revision of the Great Bible in the light of the Geneva version. While officially approved, this new version failed to displace the Geneva translation as the most popular English Bible of the age—in part because the full Bible was only printed in lectern editions of prodigious size and at a cost of several pounds. Accordingly, Elizabethan lay people overwhelmingly read the Bible in the Geneva Version—small editions were available at a relatively low cost. At the same time, there was a substantial clandestine importation of the rival Douay–Rheims New Testament of 1582, undertaken by exiled Roman Catholics. This translation, though still derived from Tyndale, claimed to represent the text of the Latin Vulgate.
In May 1601, King James VI of Scotland attended the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at St Columba's Church in Burntisland, Fife, at which proposals were put forward for a new translation of the Bible into English. Two years later, he ascended to the throne of England as James I.
The newly crowned King James convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. That gathering proposed a new English version in response to the perceived problems of earlier translations as detected by the Puritan faction of the Church of England. Here are three examples of problems the Puritans perceived with the "Bishops" and "Great Bibles":
Instructions were given to the translators that were intended to limit the Puritan influence on this new translation. The Bishop of London added a qualification that the translators would add no marginal notes (which had been an issue in the "Geneva Bible"). King James cited two passages in the Geneva translation where he found the marginal notes offensive to the principles of divinely ordained royal supremacy : Exodus 1:19, where the "Geneva Bible" notes had commended the example of civil disobedience to the Egyptian Pharaoh showed by the Hebrew midwives, and also II Chronicles 15:16, where the "Geneva Bible" had criticized King Asa for not having executed his idolatrous 'mother', Queen Maachah (Maachah had actually been Asa's grandmother, but James considered the Geneva Bible reference as sanctioning the execution of his own mother Mary, Queen of Scots). Further, the King gave the translators instructions designed to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England. Certain Greek and Hebrew words were to be translated in a manner that reflected the traditional usage of the church. For example, old ecclesiastical words such as the word "church" were to be retained and not to be translated as "congregation". The new translation would reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and traditional beliefs about ordained clergy.
James' instructions included several requirements that kept the new translation familiar to its listeners and readers. The text of the "Bishops' Bible" would serve as the primary guide for the translators, and the familiar proper names of the biblical characters would all be retained. If the "Bishops' Bible" was deemed problematic in any situation, the translators were permitted to consult other translations from a pre-approved list: the "Tyndale Bible", the "Coverdale Bible", "Matthew's Bible", the "Great Bible", and the "Geneva Bible". In addition, later scholars have detected an influence on the "Authorized Version" from the translations of "Taverner's Bible" and the New Testament of the "Douay–Rheims Bible." It is for this reason that the flyleaf of most printings of the "Authorized Version" observes that the text had been "translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesty's special commandment." As the work proceeded, more detailed rules were adopted as to how variant and uncertain readings in the Hebrew and Greek source texts should be indicated, including the requirement that words supplied in English to 'complete the meaning' of the originals should be printed in a different type face.
The task of translation was undertaken by 47 scholars, although 54 were originally approved. All were members of the Church of England and all except Sir Henry Savile were clergy. The scholars worked in six committees, two based in each of the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and Westminster. The committees included scholars with Puritan sympathies, as well as High Churchmen. Forty unbound copies of the 1602 edition of the "Bishops' Bible" were specially printed so that the agreed changes of each committee could be recorded in the margins. The committees worked on certain parts separately and the drafts produced by each committee were then compared and revised for harmony with each other. The scholars were not paid directly for their translation work, instead a circular letter was sent to bishops encouraging them to consider the translators for appointment to well-paid livings as these fell vacant. Several were supported by the various colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, while others were promoted to bishoprics, deaneries and prebends through royal patronage.
The committees started work towards the end of 1604. King James VI and I, on 22 July 1604, sent a letter to Archbishop Bancroft asking him to contact all English churchmen requesting that they make donations to his project.
They had all completed their sections by 1608, the Apocrypha committee finishing first. From January 1609, a General Committee of Review met at Stationers' Hall, London to review the completed marked texts from each of the six committees. The General Committee included John Bois, Andrew Downes and John Harmar, and others known only by their initials, including "AL" (who may be Arthur Lake), and were paid for their attendance by the Stationers' Company. John Bois prepared a note of their deliberations (in Latin) – which has partly survived in two later transcripts. Also surviving of the translators' working papers are a bound-together set of marked-up corrections to one of the forty "Bishops' Bibles"—covering the Old Testament and Gospels, and also a manuscript translation of the text of the Epistles, excepting those verses where no change was being recommended to the readings in the "Bishops' Bible". Archbishop Bancroft insisted on having a final say making fourteen further changes, of which one was the term "bishopricke" at Acts 1:20.
The original printing of the "Authorized Version" was published by Robert Barker, the King's Printer, in 1611 as a complete folio Bible. It was sold looseleaf for ten shillings, or bound for twelve. Robert Barker's father, Christopher, had, in 1589, been granted by Elizabeth I the title of royal Printer, with the perpetual Royal Privilege to print Bibles in England. Robert Barker invested very large sums in printing the new edition, and consequently ran into serious debt, such that he was compelled to sub-lease the privilege to two rival London printers, Bonham Norton and John Bill. It appears that it was initially intended that each printer would print a portion of the text, share printed sheets with the others, and split the proceeds. Bitter financial disputes broke out, as Barker accused Norton and Bill of concealing their profits, while Norton and Bill accused Barker of selling sheets properly due to them as partial Bibles for ready money. There followed decades of continual litigation, and consequent imprisonment for debt for members of the Barker and Norton printing dynasties, while each issued rival editions of the whole Bible. In 1629 the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge successfully managed to assert separate and prior royal licences for Bible printing, for their own university presses—and Cambridge University took the opportunity to print revised editions of the "Authorized Version" in 1629, and 1638. The editors of these editions included John Bois and John Ward from the original translators. This did not, however, impede the commercial rivalries of the London printers, especially as the Barker family refused to allow any other printers access to the authoritative manuscript of the "Authorized Version".
Two editions of the whole Bible are recognized as having been produced in 1611, which may be distinguished by their rendering of ; the first edition reading "he went into the city", where the second reads "she went into the city"; these are known colloquially as the "He" and "She" Bibles.
The original printing was made before English spelling was standardized, and when printers, as a matter of course, expanded and contracted the spelling of the same words in different places, so as to achieve an even column of text. They set v for initial u and v, and u for u and v everywhere else. They used long ſ for non-final s. The glyph j occurs only after i, as in the final letter in a Roman numeral. Punctuation was relatively heavy and differed from current practice. When space needed to be saved, the printers sometimes used "ye" for "the", (replacing the Middle English thorn with the continental y), set ã for "an" or "am" (in the style of scribe's shorthand), and set & for "and". On the contrary, on a few occasions, they appear to have inserted these words when they thought a line needed to be padded. Later printings regularized these spellings; the punctuation has also been standardized, but still varies from current usage norms.
The first printing used a black letter typeface instead of a roman typeface, which itself made a political and a religious statement. Like the Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible, the Authorized Version was "appointed to be read in churches". It was a large folio volume meant for public use, not private devotion; the weight of the type mirrored the weight of establishment authority behind it. However, smaller editions and roman-type editions followed rapidly, e.g. quarto roman-type editions of the Bible in 1612. This contrasted with the Geneva Bible, which was the first English Bible printed in a roman typeface (although black-letter editions, particularly in folio format, were issued later).
In contrast to the "Geneva Bible" and the "Bishops' Bible", which had both been extensively illustrated, there were no illustrations at all in the 1611 edition of the Authorized Version, the main form of decoration being the historiated initial letters provided for books and chapterstogether with the decorative title pages to the Bible itself, and to the New Testament.
In the Great Bible, readings derived from the Vulgate but not found in published Hebrew and Greek texts had been distinguished by being printed in smaller roman type. In the Geneva Bible, a distinct typeface had instead been applied to distinguish text supplied by translators, or thought needful for English grammar but not present in the Greek or Hebrew; and the original printing of the Authorized Version used roman type for this purpose, albeit sparsely and inconsistently. This results in perhaps the most significant difference between the original printed text of the King James Bible and the current text. When, from the later 17th century onwards, the Authorized Version began to be printed in roman type, the typeface for supplied words was changed to italics, this application being regularized and greatly expanded. This was intended to de-emphasize the words.
The original printing contained two prefatory texts; the first was a formal "" to "the most high and mighty Prince" King James. Many British printings reproduce this, while most non-British printings do not.
The second preface was called "", a long and learned essay that defends the undertaking of the new version. It observes the translators' stated goal, that they, "never thought from the beginning that [they] should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, ... but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath been our endeavour, that our mark." They also give their opinion of previous English Bible translations, stating, "We do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession, (for we have seen none of theirs [Roman Catholics] of the whole Bible as yet) containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God." As with the first preface, some British printings reproduce this, while most non-British printings do not. Almost every printing that includes the second preface also includes the first.
The first printing contained a number of other apparatus, including a table for the reading of the Psalms at matins and evensong, and a calendar, an almanac, and a table of holy days and observances. Much of this material became obsolete with the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar by Britain and its colonies in 1752, and thus modern editions invariably omit it.
So as to make it easier to locate a particular passage, each chapter was headed by a brief precis of its contents with verse numbers. Later editors freely substituted their own chapter summaries, or omitted such material entirely. Pilcrow marks are used to indicate the beginnings of paragraphs except after the book of Acts.
The Authorized Version was meant to replace the "Bishops' Bible" as the official version for readings in the Church of England. No record of its authorization exists; it was probably effected by an order of the Privy Council, but the records for the years 1600 to 1613 were destroyed by fire in January 1618/19, and it is commonly known as the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom. The King's Printer issued no further editions of the "Bishops' Bible", so necessarily the Authorized Version replaced it as the standard lectern Bible in parish church use in England.
In the 1662 "Book of Common Prayer", the text of the Authorized Version finally supplanted that of the "Great Bible" in the Epistle and Gospel readings—though the Prayer Book Psalter nevertheless continues in the Great Bible version.
The case was different in Scotland, where the Geneva Bible had long been the standard church Bible. It was not until 1633 that a Scottish edition of the Authorized Version was printed—in conjunction with the Scots coronation in that year of Charles I. The inclusion of illustrations in the edition raised accusations of Popery from opponents of the religious policies of Charles and William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. However, official policy favoured the Authorized Version, and this favour returned during the Commonwealth—as London printers succeeded in re-asserting their monopoly on Bible printing with support from Oliver Cromwell—and the "New Translation" was the only edition on the market. F. F. Bruce reports that the last recorded instance of a Scots parish continuing to use the "Old Translation" (i.e. Geneva) as being in 1674.
The "Authorized Version"s acceptance by the general public took longer. The "Geneva Bible" continued to be popular, and large numbers were imported from Amsterdam, where printing continued up to 1644 in editions carrying a false London imprint. However, few if any genuine Geneva editions appear to have been printed in London after 1616, and in 1637 Archbishop Laud prohibited their printing or importation. In the period of the English Civil War, soldiers of the New Model Army were issued a book of Geneva selections called ""The Soldiers' Bible"". In the first half of the 17th century the Authorized Version is most commonly referred to as "The Bible without notes", thereby distinguishing it from the Geneva "Bible with notes". There were several printings of the Authorized Version in Amsterdam—one as late as 1715 which combined the Authorized Version translation text with the Geneva marginal notes; one such edition was printed in London in 1649. During the Commonwealth a commission was established by Parliament to recommend a revision of the Authorized Version with acceptably Protestant explanatory notes, but the project was abandoned when it became clear that these would nearly double the bulk of the Bible text. After the English Restoration, the "Geneva Bible" was held to be politically suspect and a reminder of the repudiated Puritan era. Furthermore, disputes over the lucrative rights to print the Authorized Version dragged on through the 17th century, so none of the printers involved saw any commercial advantage in marketing a rival translation. The Authorized Version became the only current version circulating among English-speaking people.
A small minority of critical scholars were slow to accept the latest translation. Hugh Broughton, who was the most highly regarded English Hebraist of his time but had been excluded from the panel of translators because of his utterly uncongenial temperament, issued in 1611 a total condemnation of the new version. He especially criticized the translators' rejection of word-for-word equivalence and stated that "he would rather be torn in pieces by wild horses than that this abominable translation (KJV) should ever be foisted upon the English people". Walton's London Polyglot of 1657 disregards the Authorized Version (and indeed the English language) entirely. Walton's reference text throughout is the Vulgate. The Vulgate Latin is also found as the standard text of scripture in Thomas Hobbes's "Leviathan" of 1651, indeed Hobbes gives Vulgate chapter and verse numbers (e.g., Job 41:24, not Job 41:33) for his head text. In Chapter 35: "The Signification in Scripture of Kingdom of God", Hobbes discusses Exodus 19:5, first in his own translation of the "Vulgar Latin", and then subsequently as found in the versions he terms ""... the English translation made in the beginning of the reign of King James"", and ""The Geneva French"" (i.e. Olivétan). Hobbes advances detailed critical arguments why the Vulgate rendering is to be preferred. For most of the 17th century the assumption remained that, while it had been of vital importance to provide the scriptures in the vernacular for ordinary people, nevertheless for those with sufficient education to do so, Biblical study was best undertaken within the international common medium of Latin. It was only in 1700 that modern bilingual Bibles appeared in which the Authorized Version was compared with counterpart Dutch and French Protestant vernacular Bibles.
In consequence of the continual disputes over printing privileges, successive printings of the Authorized Version were notably less careful than the 1611 edition had been—compositors freely varying spelling, capitalization and punctuation—and also, over the years, introducing about 1,500 misprints (some of which, like the omission of "not" from the commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery" in the "Wicked Bible", became notorious). The two Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638 attempted to restore the proper text—while introducing over 200 revisions of the original translators' work, chiefly by incorporating into the main text a more literal reading originally presented as a marginal note. A more thoroughly corrected edition was proposed following the Restoration, in conjunction with the revised 1662 Book of Common Prayer, but Parliament then decided against it.
By the first half of the 18th century, the Authorized Version was effectively unchallenged as the sole English translation in current use in Protestant churches, and was so dominant that the Roman Catholic Church in England issued in 1750 a revision of the 1610 "Douay-Rheims Bible" by Richard Challoner that was very much closer to the Authorized Version than to the original. However, general standards of spelling, punctuation, typesetting, capitalization and grammar had changed radically in the 100 years since the first edition of the Authorized Version, and all printers in the market were introducing continual piecemeal changes to their Bible texts to bring them into line with current practice—and with public expectations of standardized spelling and grammatical construction.
Over the course of the 18th century, the Authorized Version supplanted the Hebrew, Greek and the Latin Vulgate as the standard version of scripture for English speaking scholars and divines, and indeed came to be regarded by some as an inspired text in itself—so much so that any challenge to its readings or textual base came to be regarded by many as an assault on Holy Scripture.
By the mid-18th century the wide variation in the various modernized printed texts of the Authorized Version, combined with the notorious accumulation of misprints, had reached the proportion of a scandal, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge both sought to produce an updated standard text. First of the two was the Cambridge edition of 1760, the culmination of 20 years' work by Francis Sawyer Parris, who died in May of that year. This 1760 edition was reprinted without change in 1762 and in John Baskerville's fine folio edition of 1763. This was effectively superseded by the 1769 Oxford edition, edited by Benjamin Blayney, though with comparatively few changes from Parris's edition; but which became the Oxford standard text, and is reproduced almost unchanged in most current printings. Parris and Blayney sought consistently to remove those elements of the 1611 and subsequent editions that they believed were due to the vagaries of printers, while incorporating most of the revised readings of the Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638, and each also introducing a few improved readings of their own. They undertook the mammoth task of standardizing the wide variation in punctuation and spelling of the original, making many thousands of minor changes to the text. In addition, Blayney and Parris thoroughly revised and greatly extended the italicization of "supplied" words not found in the original languages by cross-checking against the presumed source texts. Blayney seems to have worked from the 1550 Stephanus edition of the Textus Receptus, rather than the later editions of Theodore Beza that the translators of the 1611 New Testament had favoured; accordingly the current Oxford standard text alters around a dozen italicizations where Beza and Stephanus differ. Like the 1611 edition, the 1769 Oxford edition included the Apocrypha, although Blayney tended to remove cross-references to the Books of the Apocrypha from the margins of their Old and New Testaments wherever these had been provided by the original translators. Altogether, the standardization of spelling and punctuation caused Blayney's 1769 text to differ from the 1611 text in around 24,000 places. Since that date, a few further changes have been introduced to the Oxford standard text. The Oxford University Press paperback edition of the "Authorized King James Version" provides Oxford's standard text, and also includes the prefatory section "The Translators to the Reader".
The 1611 and 1769 texts of the first three verses from "I Corinthians 13" are given below.
There are a number of superficial edits in these three verses: 11 changes of spelling, 16 changes of typesetting (including the changed conventions for the use of u and v), three changes of punctuation, and one variant text—where "not charity" is substituted for "no charity" in verse two, in the erroneous belief that the original reading was a misprint.
A particular verse for which Blayney's 1769 text differs from Parris's 1760 version is Matthew 5:13, where Parris (1760) has
Blayney (1769) changes 'lost his savour' to 'lost its savour', and troden to trodden.
For a period, Cambridge continued to issue Bibles using the Parris text, but the market demand for absolute standardization was now such that they eventually adapted Blayney's work but omitted some of the idiosyncratic Oxford spellings. By the mid-19th century, almost all printings of the Authorized Version were derived from the 1769 Oxford text—increasingly without Blayney's variant notes and cross references, and commonly excluding the Apocrypha. One exception to this was a scrupulous original-spelling, page-for-page, and line-for-line reprint of the 1611 edition (including all chapter headings, marginalia, and original italicization, but with Roman type substituted for the black letter of the original), published by Oxford in 1833. Another important exception was the 1873 Cambridge Paragraph Bible, thoroughly revised, modernized and re-edited by F. H. A. Scrivener, who for the first time consistently identified the source texts underlying the 1611 translation and its marginal notes. Scrivener, like Blayney, opted to revise the translation where he considered the judgement of the 1611 translators had been faulty. In 2005, Cambridge University Press released its New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with Apocrypha, edited by David Norton, which followed in the spirit of Scrivener's work, attempting to bring spelling to present-day standards. Norton also innovated with the introduction of quotation marks, while returning to a hypothetical 1611 text, so far as possible, to the wording used by its translators, especially in the light of the re-emphasis on some of their draft documents. This text has been issued in paperback by Penguin Books.
From the early 19th century the Authorized Version has remained almost completely unchanged—and since, due to advances in printing technology, it could now be produced in very large editions for mass sale, it established complete dominance in public and ecclesiastical use in the English-speaking Protestant world. Academic debate through that century, however, increasingly reflected concerns about the Authorized Version shared by some scholars: (a) that subsequent study in oriental languages suggested a need to revise the translation of the Hebrew Bible—both in terms of specific vocabulary, and also in distinguishing descriptive terms from proper names; (b) that the Authorized Version was unsatisfactory in translating the same Greek words and phrases into different English, especially where parallel passages are found in the synoptic gospels; and (c) in the light of subsequent ancient manuscript discoveries, the New Testament translation base of the Greek Textus Receptus could no longer be considered to be the best representation of the original text.
Responding to these concerns, the Convocation of Canterbury resolved in 1870 to undertake a revision of the text of the Authorized Version, intending to retain the original text "except where in the judgement of competent scholars such a change is necessary". The resulting revision was issued as the Revised Version in 1881 (New Testament), 1885 (Old Testament) and 1894 (Apocrypha); but, although it sold widely, the revision did not find popular favour, and it was only reluctantly in 1899 that Convocation approved it for reading in churches.
By the early 20th century, editing had been completed in Cambridge's text, with at least 6 new changes since 1769, and the reversing of at least 30 of the standard Oxford readings. The distinct Cambridge text was printed in the millions, and after the Second World War "the unchanging steadiness of the KJB was a huge asset." The Cambridge edition is preferred by scholars.
The Authorized Version maintained its effective dominance throughout the first half of the 20th century. New translations in the second half of the 20th century displaced its 250 years of dominance (roughly 1700 to 1950), but groups do exist—sometimes termed the King James Only movement—that distrust anything not in agreement with the Authorized Version.
F. H. A. Scrivener and D. Norton have both written in detail on editorial variations which have occurred through the history of the publishing of the Authorized Version from 1611 to 1769. In the 19th century, there were effectively three main guardians of the text. Norton identified five variations among the Oxford, Cambridge and London (Eyre and Spottiswoode) texts of 1857, such as the spelling of "farther" or "further" at Matthew 26:39.
In the 20th century, variation between the editions was reduced to comparing the Cambridge to the Oxford. Distinctly identified Cambridge readings included "or Sheba" (), "sin" (), "clifts" (), "vapour" (), "flieth" (), "further" () and a number of other references. In effect the Cambridge was considered the current text in comparison to the Oxford. These are instances where both Oxford and Cambridge have now diverged from Blayney's 1769 Edition. The distinctions between the Oxford and Cambridge editions have been a major point in the Bible version debate, and a potential theological issue, particularly in regard to the identification of the Pure Cambridge Edition.
Cambridge University Press introduced a change at in 1985, reversing its longstanding tradition of printing the word "spirit" in lower case by using a capital letter "S". A Rev. Hardin of Bedford, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to Cambridge inquiring about this verse, and received a reply on 3 June 1985 from the Bible Director, Jerry L. Hooper, admitting that it was a "matter of some embarrassment regarding the lower case 's' in Spirit".
Like Tyndale's translation and the Geneva Bible, the Authorized Version was translated primarily from Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts, although with secondary reference both to the Latin Vulgate, and to more recent scholarly Latin versions; two books of the Apocrypha were translated from a Latin source. Following the example of the Geneva Bible, words implied but not actually in the original source were distinguished by being printed in distinct type (albeit inconsistently), but otherwise the translators explicitly rejected word-for-word equivalence. F. F. Bruce gives an example from Romans Chapter 5:
The English terms "rejoice" and "glory" are translated from the same word καυχώμεθα ("kaukhṓmetha") in the Greek original. In Tyndale, "Geneva" and the "Bishops' Bibles", both instances are translated "rejoice". In the "Douay–Rheims" New Testament, both are translated "glory". Only in the Authorized Version does the translation vary between the two verses.
In obedience to their instructions, the translators provided no marginal interpretation of the text, but in some 8,500 places a marginal note offers an alternative English wording. The majority of these notes offer a more literal rendering of the original (introduced as "Heb", "Chal", "Gr" or "Lat"), but others indicate a variant reading of the source text (introduced by "or"). Some of the annotated variants derive from alternative editions in the original languages, or from variant forms quoted in the fathers. More commonly, though, they indicate a difference between the literal original language reading and that in the translators' preferred recent Latin versions: Tremellius for the Old Testament, Junius for the Apocrypha, and Beza for the New Testament. At thirteen places in the New Testament (e.g. and ) a marginal note records a variant reading found in some Greek manuscript copies; in almost all cases reproducing a counterpart textual note at the same place in Beza's editions. A few more extensive notes clarify Biblical names and units of measurement or currency. Modern reprintings rarely reproduce these annotated variants—although they are to be found in the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible. In addition, there were originally some 9,000 scriptural cross-references, in which one text was related to another. Such cross-references had long been common in Latin Bibles, and most of those in the Authorized Version were copied unaltered from this Latin tradition. Consequently the early editions of the KJV retain many Vulgate verse references—e.g. in the numbering of the Psalms. At the head of each chapter, the translators provided a short précis of its contents, with verse numbers; these are rarely included in complete form in modern editions.
Also in obedience to their instructions, the translators indicated 'supplied' words in a different typeface; but there was no attempt to regularize the instances where this practice had been applied across the different companies; and especially in the New Testament, it was used much less frequently in the 1611 edition than would later be the case. In one verse, , an entire clause was printed in roman type (as it had also been in the Great Bible and Bishop's Bible); indicating a reading then primarily derived from the Vulgate, albeit one for which the later editions of Beza had provided a Greek text.
In the Old Testament the translators render the tetragrammaton YHWH by "the LORD" (in later editions in small capitals as ), or "the LORD God" (for "YHWH Elohim", יהוה אלהים), except in four places by "IEHOVAH" (, , and ) and three times in a combination form. (, , ) However, if the tetragrammaton occurs with the Hebrew word adonai (Lord) then it is rendered not as the "Lord LORD" but as the "Lord God". (, etc.) In later editions as "Lord GOD" with "GOD" in small capitals indicating to the reader that God's name appears in the original Hebrew.
For the Old Testament, the translators used a text originating in the editions of the Hebrew Rabbinic Bible by Daniel Bomberg (1524/5), but adjusted this to conform to the Greek LXX or Latin Vulgate in passages to which Christian tradition had attached a Christological interpretation. For example, the Septuagint reading "They pierced my hands and my feet" was used in (vs. the Masoretes' reading of the Hebrew "like lions my hands and feet"). Otherwise, however, the Authorized Version is closer to the Hebrew tradition than any previous English translation—especially in making use of the rabbinic commentaries, such as Kimhi, in elucidating obscure passages in the Masoretic Text; earlier versions had been more likely to adopt LXX or Vulgate readings in such places. Following the practice of the Geneva Bible, the books of 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras in the medieval Vulgate Old Testament were renamed 'Ezra' and 'Nehemiah'; 3 Esdras and 4 Esdras in the Apocrypha being renamed '1 Esdras' and '2 Esdras'.
For the New Testament, the translators chiefly used the 1598 and 1588/89 Greek editions of Theodore Beza, which also present Beza's Latin version of the Greek and Stephanus's edition of the Latin Vulgate. Both of these versions were extensively referred to, as the translators conducted all discussions amongst themselves in Latin. F.H.A. Scrivener identifies 190 readings where the Authorized Version translators depart from Beza's Greek text, generally in maintaining the wording of the "Bishop's Bible" and other earlier English translations. In about half of these instances, the Authorized Version translators appear to follow the earlier 1550 Greek Textus Receptus of Stephanus. For the other half, Scrivener was usually able to find corresponding Greek readings in the editions of Erasmus, or in the Complutensian Polyglot. However, in several dozen readings he notes that no printed Greek text corresponds to the English of the Authorized Version, which in these places derives directly from the Vulgate. For example, at , the Authorized Version reads "one fold" (as did the "Bishops' Bible", and the 16th-century vernacular versions produced in Geneva), following the Latin Vulgate "unum ovile", whereas Tyndale had agreed more closely with the Greek, "one flocke" (μία ποίμνη). The Authorized Version New Testament owes much more to the Vulgate than does the Old Testament; still, at least 80% of the text is unaltered from Tyndale's translation.
Unlike the rest of the Bible, the translators of the Apocrypha identified their source texts in their marginal notes. From these it can be determined that the books of the Apocrypha were translated from the Septuagint—primarily, from the Greek Old Testament column in the Antwerp Polyglot—but with extensive reference to the counterpart Latin Vulgate text, and to Junius's Latin translation. The translators record references to the Sixtine Septuagint of 1587, which is substantially a printing of the Old Testament text from the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, and also to the 1518 Greek Septuagint edition of Aldus Manutius. They had, however, no Greek texts for 2 Esdras, or for the Prayer of Manasses, and Scrivener found that they here used an unidentified Latin manuscript.
The translators appear to have otherwise made no first-hand study of ancient manuscript sources, even those that—like the Codex Bezae—would have been readily available to them. In addition to all previous English versions (including, and contrary to their instructions, the "Rheimish New Testament" which in their preface they criticized); they made wide and eclectic use of all printed editions in the original languages then available, including the ancient Syriac New Testament printed with an interlinear Latin gloss in the Antwerp Polyglot of 1573. In the preface the translators acknowledge consulting translations and commentaries in Chaldee, Hebrew, Syrian, Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.
The translators took the Bishop's Bible as their source text, and where they departed from that in favour of another translation, this was most commonly the Geneva Bible. However, the degree to which readings from the Bishop's Bible survived into final text of the King James Bible varies greatly from company to company, as did the propensity of the King James translators to coin phrases of their own. John Bois's notes of the General Committee of Review show that they discussed readings derived from a wide variety of versions and patristic sources; including explicitly both Henry Savile's 1610 edition of the works of John Chrysostom and the Rheims New Testament, which was the primary source for many of the literal alternative readings provided for the marginal notes.
A number of Bible verses in the King James Version of the New Testament are not found in more recent Bible translations, where these are based on modern critical texts. In the early seventeenth century, the source Greek texts of the New Testament which were used to produce Protestant Bible versions were mainly dependent on manuscripts of the late Byzantine text-type, and they also contained minor variations which became known as the Textus Receptus. With the subsequent identification of much earlier manuscripts, most modern textual scholars value the evidence of manuscripts which belong to the Alexandrian family as better witnesses to the original text of the biblical authors, without giving it, or any family, automatic preference.
A primary concern of the translators was to produce an appropriate Bible, dignified and resonant in public reading. Although the Authorized Version's written style is an important part of its influence on English, research has found only one verse—Hebrews 13:8—for which translators debated the wording's literary merits. While they stated in the preface that they used stylistic variation, finding multiple English words or verbal forms in places where the original language employed repetition, in practice they also did the opposite; for example, 14 different Hebrew words were translated into the single English word "prince".
In a period of rapid linguistic change the translators avoided contemporary idioms, tending instead towards forms that were already slightly archaic, like "verily" and "it came to pass". The pronouns "thou"/"thee" and "ye"/"you" are consistently used as singular and plural respectively, even though by this time "you" was often found as the singular in general English usage, especially when addressing a social superior (as is evidenced, for example, in Shakespeare). For the possessive of the third person pronoun, the word "its", first recorded in the "Oxford English Dictionary" in 1598, is avoided. The older "his" is usually employed, as for example at : "if the salt have lost "his" savour, wherewith shall it be salted?"; in other places "of it", "thereof" or bare "it" are found. Another sign of linguistic conservatism is the invariable use of "-eth" for the third person singular present form of the verb, as at Matthew 2:13: "the Angel of the Lord appear"eth" to Joseph in a dreame". The rival ending "-(e)s", as found in present-day English, was already widely used by this time (for example, it predominates over "-eth" in the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe). Furthermore, the translators preferred "which" to "who" or "whom" as the relative pronoun for persons, as in : "And Lot also "which" went with Abram, had flocks and heards, & tents" although "who(m)" is also found.
The Authorized Version is notably more Latinate than previous English versions, especially the Geneva Bible. This results in part from the academic stylistic preferences of a number of the translators—several of whom admitted to being more comfortable writing in Latin than in English—but was also, in part, a consequence of the royal proscription against explanatory notes. Hence, where the Geneva Bible might use a common English word—and gloss its particular application in a marginal note—the Authorized Version tends rather to prefer a technical term, frequently in Anglicized Latin. Consequently, although the King had instructed the translators to use the Bishops' Bible as a base text, the New Testament in particular owes much stylistically to the Catholic Rheims New Testament, whose translators had also been concerned to find English equivalents for Latin terminology. In addition, the translators of the New Testament books transliterate names found in the Old Testament in their Greek forms rather than in the forms closer to the Old Testament Hebrew (e.g. "Elias" and "Noe" for "Elijah" and "Noah", respectively).
While the Authorized Version remains among the most widely sold, modern critical New Testament translations differ substantially from it in a number of passages, primarily because they rely on source manuscripts not then accessible to (or not then highly regarded by) early-17th-century Biblical scholarship. In the Old Testament, there are also many differences from modern translations that are based not on manuscript differences, but on a different understanding of Ancient Hebrew vocabulary or grammar by the translators. For example, in modern translations it is clear that is referring throughout to mining operations, which is not at all apparent from the text of the Authorized Version.
The King James version contains several mistranslations; especially in the Old Testament where the knowledge of Hebrew and cognate languages was uncertain at the time. Most of these are minor and do not significantly change the meaning compared to the source material. Among the most commonly cited errors is in the Hebrew of Job and Deuteronomy, where with the probable meaning of "wild-ox, aurochs", is translated in the KJV as "unicorn"; following in this the Vulgate "unicornis" and several medieval rabbinic commentators. The translators of the KJV note the alternative rendering, "rhinocerots" in the margin at Isaiah 34:7. On a similar note Martin Luther's German translation had also relied on the Vulgate Latin on this point, consistently translating רֶאֵם using the German word for unicorn, "Einhorn." Otherwise, the translators on several occasions mistakenly interpreted a Hebrew descriptive phrase as a proper name (or vice versa); as at 2 Samuel 1:18 where 'the Book of Jasher' properly refers not to a work by an author of that name, but should rather be rendered as "the Book of the Upright" (which was proposed as an alternative reading in a marginal note to the KJV text).
Despite royal patronage and encouragement, there was never any overt mandate to use the new translation. It was not until 1661 that the Authorized Version replaced the "Bishops Bible" in the Epistle and Gospel lessons of the Book of Common Prayer, and it never did replace the older translation in the Psalter. In 1763 "The Critical Review" complained that "many false interpretations, ambiguous phrases, obsolete words and indelicate expressions ... excite the derision of the scorner". Blayney's 1769 version, with its revised spelling and punctuation, helped change the public perception of the Authorized Version to a masterpiece of the English language. By the 19th century, F. W. Faber could say of the translation, "It lives on the ear, like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego."
The Authorized Version has been called "the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language", "the most important book in English religion and culture", and "the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world". David Crystal has estimated that it is responsible for 257 idioms in English; examples include feet of clay and reap the whirlwind. Furthermore, prominent atheist figures such as the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have praised the King James Version as being "a giant step in the maturing of English literature" and "a great work of literature", respectively, with Dawkins then adding, "A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian".
Although the Authorized Version's former monopoly in the English-speaking world has diminished—for example, the Church of England recommends six other versions in addition to it—it is still the most used translation in the United States, especially as the Scofield Reference Bible for Evangelicals. However, over the past forty years it has been gradually overtaken by modern versions, principally the New International Version (1973) and the New Revised Standard Version (1989). In addition, in the Orthodox Church in America, the King James Version is used liturgically, and was made "the 'official' translation for a whole generation of American Orthodox". The later Service Book of the Antiochian Archdiocese, in vogue today, also uses the King James Version.
The King James Version is also one of the versions authorized to be used in the services of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, as it is the historical Bible of this Church.
The Authorized Version is in the public domain in most of the world. However, in the United Kingdom, the right to print, publish and distribute it is a Royal prerogative and the Crown licenses publishers to reproduce it under letters patent. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the letters patent are held by the Queen's Printer, and in Scotland by the Scottish Bible Board. The office of Queen's Printer has been associated with the right to reproduce the Bible for centuries, the earliest known reference coming in 1577. In the 18th century all surviving interests in the monopoly were bought out by John Baskett. The Baskett rights descended through a number of printers and, in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Queen's Printer is now Cambridge University Press, which inherited the right when they took over the firm of Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1990.
Other royal charters of similar antiquity grant Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press the right to produce the Authorized Version independently of the Queen's Printer. In Scotland the Authorized Version is published by Collins under licence from the Scottish Bible Board. The terms of the letters patent prohibit any other than the holders, or those authorized by the holders, from printing, publishing or importing the Authorized Version into the United Kingdom. The protection that the Authorized Version, and also the "Book of Common Prayer," enjoy is the last remnant of the time when the Crown held a monopoly over all printing and publishing in the United Kingdom. Almost all provisions granting copyright in perpetuity were abolished by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, but because the Authorized Version is protected by royal prerogative rather than copyright, it will remain protected, as specified in CDPA s171(1)(b).
Cambridge University Press permits the reproduction of at most 500 verses for "liturgical and non-commercial educational use" if their prescribed acknowledgement is included, the quoted verses do not exceed 25% of the publication quoting them and do not include a complete Bible book. For use beyond this, the Press is willing to consider permission requested on a case-by-case basis and in 2011 a spokesman said the Press generally does not charge a fee but tries to ensure that a reputable source text is used.
The original King Iames Version did not use the letter J. J first appeared in the "1629 Cambridge King James Authorized Bible" which is considered the 1st Revision. Hence, the 26-letter modern English alphabet was established.
Translations of the books of the biblical apocrypha were necessary for the King James version, as readings from these books were included in the daily Old Testament lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer. Protestant Bibles in the 16th century included the books of the Apocrypha—generally, following the Luther Bible, in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments to indicate they were not considered part of the Old Testament text—and there is evidence that these were widely read as popular literature, especially in Puritan circles; The Apocrypha of the King James Version has the same 14 books as had been found in the Apocrypha of the Bishop's Bible; however, following the practice of the Geneva Bible, the first two books of the Apocrypha were renamed 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras, as compared to the names in the Thirty-nine Articles, with the corresponding Old Testament books being renamed Ezra and Nehemiah. Starting in 1630, volumes of the "Geneva Bible" were occasionally bound with the pages of the Apocrypha section excluded. In 1644 the Long Parliament forbade the reading of the Apocrypha in Church and in 1666 the first editions of the King James Bible without the Apocrypha were bound.
The standardization of the text of the Authorized Version after 1769 together with the technological development of stereotype printing made it possible to produce Bibles in large print-runs at very low unit prices. For commercial and charitable publishers, editions of the Authorized Version without the Apocrypha reduced the cost, while having increased market appeal to non-Anglican Protestant readers.
With the rise of the Bible societies, most editions have omitted the whole section of Apocryphal books. The British and Foreign Bible Society withdrew subsidies for bible printing and dissemination in 1826, under the following resolution:
The American Bible Society adopted a similar policy. Both societies eventually reversed these policies in light of 20th-century ecumenical efforts on translations, the ABS doing so in 1964 and the BFBS in 1966.
The King James Only movement advocates the belief that the King James Version is superior to all other English translations of the Bible. Most adherents of the movement believe that the Textus Receptus is very close, if not identical, to the original autographs, thereby making it the ideal Greek source for the translation. They argue that manuscripts such as the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, on which most modern English translations are based, are corrupted New Testament texts. One of them, Perry Demopoulos, was a director of the translation of the King James Bible into Russian. In 2010 the Russian translation of the KJV of the New Testament was released in Kiev, Ukraine. In 2017 the first complete edition of the Russian King James Bible was released.
Chronological order of publication (newest first)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16767
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Kevin Spacey
Kevin Spacey Fowler (born July 26, 1959) is an American actor, producer, and singer. Spacey began his career as a stage actor during the 1980s, obtaining supporting roles in film and television. He gained critical acclaim in the 1990s, culminating in an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the neo-noir crime thriller "The Usual Suspects" (1995) and an Academy Award for Best Actor for the midlife crisis-themed drama "American Beauty" (1999). Spacey's first roles in film were in Mike Nichols' "Heartburn" (1986), and "Working Girl" (1988). Spacey's other starring roles have included "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992), the comedy-drama film "Swimming with Sharks" (1994), the psychological thriller "Seven" (1995), the neo-noir crime film "L.A. Confidential" (1997), the drama "Pay It Forward" (2000), the science fiction-mystery film "K-PAX" (2001), the musical biopic "Beyond the Sea" (2004), the superhero film "Superman Returns" (2006), and the action film "Baby Driver" (2017).
In Broadway theatre, Spacey starred in "Long Day's Journey into Night" in 1986 alongside Jack Lemmon. In 1991, he won a Tony Award in 1991 for his role in "Lost in Yonkers". He continued to act in theater receiving his second Tony Award nomination for "The Iceman Cometh" in 1999. He then became the artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London from 2004 until stepping down in mid-2015. In 2017, he hosted the 71st Tony Awards. From 2013 to 2017, he played Frank Underwood in the Netflix political drama series "House of Cards", which won him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama and two consecutive Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series as well as 5 consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Drama Series.
In October 2017, actor Anthony Rapp accused Spacey of making a sexual advance toward him in 1986, when Rapp was 14. Numerous other men subsequently came forward alleging that Spacey had made unwanted advances and sexually harassed them as well. As a result of the allegations, Netflix cut ties with Spacey, shelving his film "Gore" and removing him from the last season of "House of Cards". Spacey's role as J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott's film "All the Money in the World" (2017) was reshot with actor Christopher Plummer in his place. In 2018, "Billionaire Boys Club" (which had been completed before the allegations surfaced) was released with Spacey's role unchanged.
Kevin Spacey Fowler was born in South Orange, New Jersey, to Kathleen Ann ("née" Knutson), a secretary, and Thomas Geoffrey Fowler, a technical writer and data consultant. Spacey has an older brother, Randy Fowler, who is a limousine driver and Rod Stewart impersonator in Boise, Idaho, and a sister, Julie Ann Fowler Keir, an office worker. His family relocated to Southern California when he was four years old. Randy Fowler (from whom Spacey is estranged) has stated that their father, whom he described as a racist "Nazi supporter", was sexually and physically abusive, and that Spacey had shut down emotionally and become "very sly and smart" to avoid whippings.
Spacey attended Northridge Military Academy, Canoga Park High School in the 10th and 11th grades. He graduated co-valedictorian (along with Mare Winningham) of the class of 1977 of Chatsworth High School in Chatsworth, California. At Chatsworth, Spacey starred in the school's senior production of "The Sound of Music", playing the part of Captain Georg von Trapp, with Winningham as Maria von Trapp. He started using his middle name "Spacey", which is also his paternal grandmother's maiden name.
Spacey had tried to succeed as a comedian for several years before attending the Juilliard School in New York City, as a member of Group 12, where he studied drama with teacher Marian Seldes between 1979 and 1981. During this time period, he performed stand-up comedy in bowling alley talent contests.
Spacey's first professional stage appearance was as a spear carrier in a New York Shakespeare Festival performance of "Henry VI, Part 1" in 1981. The following year, he made his first Broadway appearance, as Oswald in a production of Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts", starring Liv Ullmann. Then he portrayed Philinte in Molière's "The Misanthrope". In 1984, Spacey appeared in a production of David Rabe's "Hurlyburly", in which he rotated through each of the male parts (he would later play Mickey in the film version). Next came Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" alongside David Strathairn and Colleen Dewhurst. In 1986, Spacey appeared in a production of "Sleuth" in a New Jersey dinner theatre.
Spacey's prominence as a stage actor began in 1986, when he was cast opposite Jack Lemmon, Peter Gallagher and Bethel Leslie as Jamie, the eldest Tyrone son, in Jonathan Miller's lauded production of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night". Lemmon in particular would become a mentor to Spacey and was invited, along with Spacey's high school drama teacher, to be present when Spacey received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1999. Spacey made his first major television appearance in the second-season premiere of "Crime Story", playing a Kennedy-esque American senator. Although his interest soon turned to film, Spacey remained actively involved in the live theater community. In 1991, he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Uncle Louie in Neil Simon's Broadway hit "Lost in Yonkers". Spacey's father was unconvinced that Spacey could make a career for himself as an actor, and did not change his mind until Spacey became well-known.
Some of Spacey's early roles include a widowed, eccentric millionaire on "L.A. Law"; the television miniseries "The Murder of Mary Phagan" (1988), opposite Lemmon; and the comedy "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" (1989). He earned a fan base after playing the criminally insane arms dealer Mel Profitt on the television series "Wiseguy". Spacey quickly developed a reputation as a character actor, and was cast in bigger roles, including the malevolent office manager in the ensemble film "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992), one-half of a bickering Connecticut couple in the dark comedy film "The Ref" (1994), and a malicious Hollywood studio boss in the satire "Swimming with Sharks" (1995), gaining him positive notices by critics. Spacey's performance as the enigmatic criminal Verbal Kint in Bryan Singer's 1995 neo-noir film "The Usual Suspects" won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Spacey appeared in the 1995 thriller "Seven", making a sudden entrance late in the film as the serial killer John Doe after going uncredited and unmentioned in the film's advertisements and opening credits. His work in "Seven", "The Usual Suspects" and "Outbreak" earned him Best Supporting Actor honors at the 1995 Society of Texas Film Critics Awards. Spacey played an egomaniacal district attorney in "A Time to Kill" (1996), and founded Trigger Street Productions in 1997, with the purpose of producing and developing entertainment across various media. Spacey made his directorial debut with the film "Albino Alligator" (1996). The film was a box office bomb, grossing $339,379 with a budget of $6 million, but critics praised Spacey's direction. He also voiced Hopper in the animated film "A Bug's Life" (1998).
Throughout his career, Spacey has been well known for playing villains; he remarked in 2013: "I think people just like me evil for some reason. They want me to be a son of a bitch."
In 1999, Spacey acted alongside Annette Benning in Sam Mendes' "American Beauty". In the film he played the role of Lester Burnham, a depressed suburban father and advertising executive who lusts after his teenage daughter's best friend. Spacey won his second Oscar this time for Best Actor in a Leading Role. In his acceptance speech he dedicated his Oscar to Jack Lemmon praising him as an influence, mentor, and father figure. He also stated, "[Lemmon's] performance in "The Apartment" stands as one of the finest we've ever had".
That same year, he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Spacey won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor and earned another Tony Award nomination in 1999 for "The Iceman Cometh".
Spacey played a physically and emotionally scarred grade school teacher in "Pay It Forward" (2000), a patient in a mental institution who may or may not be an alien in "K-Pax" (2001), and singer Bobby Darin in "Beyond the Sea" (2004). The latter was a lifelong dream project for Spacey, who took on co-writing, directing, co-producing and starring duties in the biography/musical about Darin's life, career and relationship with actress Sandra Dee. Facing little interest for backing in the U.S., Spacey went to the United Kingdom and Germany for funding. Almost all of the film was made in Berlin. Spacey provided his own vocals on the film's soundtrack and appeared in several tribute concerts around the time of its release. Spacey received mostly positive reviews for his singing, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for his performance. However, reviewers criticized the age disparity between Spacey and Darin, noting that Spacey was too old to convincingly portray Darin, particularly during the early stages of the singer's life depicted in the film.
Spacey hosted "Saturday Night Live" twice: first in 1997 with musical guest Beck and special guests Michael Palin and John Cleese from "Monty Python's Flying Circus", and again in May 2006 with musical guest Nelly Furtado. In 2006, Spacey played Lex Luthor in the Bryan Singer superhero film "Superman Returns". He was to return for its 2009 sequel, but the series was instead rebooted with the 2013 film "Man of Steel". Spacey also appeared in "Edison", which received a direct-to-video release in 2006.
In 2008, Spacey played an MIT lecturer in the film "21". The film is based on Ben Mezrich's best seller "Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions", a story of student MIT card-counters who used mathematical probability to aid them in card games such as blackjack. In early 2010, Spacey went to China to star in writer-director Dayyan Eng's black comedy film "Inseparable", becoming the first Hollywood actor to star in a fully Chinese-funded film.
In September 2006, Spacey said that he intended to take up British citizenship when it is offered to him. When asked about the UK's 2016 European Union membership referendum, Spacey replied, "I appreciate you asking me the question, but I am not a British citizen, I am a resident of Great Britain. And I have never in my twelve years ever gotten involved in politics in Great Britain. I think it's inappropriate for me as a, really as a guest, in Great Britain, so I'll leave that to the British people." On June 16, 2016, Spacey was awarded an honorary knighthood for his services to theatre. The honor, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was given at Clarence House by Prince Charles. While Spacey will be permitted to add the post-nominal letters, KBE, to his name, as a non-British citizen the award is honorary and he will not be able to style himself as "Sir Kevin". Spacey had previously been awarded the lesser rank of honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to drama in 2010.
Spacey is well known in Hollywood for his impressions. When he appeared on "Inside the Actors Studio", he imitated (at host James Lipton's request) Jack Lemmon, James Stewart, Johnny Carson, Katharine Hepburn, Clint Eastwood, John Gielgud, Marlon Brando, Christopher Walken, and Al Pacino. As a young actor in New York City, he used his skill to pretend to be Carson's son to obtain free theater tickets and enter Studio 54.
Capitol/EMI's album "Forever Cool" (2007) features two duets with Spacey and an earlier recording of Dean Martin: "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" and "King of the Road". In December 2007, Spacey co-hosted the Nobel Peace Prize Concert along with Uma Thurman.
Spacey is a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that enables school children across the UK to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres. He also sits on the board of directors of the Motion Picture and Television Fund.
On March 18, 2011, it was announced that Spacey was cast as Frank Underwood in the Netflix series "House of Cards", adapted from a 1990 BBC political drama of the same name. He was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series at the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2013, becoming the first lead actor to be Primetime Emmy-nominated from a web television series. Spacey went on to win the Golden Globe award for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards and Screen Actors Guild nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series at the 21st Screen Actors Guild Awards for his season 2 performance.
In July 2011, Spacey co-starred in the black comedy film "Horrible Bosses", which grossed over $209.6 million at the box office. He executive produced the biographical survival thriller film "Captain Phillips" in 2013, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Spacey portrayed the antagonist Jonathan Irons in the 2014 video game "" through motion capture. He starred as President Richard Nixon in the comedy-drama "Elvis & Nixon" (2016), which is based on the meeting that took place between Nixon and singer Elvis Presley (Michael Shannon) in December 1970 wherein Presley requested Nixon swear him in as an undercover agent in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He next starred in the comedy film "Nine Lives", as a man trapped in the body of a cat. The film was released on August 5, 2016.
In March 2017, it was announced that Spacey would portray J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott's "All the Money in the World". He shot his role in the film in ten days over the summer of 2017. However, due to the sexual assault allegations against Spacey, it was announced on November 8, 2017 that all of his footage would be excised, and that Christopher Plummer would replace Spacey as Getty in reshoots. In spite of the very tight schedule, TriStar Pictures completed the new version of the film in time for a December 25 release.
Spacey appeared in the film "Billionaire Boys Club", which had a limited release on August 17, 2018. Vertical Entertainment stated that they would be taking no action to remove Spacey from the film, as it had been completed in late 2016, prior to the allegations made in October 2017.
In February 2003, Spacey announced that he was returning to London to become the artistic director of the Old Vic, one of the city's oldest theatres. Appearing at a press conference with Judi Dench and Elton John, Spacey promised both to appear on stage and to bring in big-name talent. He undertook to remain in the post for a full ten years. The Old Vic Theatre Company staged shows eight months out of the year. Spacey's first season started in September 2004, and opened with the British premiere of the play "Cloaca" by Maria Goos, directed by Spacey, which opened to mixed reviews. In the 2005 season, Spacey made his UK Shakespearean debut, to good notices, in the title role of "Richard II" directed by Trevor Nunn.
In mid-2006, Spacey said that he was having the time of his life working at the Old Vic; at that point in his career, he said, he was "trying to do things now that are much bigger and outside [myself]". Spacey performed in productions of "National Anthems" by Dennis McIntyre, and "The Philadelphia Story" by Philip Barry, in which he played C.K. Dexter Haven, the Cary Grant role in the film version. Critics applauded Spacey for taking on the management of a theatre, but noted that while his acting was impressive, his skills and judgment as a producer/manager had yet to develop.
In the 2006 season, Spacey suffered a major setback with a production of Arthur Miller's "Resurrection Blues", directed by Robert Altman. Despite an all-star cast (including Matthew Modine and future "House of Cards" co-star Neve Campbell) and the pedigree of Miller's script, Spacey's decision to lure Altman to the stage proved disastrous: after a fraught rehearsal period, the play opened to a critical panning, and closed after only a few weeks. Later in the year, Spacey starred in Eugene O'Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten", along with Colm Meaney and Eve Best. The play received excellent reviews for Spacey and Best, and was transferred to Broadway in 2007. For the spring part of the 2007–08 season, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly joined Spacey as the three characters in David Mamet's 1988 play "Speed-the-Plow".
In 2009, he directed the premiere of Joe Sutton's "Complicit", with Richard Dreyfuss, David Suchet and Elizabeth McGovern. Later that year, Trevor Nunn directed Spacey in a revival of "Inherit the Wind". Spacey played defense lawyer Henry Drummond, a role that was made famous by Spencer Tracy in the 1960 film of the same name. Sam Mendes directed Spacey in Shakespeare's "Richard III"; Spacey played the title role. The show began in June 2011, commencing a worldwide tour culminating in New York in early 2012. In March 2014, it was announced that Spacey would star in a one-man play at the Old Vic to celebrate his ten years as artistic director. He took on the part of Clarence Darrow in the play.
In January 2016 it was announced that Relativity Media, which was just emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, had acquired Trigger Street Productions and that Spacey would become chairman of Relativity Studios while Dana Brunetti would become the studio's president. Spacey called the move "an incredible opportunity to make great entertainment" and said he considered it the "next evolution in my career". However, when the paperwork for the studio was filed for the court, it emerged that Spacey had opted out of assuming the chairmanship of the studios, and by the end of 2016 Brunetti had also left Relativity whilst both remained executive producers on "House of Cards" and "".
Spacey's career has spanned thirty years across film, television and theater. He got his film career started in the late 1980s after small parts in Mike Nichols' films "Heartburn" (1986) and "Working Girl" (1988). In the 90s he had supporting roles in films such as "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992) opposite Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino and the black comedy film "The Ref", before being cast in the role of Roger "Verbal" Kint / Keyser Söze in 1995's "The Usual Suspects", which earned him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. That same year he a played serial killer and villain in "Se7en" opposite Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. He went on to star in noir crime drama "L.A. Confidential" (1997) alongside Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, Clint Eastwood's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (1997), and "American Beauty" (1999), for which he earned his second Academy Award, this time for Best Actor.
In the 2000s he appeared in the films "Pay It Forward" with Helen Hunt (2000), "Superman Returns" as Lex Luthor (2006), and "21" with Jim Sturgess (2008), the last of which he also produced. In 2004 he wrote, directed and starred in the biopic musical "Beyond the Sea" (2004). In 2011 he co-starred with Paul Bettany and Jeremy Irons in the drama film "Margin Call". That same year he played antagonist Dave Harken in the comedy "Horrible Bosses" with Jason Bateman, a role he reprised in the 2014 sequel film "Horrible Bosses 2". He played Doc in the 2017 film "Baby Driver" with Ansel Elgort.
From 2013–2017 he played Francis "Frank" Underwood in the Netflix series "House of Cards" alongside Robin Wright. Spacey also starred in the HBO Television film "Recount" (2008) and produced the 2006 film "Bernard and Doris".
Over his decade-spanning career, Spacey has won two Academy Awards, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award, four Screen Actors Guild Awards and a British Academy Film Award. He was nominated for a Grammy Award as well as twelve Primetime Emmy Awards. Spacey received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1999, and was named an honorary Commander and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2010 and 2015, respectively.
An article in "The Sunday Times Magazine" in 1999 stated that Spacey's "love affair with acting, and the absence of a visible partner in the life of an attractive 40-year-old, has resulted in "Esquire" magazine asserting two years ago that he must be gay". Spacey responded to the rumors by telling "Playboy" and other interviewers that he was not gay, and telling Lesley White of "The Sunday Times":I chose for a long time not to answer these questions because of the manner in which they were asked, and because I was never talking to someone I trusted, so why should I? Recently I chose to participate because it's a little hard on the people I love.
In 1999, reports suggested Spacey was dating a script supervisor named Dianne Dreyer, with their relationship possibly dating back as far as 1992. In 2000, Spacey brought Dreyer to the Academy Awards; during the acceptance speech for his Best Actor award, Spacey stated, "Dianne, thank you for teaching me about caring about the right things, and I love you."
In 2007, "Gotham" magazine quoted Spacey saying:I've never believed in pimping my personal life out for publicity. Although I might be interested in doing it, I will never do it. People can gossip all they want; they can speculate all they want. I just happened to believe that there's a separation between the public life and the private life. Everybody has the right to a private life no matter what their professions are.
Spacey's political views have been described as left-leaning and mirroring some of those possessed by his fictional character in "House of Cards". He is a Democrat and a friend of President Bill Clinton, having met Clinton before his presidency began. Spacey once described Clinton as "one of a shining light" in the political process. He additionally made a cameo appearance in the short film "President Clinton: Final Days", a light-hearted political satire produced by the Clinton Administration for the 2000 White House Correspondents Dinner.
Spacey met Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in September 2007, but never spoke to the press about their encounter. During the trip, he donated money to the Venezuelan film studio Villa del Cine. In March 2011, following Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko's crackdown on the Belarusian democracy movement, Spacey joined Jude Law in a street protest in London against Lukashenko's regime.
In October 2008, Spacey started the Kevin Spacey Foundation in the UK to encourage youth involvement in the arts. Headquartered in England and Wales, its purpose was to provide grants to individuals and organizations to help young people study the arts, particularly theatre. The charity shut down in February 2018 following sexual misconduct allegations against Spacey.
In 2018, Earl Blue, owner of the security company VIP Protective Services, claimed that Spacey had used racial slurs against his predominantly African-American staff when they were hired on the "House of Cards" set in 2012, before getting Blue fired.
On October 29, 2017, actor Anthony Rapp alleged that Spacey, while appearing intoxicated, made a sexual advance toward him in 1986, when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26. Rapp had also shared this story in a 2001 interview with "The Advocate", but Spacey's name was redacted from publication to avoid legal disputes and public outing. Spacey stated through Twitter that he did not remember the encounter, but that he owed Rapp "the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior" if he had behaved as asserted.
Fifteen others then came forward alleging similar abuse, including Boston anchorwoman Heather Unruh, who alleged that Spacey sexually assaulted her son; filmmaker Tony Montana; actor Roberto Cavazos; Richard Dreyfuss' son Harry; and eight people who worked on "House of Cards". "The Guardian" was contacted by "a number of people" who alleged that Spacey "groped and behaved in an inappropriate way with young men" as artistic director of the Old Vic.
In October 2017, Spacey came out as gay when he apologized to Rapp for allegedly making a sexual advance toward him in 1986. Spacey said, "I have had relationships with both men and women. I have loved and had romantic encounters with men throughout my life, and I choose now to live as a gay man." His decision to come out via his statement was criticized by prominent members of the gay community, including Billy Eichner, George Takei, and Wanda Sykes, as an attempt to change the subject and shift focus from Rapp's accusation, for using his own drunkenness as an excuse for making a sexual advance on a minor, and for implying a connection between being gay and preying on a minor.
In the midst of the allegations, filming was suspended on the sixth and final season of "House of Cards". The show's production company had implemented "an anonymous complaint hotline, crisis counselors, and sexual harassment legal advisors for the crew." In 2012, "someone on the crew shared a complaint about a specific remark and gesture made by Kevin Spacey. Immediate action was taken following our review of the situation and we are confident the issue was resolved promptly to the satisfaction of all involved." According to the production company, Spacey "willingly participated in a training process and since that time MRC has not been made aware of any other complaints" involving him. The show had been due to end in 2018. The season was shortened from 13 episodes to eight, and Spacey was removed from the cast and his role as executive producer.
The Gore Vidal biopic "Gore" starring Spacey, which was set to be distributed by Netflix, was canceled, and Netflix went on to sever all ties with him. Spacey was due to appear in "All the Money in the World" as industrialist J. Paul Getty; however, his scenes were cut and Christopher Plummer replaced him as Getty in reshoots. Plummer stated in reaction to his re-casting, "“It’s really not replacing [Spacey]. It’s starting all over again,” Plummer elaborated saying, "I think it’s very sad what happened to him,” Plummer who told "Vanity Fair". “Kevin is such a talented and a terrifically gifted actor, and it’s so sad. It’s such a shame. That’s all I can say, because that’s it.”
The International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences reversed its decision to honor Spacey with the 2017 International Emmy Founders Award. On November 2, 2017, "Variety" reported that his publicist Staci Wolfe and talent agency Creative Artists Agency were ending their relationships with him.
On December 24, 2018, Spacey uploaded a video entitled "Let Me Be Frank" on YouTube. In the video, Spacey – while in character as Frank Underwood, the role he had portrayed in "House of Cards" – appeared to deny the real-life allegations against him. Various celebrities criticized the video on Twitter. As of December 2019, the video has over 11 million views. A year later on December 24, 2019, Spacey posted another video titled "KTWK" to his YouTube channel, once again in-character as Underwood.
The Los Angeles District Attorney's office stated in April 2018 that it would investigate an allegation that Spacey had sexually assaulted an adult male in 1992. In July 2018, three more allegations of sexual assault against Spacey were revealed by Scotland Yard, bringing the total number of open investigations in the UK to six. In September 2018, a lawsuit filed at Los Angeles Superior Court claimed that Spacey sexually assaulted an unnamed masseur at a house in Malibu, California, in October 2016.
In December 2018, Spacey was charged with a felony for allegedly sexually assaulting journalist Heather Unruh's 18-year-old son in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in July 2016. Spacey pleaded not guilty to the charge on January 7, 2019. Unruh's son told police he was texting with his girlfriend throughout the alleged "groping" incident. Spacey's defense attorneys spent months trying to obtain copies of the texts and the phone itself. In mid-May 2019, Unruh's son's personal attorney informed the court that the cell phone in question is "missing". On June 4, 2019, the defense learned that when Unruh gave her son's cell phone to police in 2017, she admitted she had deleted some of the text messages. Later that month, her son filed a lawsuit against Spacey, claiming emotional damages. On July 5, 2019, he voluntarily dismissed the claims with prejudice.
On July 17, 2019, the criminal assault charge against Spacey was dropped by the Cape and Islands prosecutors. When the anonymous massage therapist who accused him died of cancer, the last remaining criminal case against Spacey was closed.
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K. Eric Drexler
Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955) is an American engineer best known for seminal studies of the potential of molecular nanotechnology (MNT), from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was revised and published as the book "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation" (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992.
K. Eric Drexler was strongly influenced by ideas on limits to growth in the early 1970s. During his first year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he sought out someone who was working on extraterrestrial resources. He found Gerard K. O'Neill of Princeton University, a physicist famous for his work on storage rings for particle accelerators and his landmark work on the concepts of space colonization. Drexler participated in NASA summer studies on space colonies in 1975 and 1976. He fabricated metal films a few tens of nanometers thick on a wax support to demonstrate the potentials of high performance solar sails. He was active in space politics, helping the L5 Society defeat the Moon Treaty in 1980. Besides working summers for O'Neill, building mass driver prototypes, Drexler delivered papers at the first three Space Manufacturing conferences at Princeton. The 1977 and 1979 papers were co-authored with Keith Henson, and patents were issued on both subjects, vapor phase fabrication and space radiators.
During the late 1970s, Drexler began to develop ideas about molecular nanotechnology (MNT). In 1979, he encountered Richard Feynman's provocative 1959 talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. In 1981, Drexler wrote a seminal research article, published by PNAS, "Molecular engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation". This article has continued to be cited, more than 620 times, during the following 35 years.
The term "nano-technology" had been coined by the Tokyo University of Science professor Norio Taniguchi in 1974 to describe the precision manufacture of materials with nanometer tolerances, and Drexler unknowingly used a related term in his 1986 book "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" to describe what later became known as molecular nanotechnology (MNT). In that book, he proposed the idea of a nanoscale "assembler" which would be able to build a copy of itself and of other items of arbitrary complexity. He also first published the term "grey goo" to describe what might happen if a hypothetical self-replicating molecular nanotechnology went out of control. He has subsequently tried to clarify his concerns about out-of-control self-replicators, and make the case that molecular manufacturing does not require such devices.
He is currently a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute where his focus is on superintelligence.
Drexler holds three degrees from MIT. He received his B.S. in Interdisciplinary Sciences in 1977 and his M.S. in 1979 in Astro/Aerospace Engineering with a Master's thesis titled "Design of a High Performance Solar Sail System." In 1991, he earned a Ph.D. through the MIT Media Lab (formally, the Media Arts and Sciences Section, School of Architecture and Planning) after the department of electrical engineering and computer science refused to approve Drexler's plan of study.
His Ph.D. work was the first doctoral degree on the topic of molecular nanotechnology and his thesis, "Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation," was published (with minor editing) as "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation" (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992.
Drexler was married to Christine Peterson for 21 years. The marriage ended in 2002.
In 2006, Drexler married Rosa Wang, a former investment banker who works with on improving the social capital markets.
Drexler has arranged to be cryonically preserved in the event of legal death.
Drexler's work on nanotechnology was criticized as naive by Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley in a 2001 "Scientific American" article. Smalley first argued that "fat fingers" made MNT impossible. He later argued that nanomachines would have to resemble chemical enzymes more than Drexler's assemblers and could only work in water. Drexler maintained that both were straw man arguments, and in the case of enzymes, wrote that "Prof. Klibanov wrote in 1994, ' ... using an enzyme in organic solvents eliminates several obstacles ... '" Drexler had difficulty in getting Smalley to respond, but in December 2003, Chemical and Engineering news carried a four-part debate. Ray Kurzweil disputes Smalley's arguments.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in its 2006 review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, argues that it is difficult to predict the future capabilities of nanotechnology:
Drexler is mentioned in Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel "The Diamond Age" as one of the heroes of a future world where nanotechnology is ubiquitous.
In the science fiction novel "Newton's Wake" by Ken MacLeod, a 'drexler' is a nanotech assembler of pretty much anything that can fit in the volume of the particular machine—from socks to starships.
Drexler is also mentioned in the science fiction book "Decipher" by Stel Pavlou; his book is mentioned as one of the starting points of the nanomachine construction, as well as giving a better understanding of the way carbon 60 was to be applied.
James Rollins references Drexler's "Engines of Creation" in his novel "Excavation", using his theory of a molecular machine in two sections as a possible explanation for the mysterious "Substance Z" in the story.
Drexler gets a mention in the Timothy Leary's "Design for Dying" in the "Mutation" section, briefly detailing the 8-circuit model of consciousness (pg. 91).
Drexler is mentioned in Doom Patrol #57.
Drexler is mentioned in Michael Crichton's novel "Prey" in the introduction (pg xii).
The Drexler Facility ("ドレクサー機関") of molecular nanotechnology research in Baldr Sky is named after him. The 'Assemblers' is its key invention.
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Korean War
The Korean War (in South Korean , "Korean War"; in North Korean , "Fatherland Liberation War"; 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) was a war between North Korea (with the support of China and the Soviet Union) and South Korea (with the support of the United Nations, principally from the United States). The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea.
At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States liberated Korea from imperial Japanese colonial control on 15 August 1945. After the war had ended, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel into two zones of occupation, the Soviets administered the northern half and the Americans administered the southern half. With the border set at the 38th parallel in 1948, two sovereign states were established as a result of geopolitical tensions of the Cold War (between the Soviet Union and the United States). A socialist state was established in the north under the communist leadership of Kim Il-sung and a capitalist state in the south under the anti-communist leadership of Syngman Rhee. Both governments of the two new Korean states claimed to be the sole legitimate government of all of Korea, and neither accepted the border as permanent.
The conflict escalated into warfare when North Korean military (Korean People's Army, KPA) forces—supported by the Soviet Union and China—crossed the border and advanced into South Korea on 25 June 1950. The United Nations Security Council authorized the formation of the United Nations Command and the dispatch of forces to Korea to repel what was recognized as a North Korean invasion. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel.
After the first two months of war, South Korean Army (ROKA) and the US forces rapidly dispatched to Korea were on the point of defeat. As a result, the ROKA and US troops retreated to a small area behind a defensive line known as the Pusan Perimeter. In September 1950, an amphibious UN counter-offensive was launched at Incheon, and cut off many KPA troops in South Korea. Those who escaped envelopment and capture were forced back north. UN forces invaded North Korea in October 1950 and moved rapidly towards the Yalu River—the border with China—but on 19 October 1950, Chinese forces of the People's Volunteer Army (PVA) crossed the Yalu and entered the war. The surprise Chinese intervention triggered a retreat of UN forces and Chinese forces were in South Korea by late December.
In these and subsequent battles, Seoul was captured four times, and communist forces were pushed back to positions around the 38th parallel, close to where the war started. After this the front stabilized and the last two years of fighting became a war of attrition, the war in the air, however, was never a stalemate. North Korea was subject to a massive U.S. bombing campaign. Jet fighters confronted each other in air-to-air combat for the first time in history, and Soviet pilots covertly flew in defense of their communist allies.
The fighting ended on 27 July 1953 when the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed. The agreement created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to separate North and South Korea, and allowed the return of prisoners. However, no peace treaty was ever signed, and the two Koreas are technically still at war, engaged in a frozen conflict. In April 2018, the leaders of North and South Korea met at the DMZ and agreed to work towards a treaty to formally end the Korean War.
The Korean War was among the most destructive conflicts of the modern era, with approximately 3 million war fatalities and a larger proportional civilian death toll than World War II or the Vietnam War. It incurred the destruction of virtually all of Korea's major cities, thousands of massacres by both sides (including the mass killing of tens of thousands of suspected communists by the South Korean government), and the torture and starvation of prisoners of war by the North Korean command. North Korea became among the most heavily-bombed countries in history.
In South Korea, the war is usually referred to as "625" or the "6–2–5 Upheaval" ( (), "yook-i-o dongnan"), reflecting the date of its commencement on 25 June.
In North Korea, the war is officially referred to as the "Fatherland Liberation War" ("Choguk haebang chǒnjaeng") or alternatively the ""Chosǒn" [Korean] "War"" (, "Chosǒn chǒnjaeng").
In China, the war is officially called the "War to Resist America and Aid Korea" (), although the term ""Chaoxian" (Korean) War" () is also used in unofficial contexts, along with the term ""Hán" (Korean) War" () more commonly used in regions such as Hong Kong and Macau.
In the US, the war was initially described by President Harry S. Truman as a "police action" as the United States never formally declared war on its opponents and the operation was conducted under the auspices of the United Nations. It has been sometimes referred to in the English-speaking world as "The Forgotten War" or "The Unknown War" because of the lack of public attention it received both during and after the war, relative to the global scale of World War II, which preceded it, and the subsequent angst of the Vietnam War, which succeeded it.
Imperial Japan destroyed the influence of China over Korea in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), ushering in the short-lived Korean Empire. A decade later, after defeating Imperial Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), Japan made Korea its protectorate with the Eulsa Treaty in 1905, then annexed it with the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty in 1910.
Many Korean nationalists fled the country. The Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea was founded in 1919 in Nationalist China. It failed to achieve international recognition, failed to unite nationalist groups, and had a fractious relationship with its US-based founding president, Syngman Rhee. From 1919 to 1925 and beyond, Korean communists led internal and external warfare against the Japanese.
In China, the Nationalist National Revolutionary Army and the communist People's Liberation Army (PLA) helped organize Korean refugees against the Japanese military, which had also occupied parts of China. The Nationalist-backed Koreans, led by Yi Pom-Sok, fought in the Burma Campaign (December 1941 – August 1945). The communists, led by Kim Il-sung among others, fought the Japanese in Korea and Manchuria.
At the Cairo Conference in November 1943, China, the United Kingdom and the United States all decided that "in due course Korea shall become free and independent".
At the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviet Union promised to join its allies in the Pacific War within three months of the victory in Europe. Germany officially surrendered on 8 May 1945, and the USSR declared war on Japan on 9 August 1945, three months and one day after VE day. This was also three days after the USA atomic bombing of Hiroshima. By 10 August, the Red Army had begun to occupy the northern part of the Korean Peninsula.
On the night of 10 August in Washington, US Colonels Dean Rusk and Charles H. Bonesteel III were assigned with dividing the Korean Peninsula into Soviet and US occupation zones and proposed the 38th Parallel. This was incorporated into the US General Order No. 1 which responded to the Japanese surrender on 15 August. Explaining the choice of the 38th Parallel, Rusk observed, "even though it was further north than could be realistically reached by US forces, in the event of Soviet disagreement ... we felt it important to include the capital of Korea in the area of responsibility of American troops". He noted that he was "faced with the scarcity of US forces immediately available, and time and space factors, which would make it difficult to reach very far north, before Soviet troops could enter the area". As Rusk's comments indicate, the US doubted whether the Soviet government would agree to this. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, however, maintained his wartime policy of co-operation, and on 16 August the Red Army halted at the 38th Parallel for three weeks to await the arrival of U.S. forces in the south.
On 8 September 1945, US Lieutenant General John R. Hodge arrived in Incheon to accept the Japanese surrender south of the 38th Parallel. Appointed as military governor, Hodge directly controlled South Korea as head of the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK 1945–48). He attempted to establish control by restoring Japanese colonial administrators to power, but in the face of Korean protests quickly reversed this decision. Hodge did keep in governmental positions a large number of Koreans who had directly served and collaborated with the Japanese colonial government. This presence was particularly pronounced in the Korean National Police Force, who would later suppress widespread rebellions to the ROK. The USAMGIK refused to recognize the provisional government of the short-lived People's Republic of Korea (PRK) due to its suspected Communist sympathies.
In December 1945, Korea was administered by a US-Soviet Union Joint Commission, as agreed at the Moscow Conference, with the aim of granting independence after a five-year trusteeship. The idea was not popular among Koreans and riots broke out. To contain them, the USAMGIK banned strikes on 8 December 1945 and outlawed the PRK Revolutionary Government and the PRK People's Committees on 12 December 1945. Following further large-scale civilian unrest, the USAMGIK declared martial law.
Citing the inability of the Joint Commission to make progress, the US government decided to hold an election under United Nations auspices with the aim of creating an independent Korea. The Soviet authorities and the Korean Communists refused to co-operate on the grounds it would not be fair, and many South Korean politicians boycotted it. A general election was held in the South on 10 May 1948. North Korea held parliamentary elections three months later on 25 August.
The resultant South Korean government promulgated a national political constitution on 17 July 1948, and elected Syngman Rhee as President on 20 July 1948. This election is generally considered to have been manipulated by the Rhee regime. The Republic of Korea (South Korea) was established on 15 August 1948. In the Soviet Korean Zone of Occupation, the Soviet Union agreed to the establishment a communist government led by Kim Il-sung.
The Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Korea in 1948, and US troops withdrew in 1949.
With the end of the war with Japan, the Chinese Civil War resumed in earnest between the Communists and Nationalists. While the Communists were struggling for supremacy in Manchuria, they were supported by the North Korean government with matériel and manpower. According to Chinese sources, the North Koreans donated 2,000 railway cars worth of supplies while thousands of Koreans served in the Chinese PLA during the war. North Korea also provided the Chinese Communists in Manchuria with a safe refuge for non-combatants and communications with the rest of China.
The North Korean contributions to the Chinese Communist victory were not forgotten after the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. As a token of gratitude, between 50,000 and 70,000 Korean veterans that served in the PLA were sent back along with their weapons, and they later played a significant role in the initial invasion of South Korea. China promised to support the North Koreans in the event of a war against South Korea.
After the formation of the PRC, the PRC government named the Western nations, led by the US, as the biggest threat to its national security. Basing this judgment on China's century of humiliation beginning in the mid-19th century, US support for the Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War, and the ideological struggles between revolutionaries and reactionaries, the PRC Chinese leadership believed that China would become a critical battleground in the US' crusade against Communism. As a countermeasure and to elevate China's standing among the worldwide Communist movements, the PRC leadership adopted a foreign policy that actively promoted Communist revolutions throughout territories on China's periphery.
By 1948, a large-scale North Korea-backed insurgency had broken out in the southern half of the peninsula. This was exacerbated by the ongoing undeclared border war between the Koreas, which saw division level engagements and thousands of deaths on both sides. The ROK in this time was almost entirely trained and focused in counterinsurgency, rather than conventional warfare. They were equipped and advised by a force of a few hundred American officers, who were largely successful in helping the ROKA to subdue guerrillas and hold its own against North Korean military (Korean People's Army, KPA) forces along the 38th parallel. Approximately 8,000 South Korean soldiers and police died in the insurgent war and border clashes.
The first socialist uprising occurred without direct North Korean participation, though the guerrillas still professed support for the northern government. Beginning in April 1948 on the isolated island of Jeju, the campaign saw mass arrests and repression by the South Korean government in the fight against the South Korean Labor Party, resulting in a total of 30,000 violent deaths, among them 14,373 civilians (of whom ~2,000 were killed by rebels and ~12,000 by ROK security forces). The Yeosu–Suncheon rebellion overlapped with it, as several thousand army defectors waving red flags massacred right-leaning families. This resulted in another brutal suppression by the government and between 2,976 and 3,392 deaths. By May 1949, both uprisings had been crushed.
Insurgency reignited in the spring of 1949, when attacks by guerrillas in the mountainous regions (buttressed by army defectors and North Korean agents) increased. Insurgent activity peaked in late 1949 as the ROKA engaged so-called People's Guerrilla Units. Organized and armed by the North Korean government, and backed up by 2,400 KPA commandos who had infiltrated through the border, these guerrillas launched a large offensive in September aimed at undermining the South Korean government and preparing the country for the KPA's arrival in force. This offensive failed. However, by this point the guerrillas were firmly entrenched in the Taebaek-san region of the North Gyeongsang Province (around Taegu), as well as in the border areas of the Gangwon Province.
While the insurgency was ongoing, the ROKA and KPA engaged in multiple battalion-sized battles along the border, starting in May 1949. Serious border clashes between South and North continued on 4 August 1949, when thousands of North Korean troops attacked South Korean troops occupying territory north of the 38th Parallel. The 2nd and 18th ROK Infantry Regiments repulsed initial attacks in Kuksa-bong (above the 38th Parallel) and Ch'ungmu, and at the end of the clashes ROK troops were "completely routed". Border incidents decreased significantly by the start of 1950.
Meanwhile, counterinsurgency efforts in the South Korean interior intensified; persistent operations, paired with worsening weather conditions, eventually denied the guerrillas sanctuary and wore away their fighting strength. North Korea responded by sending more troops to link up with existing insurgents and build more partisan cadres; the number of North Korean infiltrators had reached 3,000 men in 12 units by the start of 1950, but all of these units were destroyed or scattered by the ROKA. On 1 October 1949, the ROKA launched a three-pronged assault on the insurgents in South Cholla and Taegu. By March 1950, the ROKA claimed 5,621 guerrillas killed or captured and 1,066 small arms seized. This operation crippled the insurgency. Soon after, the North Koreans made two final attempts to keep the uprising active, sending two battalion-sized units of infiltrators under the commands of Kimg Sang-ho and Kim Moo-hyon. The first battalion was annihilated to a man over the course of several engagements by the ROKA 8th Division. The second battalion was annihilated by a two-battalion hammer-and-anvil maneuver by units of the ROKA 6th Division, resulting in a loss toll of 584 KPA guerrillas (480 killed, 104 captured) and 69 ROKA troops killed, plus 184 wounded. By spring of 1950, guerrilla activity had mostly subsided; the border, too, was calm.
By 1949, South Korean and US military actions had reduced the active number of indigenous communist guerrillas in the South from 5,000 to 1,000. However, Kim Il-sung believed that widespread uprisings had weakened the South Korean military and that a North Korean invasion would be welcomed by much of the South Korean population. Kim began seeking Stalin's support for an invasion in March 1949, traveling to Moscow to attempt to persuade him.
Stalin initially did not think the time was right for a war in Korea. PLA forces were still embroiled in the Chinese Civil War, while US forces remained stationed in South Korea. By spring 1950, he believed that the strategic situation had changed: PLA forces under Mao Zedong had secured final victory in China, US forces had withdrawn from Korea, and the Soviets had detonated their first nuclear bomb, breaking the US atomic monopoly. As the US had not directly intervened to stop the communist victory in China, Stalin calculated that they would be even less willing to fight in Korea, which had much less strategic significance. The Soviets had also cracked the codes used by the US to communicate with their embassy in Moscow, and reading these dispatches convinced Stalin that Korea did not have the importance to the US that would warrant a nuclear confrontation. Stalin began a more aggressive strategy in Asia based on these developments, including promising economic and military aid to China through the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance.
In April 1950, Stalin gave Kim permission to attack the government in the South under the condition that Mao would agree to send reinforcements if needed. For Kim, this was the fulfillment of his goal to unite Korea after its division by foreign powers. Stalin made it clear that Soviet forces would not openly engage in combat, to avoid a direct war with the US. Kim met with Mao in May 1950. Mao was concerned the US would intervene but agreed to support the North Korean invasion. China desperately needed the economic and military aid promised by the Soviets. However, Mao sent more ethnic Korean PLA veterans to Korea and promised to move an army closer to the Korean border. Once Mao's commitment was secured, preparations for war accelerated.
Soviet generals with extensive combat experience from the Second World War were sent to North Korea as the Soviet Advisory Group. These generals completed the plans for the attack by May. The original plans called for a skirmish to be initiated in the Ongjin Peninsula on the west coast of Korea. The North Koreans would then launch a counterattack that would capture Seoul and encircle and destroy the ROK. The final stage would involve destroying South Korean government remnants and capturing the rest of South Korea, including the ports.
On 7 June 1950, Kim Il-sung called for a Korea-wide election on 5–8 August 1950 and a consultative conference in Haeju on 15–17 June 1950. On 11 June, the North sent three diplomats to the South as a peace overture that Rhee rejected outright. On 21 June, Kim Il-Sung revised his war plan to involve a general attack across the 38th Parallel, rather than a limited operation in the Ongjin Peninsula. Kim was concerned that South Korean agents had learned about the plans and that South Korean forces were strengthening their defenses. Stalin agreed to this change of plan.
While these preparations were underway in the North, there were frequent clashes along the 38th Parallel, especially at Kaesong and Ongjin, many initiated by the South. The ROK was being trained by the US Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG). On the eve of war, KMAG commander General William Lynn Roberts voiced utmost confidence in the ROK and boasted that any North Korean invasion would merely provide "target practice". For his part, Syngman Rhee repeatedly expressed his desire to conquer the North, including when US diplomat John Foster Dulles visited Korea on 18 June.
Although some South Korean and US intelligence officers predicted an attack from the North, similar predictions had been made before and nothing had happened. The Central Intelligence Agency noted the southward movement by the KPA, but assessed this as a "defensive measure" and concluded an invasion was "unlikely". On 23 June, UN observers inspected the border and did not detect that war was imminent.
Throughout 1949 and 1950, the Soviets continued arming North Korea. After the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, ethnic Korean units in the PLA were sent to North Korea. Chinese involvement was extensive from the beginning, building on previous collaboration between the Chinese and Korean communists during the Chinese Civil War. In the fall of 1949, two PLA divisions composed mainly of Korean-Chinese troops (the 164th and 166th) entered North Korea, followed by smaller units throughout the rest of 1949; these troops brought with them not only their experience and training, but their weapons and other equipment, changing little but their uniforms. The reinforcement of the KPA with PLA veterans continued into 1950, with the 156th division and several other units of the former Fourth Field Army arriving (also with their equipment) in February; the PLA 156th Division was reorganized as the KPA 7th Division. By mid-1950, between 50,000 and 70,000 former PLA troops had entered North Korea, forming a significant part of the KPA's strength on the eve of the war's beginning. Several generals, such as Lee Kwon-mu, were PLA veterans born to ethnic Koreans in China. The combat veterans and equipment from China, the tanks, artillery and aircraft supplied by the Soviets, and rigorous training increased North Korea's military superiority over the South, armed by the US military with mostly small arms, but no heavy weaponry such as tanks. While older histories of the conflict often referred to these ethnic Korean PLA veterans as being sent from northern Korea to fight in the Chinese Civil War before being sent back, recent Chinese archival sources studied by Kim Donggill indicate that this was not the case. Rather, the soldiers were indigenous to China (part of China's longstanding ethnic Korean community) and were recruited to the PLA in the same way as any other Chinese citizen.
According to the first official census in 1949 the population of North Korea numbered 9,620,000, and by mid-1950 North Korean forces numbered between 150,000 and 200,000 troops, organized into 10 infantry divisions, one tank division, and one air force division, with 210 fighter planes and 280 tanks, who captured scheduled objectives and territory, among them Kaesong, Chuncheon, Uijeongbu and Ongjin. Their forces included 274 T-34-85 tanks, 200 artillery pieces, 110 attack bombers, and some 150 Yak fighter planes, and 35 reconnaissance aircraft. In addition to the invasion force, the North had 114 fighters, 78 bombers, 105 T-34-85 tanks, and some 30,000 soldiers stationed in reserve in North Korea. Although each navy consisted of only several small warships, the North and South Korean navies fought in the war as sea-borne artillery for their armies.
In contrast, the South Korean population was estimated at 20 million and its army was unprepared and ill-equipped. As of 25 June 1950 the ROK had 98,000 soldiers (65,000 combat, 33,000 support), no tanks (they had been requested from the US military, but requests were denied), and a 22-plane air force comprising 12 liaison-type and 10 AT6 advanced-trainer airplanes. Large US garrisons and air forces were in Japan, but only 200–300 US troops were in Korea.
At dawn on Sunday, 25 June 1950, the KPA crossed the 38th Parallel behind artillery fire. The KPA justified its assault with the claim that ROK troops attacked first and that the KPA were aiming to arrest and execute the "bandit traitor Syngman Rhee". Fighting began on the strategic Ongjin Peninsula in the west. There were initial South Korean claims that the 17th Regiment captured the city of Haeju, and this sequence of events has led some scholars to argue that the South Koreans fired first.
Whoever fired the first shots in Ongjin, within an hour, KPA forces attacked all along the 38th Parallel. The KPA had a combined arms force including tanks supported by heavy artillery. The ROK had no tanks, anti-tank weapons or heavy artillery to stop such an attack. In addition, the South Koreans committed their forces in a piecemeal fashion and these were routed in a few days.
On 27 June, Rhee evacuated from Seoul with some of the government. On 28 June, at 2 am, the ROK blew up the Hangang Bridge across the Han River in an attempt to stop the KPA. The bridge was detonated while 4,000 refugees were crossing it and hundreds were killed. Destroying the bridge also trapped many ROK units north of the Han River. In spite of such desperate measures, Seoul fell that same day. A number of South Korean National Assemblymen remained in Seoul when it fell, and forty-eight subsequently pledged allegiance to the North.
On 28 June, Rhee ordered the massacre of suspected political opponents in his own country.
In five days, the ROK, which had 95,000 men on 25 June, was down to less than 22,000 men. In early July, when US forces arrived, what was left of the ROK were placed under US operational command of the United Nations Command.
The Truman administration was unprepared for the invasion. Korea was not included in the strategic Asian Defense Perimeter outlined by United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Truman himself was at his home in Independence, Missouri. Military strategists were more concerned with the security of Europe against the Soviet Union than East Asia. At the same time, the administration was worried that a war in Korea could quickly widen into another world war should the Chinese or Soviets decide to get involved.
While there was initial hesitance by some in the US government to get involved in the war, considerations about Japan played a part in the ultimate decision to engage on behalf of South Korea. Especially after the fall of China to the Communists, US experts on East Asia saw Japan as the critical counterweight to the Soviet Union and China in the region. While there was no US policy dealing with South Korea directly as a national interest, its proximity to Japan increased the importance of South Korea. Said Kim: "The recognition that the security of Japan required a non-hostile Korea led directly to President Truman's decision to intervene ... The essential point ... is that the American response to the North Korean attack stemmed from considerations of U.S. policy toward Japan."
Another major consideration was the possible Soviet reaction in the event that the US intervened. The Truman administration was fearful that a war in Korea was a diversionary assault that would escalate to a general war in Europe once the United States committed in Korea. At the same time, "[t]here was no suggestion from anyone that the United Nations or the United States could back away from [the conflict]". Yugoslavia—a possible Soviet target because of the Tito-Stalin Split—was vital to the defense of Italy and Greece, and the country was first on the list of the National Security Council's post-North Korea invasion list of "chief danger spots". Truman believed if aggression went unchecked, a chain reaction would be initiated that would marginalize the UN and encourage Communist aggression elsewhere. The UN Security Council approved the use of force to help the South Koreans, and the US immediately began using what air and naval forces that were in the area to that end. The Truman administration still refrained from committing on the ground because some advisers believed the North Koreans could be stopped by air and naval power alone.
The Truman administration was still uncertain if the attack was a ploy by the Soviet Union or just a test of US resolve. The decision to commit ground troops became viable when a communiqué was received on 27 June indicating the Soviet Union would not move against US forces in Korea. The Truman administration now believed it could intervene in Korea without undermining its commitments elsewhere.
On 25 June 1950, the United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned the North Korean invasion of South Korea, with UN Security Council Resolution 82. The Soviet Union, a veto-wielding power, had boycotted the Council meetings since January 1950, protesting that the Taiwanese "Republic of China" and not the mainland "People's Republic of China" held a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. After debating the matter, the Security Council, on 27 June 1950, published Resolution 83 recommending member states provide military assistance to the Republic of Korea. On 27 June President Truman ordered US air and sea forces to help South Korea. On 4 July the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister accused the US of starting armed intervention on behalf of South Korea.
The Soviet Union challenged the legitimacy of the war for several reasons. The ROK intelligence upon which Resolution 83 was based came from US Intelligence; North Korea was not invited as a sitting temporary member of the UN, which violated UN Charter Article 32; and the fighting was beyond the UN Charter's scope, because the initial north–south border fighting was classed as a civil war. Because the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time, legal scholars posited that deciding upon an action of this type required the unanimous vote of all the five permanent members including the Soviet Union.
Within days of the invasion, masses of ROK soldiers—of dubious loyalty to the Syngman Rhee regime—were retreating southwards or defecting en masse to the northern side, the KPA.
As soon as word of the attack was received, Acheson informed President Truman that the North Koreans had invaded South Korea. Truman and Acheson discussed a US invasion response and agreed that the US was obligated to act, paralleling the North Korean invasion with Adolf Hitler's aggressions in the 1930s, with the conclusion being that the mistake of appeasement must not be repeated. Several US industries were mobilized to supply materials, labor, capital, production facilities, and other services necessary to support the military objectives of the Korean War. However, President Truman later acknowledged that he believed fighting the invasion was essential to the US goal of the global containment of communism as outlined in the National Security Council Report 68 (NSC 68) (declassified in 1975):
In August 1950, the President and the Secretary of State obtained the consent of Congress to appropriate $12 billion for military action in Korea.
Because of the extensive defense cuts and the emphasis placed on building a nuclear bomber force, none of the services were in a position to make a robust response with conventional military strength. General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was faced with re-organizing and deploying a US military force that was a shadow of its World War II counterpart.
Acting on Secretary of State Acheson's recommendation, President Truman ordered Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan General Douglas MacArthur to transfer matériel to the South Korean military while giving air cover to the evacuation of US nationals. The President disagreed with advisers who recommended unilateral US bombing of the North Korean forces, and ordered the US Seventh Fleet to protect the Republic of China (Taiwan), whose government asked to fight in Korea. The United States denied Taiwan's request for combat, lest it provoke a PRC retaliation. Because the United States had sent the Seventh Fleet to "neutralize" the Taiwan Strait, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai criticized both the UN and US initiatives as "armed aggression on Chinese territory".
The Battle of Osan, the first significant US engagement of the Korean War, involved the 540-soldier Task Force Smith, which was a small forward element of the 24th Infantry Division which had been flown in from Japan. On 5 July 1950, Task Force Smith attacked the KPA at Osan but without weapons capable of destroying the KPA tanks. The KPA defeated the US soldiers; the result was 180 American dead, wounded, or taken prisoner. The KPA progressed southwards, pushing back US forces at Pyongtaek, Chonan, and Chochiwon, forcing the 24th Division's retreat to Taejeon, which the KPA captured in the Battle of Taejon; the 24th Division suffered 3,602 dead and wounded and 2,962 captured, including its commander, Major General William F. Dean.
By August, the KPA steadily pushed back the ROK and the Eighth United States Army southwards. The impact of the Truman administration's defense budget cutbacks were now keenly felt, as US troops fought a series of costly rearguard actions. Facing a veteran and well led KPA force, and lacking sufficient anti-tank weapons, artillery or armor, the Americans retreated and the KPA advanced down the Korean Peninsula. During their advance, the KPA purged South Korea's intelligentsia by killing civil servants and intellectuals. On 20 August, General MacArthur warned North Korean leader Kim Il-sung was responsible for the KPA's atrocities. By September, UN forces were hemmed into a small corner of southeast Korea, near Pusan. This perimeter enclosed about 10% of Korea, in a line partially defined by the Nakdong River.
Although Kim's early successes led him to predict he would end the war by the end of August, Chinese leaders were more pessimistic. To counter a possible US deployment, Zhou Enlai secured a Soviet commitment to have the Soviet Union support Chinese forces with air cover, and deployed 260,000 soldiers along the Korean border, under the command of Gao Gang. Zhou commanded Chai Chengwen to conduct a topographical survey of Korea, and directed Lei Yingfu, Zhou's military advisor in Korea, to analyze the military situation in Korea. Lei concluded that MacArthur would most likely attempt a landing at Incheon. After conferring with Mao that this would be MacArthur's most likely strategy, Zhou briefed Soviet and North Korean advisers of Lei's findings, and issued orders to PLA commanders deployed on the Korean border to prepare for US naval activity in the Korea Strait.
In the resulting Battle of Pusan Perimeter (August–September 1950), the UN forces withstood KPA attacks meant to capture the city at the Naktong Bulge, P'ohang-dong, and Taegu. The United States Air Force (USAF) interrupted KPA logistics with 40 daily ground support sorties that destroyed 32 bridges, halting most daytime road and rail traffic. KPA forces were forced to hide in tunnels by day and move only at night. To deny matériel to the KPA, the USAF destroyed logistics depots, petroleum refineries, and harbors, while the US Navy air forces attacked transport hubs. Consequently, the over-extended KPA could not be supplied throughout the south. On 27 August, 67th Fighter Squadron aircraft mistakenly attacked facilities in Chinese territory and the Soviet Union called the UN Security Council's attention to China's complaint about the incident. The US proposed that a commission of India and Sweden determine what the US should pay in compensation but the Soviets vetoed the US proposal.
Meanwhile, US garrisons in Japan continually dispatched soldiers and matériel to reinforce defenders in the Pusan Perimeter. Tank battalions deployed to Korea directly from the US mainland from the port of San Francisco to the port of Pusan, the largest Korean port. By late August, the Pusan Perimeter had some 500 medium tanks battle-ready. In early September 1950, UN forces outnumbered the KPA 180,000 to 100,000 soldiers.
Against the rested and re-armed Pusan Perimeter defenders and their reinforcements, the KPA were undermanned and poorly supplied; unlike the UN forces, they lacked naval and air support. To relieve the Pusan Perimeter, General MacArthur recommended an amphibious landing at Incheon, near Seoul and well over behind the KPA lines. On 6 July, he ordered Major General Hobart R. Gay, commander of the US 1st Cavalry Division, to plan the division's amphibious landing at Incheon; on 12–14 July, the 1st Cavalry Division embarked from Yokohama, Japan, to reinforce the 24th Infantry Division inside the Pusan Perimeter.
Soon after the war began, General MacArthur began planning a landing at Incheon, but the Pentagon opposed him. When authorized, he activated a combined US Army and Marine Corps, and ROK force. US X Corps, led by Major General Edward Almond, consisted of 40,000 men of the 1st Marine Division, the 7th Infantry Division and around 8,600 ROK soldiers. By 15 September, the amphibious assault force faced few KPA defenders at Incheon: military intelligence, psychological warfare, guerrilla reconnaissance, and protracted bombardment facilitated a relatively light battle. However, the bombardment destroyed most of the city of Incheon.
On 16 September Eighth Army began its breakout from the Pusan Perimeter. "Task Force Lynch", 3rd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, and two 70th Tank Battalion units (Charlie Company and the Intelligence–Reconnaissance Platoon) advanced through of KPA territory to join the 7th Infantry Division at Osan on 27 September. X Corps rapidly defeated the KPA defenders around Seoul, thus threatening to trap the main KPA force in Southern Korea. On 18 September, Stalin dispatched General H. M. Zakharov to North Korea to advise Kim Il-sung to halt his offensive around the Pusan perimeter and to redeploy his forces to defend Seoul. Chinese commanders were not briefed on North Korean troop numbers or operational plans. As the overall commander of Chinese forces, Zhou Enlai suggested that the North Koreans should attempt to eliminate the UN forces at Incheon only if they had reserves of at least 100,000 men; otherwise, he advised the North Koreans to withdraw their forces north.
On 25 September, Seoul was recaptured by UN forces. US air raids caused heavy damage to the KPA, destroying most of its tanks and much of its artillery. KPA troops in the south, instead of effectively withdrawing north, rapidly disintegrated, leaving Pyongyang vulnerable. During the general retreat only 25,000 to 30,000 KPA soldiers managed to reach the KPA lines. On 27 September, Stalin convened an emergency session of the Politburo, in which he condemned the incompetence of the KPA command and held Soviet military advisers responsible for the defeat.
On 27 September, MacArthur received the top secret National Security Council Memorandum 81/1 from Truman reminding him that operations north of the 38th Parallel were authorized only if "at the time of such operation there was no entry into North Korea by major Soviet or Chinese Communist forces, no announcements of intended entry, nor a threat to counter our operations militarily". On 29 September MacArthur restored the government of the Republic of Korea under Syngman Rhee. On 30 September, US Defense Secretary George Marshall sent an eyes-only message to MacArthur: "We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel." During October, the South Korean police executed people who were suspected to be sympathetic to North Korea, and similar massacres were carried out until early 1951. The Joint
Chiefs of Staff on 27 September sent to General MacArthur a comprehensive directive to govern his future actions: the directive stated that the primary goal was the destruction of the KPA, with unification of the Korean Peninsula under Rhee as a secondary objective "if possible"; the Joint Chiefs added that this objective was dependent on whether or not the Chinese and Soviets would intervene, and was subject to changing conditions.
On 30 September, Zhou Enlai warned the US that China was prepared to intervene in Korea if the US crossed the 38th Parallel. Zhou attempted to advise KPA commanders on how to conduct a general withdrawal by using the same tactics that allowed Chinese communist forces to successfully escape Chiang Kai-shek's Encirclement Campaigns in the 1930s, but by some accounts KPA commanders did not use these tactics effectively. Historian Bruce Cumings argues, however, that the KPA's rapid withdrawal was strategic, with troops melting into the mountains from where they could launch guerrilla raids on the UN forces spread out on the coasts.
By 1 October 1950, the UN Command repelled the KPA northwards past the 38th Parallel; the ROK advanced after them, into North Korea. MacArthur made a statement demanding the KPA's unconditional surrender. Six days later, on 7 October, with UN authorization, the UN Command forces followed the ROK forces northwards. The X Corps landed at Wonsan (in southeastern North Korea) and Riwon (in northeastern North Korea) on 26 October, but these cities had already been captured by ROK forces. The Eighth US Army drove up western Korea and captured Pyongyang on 19 October 1950. The 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team made their first of two combat jumps during the Korean War on 20 October 1950 at Sunchon and Sukchon. The mission was to cut the road north going to China, preventing North Korean leaders from escaping from Pyongyang; and to rescue US prisoners of war. At month's end, UN forces held 135,000 KPA prisoners of war. As they neared the Sino-Korean border, the UN forces in the west were divided from those in the east by of mountainous terrain. In addition to the 135,000 captured, the KPA had also suffered some 200,000 men killed or wounded for a total of 335,000 casualties since the end of June 1950, and had lost 313 tanks (mostly T-34/85 models). A mere 25,000 KPA regulars retreated across the 38th Parallel, as their military had entirely collapsed. The U.N. forces on the peninsula numbered 229,722 combat troops (including 125,126 Americans and 82,786 South Koreans), 119,559 rear area troops, and 36,667 U.S. Air Force personnel.
Taking advantage of the UN Command's strategic momentum against the communists, General MacArthur believed it necessary to extend the Korean War into China to destroy depots supplying the North Korean war effort. President Truman disagreed, and ordered caution at the Sino-Korean border.
From the beginning of the conflict, the People's Republic of China had been preparing to invade Korea if they deemed it necessary. On 30 June 1950, five days after the outbreak of the war, Zhou Enlai, premier of the PRC and vice-chairman of the Central Military Committee of the CCP (CMCC), decided to send a group of Chinese military intelligence personnel to North Korea to establish better communications with Kim II Sung as well as to collect first-hand materials on the fighting. One week later, on 7 July, Zhou and Mao chaired a conference discussing military preparations for the Korean Conflict. Another conference took place on 10 July. Here it was decided that the Thirteenth Army Corps under the Fourth Field Army of the PLA, one of the best trained and equipped units in China, would be immediately transformed into the Northeastern Border Defense Army (NEBDA) to prepare for "an intervention in the Korean War if necessary." On 13 July the CMCC formally issued the order to establish the NEBDA, appointing Deng Hua, the commander of the Fifteenth Army Corps and one of the most talented commanders of the Chinese Civil War, to coordinate all preparation efforts.
On 20 August 1950, Premier Zhou Enlai informed the UN that "Korea is China's neighbor... The Chinese people cannot but be concerned about a solution of the Korean question". Thus, through neutral-country diplomats, China warned that in safeguarding Chinese national security, they would intervene against the UN Command in Korea. President Truman interpreted the communication as "a bald attempt to blackmail the UN", and dismissed it. Mao ordered that his troops should be ready for action by the end of August. Stalin, by contrast, was reluctant to escalate the war with a Chinese intervention.
On 1 October 1950, the day that UN troops crossed the 38th Parallel, the Soviet ambassador forwarded a telegram from Stalin to Mao and Zhou requesting that China send five to six divisions into Korea, and Kim Il-sung sent frantic appeals to Mao for Chinese military intervention. At the same time, Stalin made it clear that Soviet forces themselves would not directly intervene.
In a series of emergency meetings that lasted from 2 to 5 October, Chinese leaders debated whether to send Chinese troops into Korea. There was considerable resistance among many leaders, including senior military leaders, to confronting the US in Korea. Mao strongly supported intervention, and Zhou was one of the few Chinese leaders who firmly supported him. After Lin Biao politely refused Mao's offer to command Chinese forces in Korea (citing his upcoming medical treatment), Mao decided that Peng Dehuai would be the commander of the Chinese forces in Korea after Peng agreed to support Mao's position. Mao then asked Peng to speak in favor of intervention to the rest of the Chinese leaders. After Peng made the case that if US troops conquered Korea and reached the Yalu they might cross it and invade China, the Politburo agreed to intervene in Korea. On 4 August 1950, with a planned invasion of Taiwan aborted due to the heavy US naval presence, Mao reported to the Politburo that he would intervene in Korea when the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Taiwan invasion force was reorganized into the PLA North East Frontier Force. On 8 October 1950, Mao redesignated the PLA North East Frontier Force as the People's Volunteer Army (PVA).
To enlist Stalin's support, Zhou and a Chinese delegation arrived in Moscow on 10 October, at which point they flew to Stalin's home on the Black Sea. There they conferred with the top Soviet leadership, which included Joseph Stalin as well as Vyacheslav Molotov, Lavrentiy Beria and Georgy Malenkov. Stalin initially agreed to send military equipment and ammunition, but warned Zhou that the Soviet Air Force would need two or three months to prepare any operations. In a subsequent meeting, Stalin told Zhou that he would only provide China with equipment on a credit basis, and that the Soviet Air Force would only operate over Chinese airspace, and only after an undisclosed period of time. Stalin did not agree to send either military equipment or air support until March 1951. Mao did not find Soviet air support especially useful, as the fighting was going to take place on the south side of the Yalu. Soviet shipments of matériel, when they did arrive, were limited to small quantities of trucks, grenades, machine guns, and the like.
Immediately on his return to Beijing on 18 October 1950, Zhou met with Mao Zedong, Peng Dehuai and Gao Gang, and the group ordered two hundred thousand PVA troops to enter North Korea, which they did on 19 October. UN aerial reconnaissance had difficulty sighting PVA units in daytime, because their march and bivouac discipline minimized aerial detection. The PVA marched "dark-to-dark" (19:00–03:00), and aerial camouflage (concealing soldiers, pack animals, and equipment) was deployed by 05:30. Meanwhile, daylight advance parties scouted for the next bivouac site. During daylight activity or marching, soldiers were to remain motionless if an aircraft appeared, until it flew away; PVA officers were under order to shoot security violators. Such battlefield discipline allowed a three-division army to march the from An-tung, Manchuria, to the combat zone in some 19 days. Another division night-marched a circuitous mountain route, averaging daily for 18 days.
Meanwhile, on 15 October 1950, President Truman and General MacArthur met at Wake Island. This meeting was much publicized because of the General's discourteous refusal to meet the President on the continental United States. To President Truman, MacArthur speculated there was little risk of Chinese intervention in Korea, and that the PRC's opportunity for aiding the KPA had lapsed. He believed the PRC had some 300,000 soldiers in Manchuria, and some 100,000–125,000 soldiers at the Yalu River. He further concluded that, although half of those forces might cross south, "if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang, there would be the greatest slaughter" without air force protection.
After secretly crossing the Yalu River on 19 October, the PVA 13th Army Group launched the First Phase Offensive on 25 October, attacking the advancing UN forces near the Sino-Korean border. This military decision made solely by China changed the attitude of the Soviet Union. Twelve days after PVA troops entered the war, Stalin allowed the Soviet Air Force to provide air cover, and supported more aid to China. After inflicting heavy losses on the ROK II Corps at the Battle of Onjong, the first confrontation between Chinese and US military occurred on 1 November 1950. Deep in North Korea, thousands of soldiers from the PVA 39th Army encircled and attacked the US 8th Cavalry Regiment with three-prong assaults—from the north, northwest, and west—and overran the defensive position flanks in the Battle of Unsan. The surprise assault resulted in the UN forces retreating back to the Ch'ongch'on River, while the PVA unexpectedly disappeared into mountain hideouts following victory. It is unclear why the Chinese did not press the attack and follow up their victory.
The UN Command, however, were unconvinced that the Chinese had openly intervened because of the sudden PVA withdrawal. On 24 November, the Home-by-Christmas Offensive was launched with the US Eighth Army advancing in northwest Korea, while US X Corps attacked along the Korean east coast. But the PVA were waiting in ambush with their Second Phase Offensive, which they executed at two sectors: in the East at the Chosin Reservoir and in the Western sector at Ch'ongch'on River.
On 13 November, Mao appointed Zhou Enlai the overall commander and coordinator of the war effort, with Peng as field commander. On 25 November on the Korean western front, the PVA 13th Army Group attacked and overran the ROK II Corps at the Battle of the Ch'ongch'on River, and then inflicted heavy losses on the US 2nd Infantry Division on the UN forces' right flank. Believing that they could not hold against the PVA the Eighth Army began to retreat from North Korea crossing the 38th Parallel in mid-December. UN morale hit rock bottom when Lieutenant General Walton Walker, commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, was killed on 23 December 1950 in an automobile accident.
In the east on 27 November the PVA 9th Army Group initiated the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. Here the UN forces fared comparatively better: like the Eighth Army the surprise attack also forced X Corps to retreat from northeast Korea, but they were in the process able to breakout from the attempted encirclement by the PVA and execute a successful tactical withdrawal. X Corps managed to establish a defensive perimeter at the port city of Hungnam on 11 December and were able to evacuate by 24 December in order to reinforce the badly depleted US Eighth Army to the south. During the evacuation, about 193 shiploads of UN forces and matériel (approximately 105,000 soldiers, 98,000 civilians, 17,500 vehicles, and 350,000 tons of supplies) were evacuated to Pusan. The SS "Meredith Victory" was noted for evacuating 14,000 refugees, the largest rescue operation by a single ship, even though it was designed to hold 12 passengers. Before escaping, the UN forces razed most of Hungnam city, especially the port facilities. On 16 December 1950, President Truman declared a national state of emergency with Presidential Proclamation No. 2914, 3 C.F.R. 99 (1953), which remained in force until 14 September 1978. The next day, 17 December 1950, Kim Il-sung was deprived of the right of command of KPA by China.
China justified its entry into the war as a response to "American aggression in the guise of the UN". Later, the Chinese claimed that US bombers had violated PRC national airspace on three separate occasions and attacked Chinese targets before China intervened.
With Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway assuming the command of the US Eighth Army on 26 December, the PVA and the KPA launched their Third Phase Offensive (also known as the "Chinese New Year's Offensive") on New Year's Eve of 1950/51. Utilizing night attacks in which UN fighting positions were encircled and then assaulted by numerically superior troops who had the element of surprise, the attacks were accompanied by loud trumpets and gongs, which fulfilled the double purpose of facilitating tactical communication and mentally disorienting the enemy. UN forces initially had no familiarity with this tactic, and as a result some soldiers panicked, abandoning their weapons and retreating to the south. The offensive overwhelmed UN forces, allowing the PVA and KPA to capture Seoul for the second time on 4 January 1951. Following this, the CPV party committee issued orders regarding tasks during rest and reorganization on 8 January 1951, outlining Chinese war goals. The orders read: "the central issue is for the whole party and army to overcome difficulties ... to improve tactics and skills. When the next campaign starts ... we will annihilate all enemies and liberate all Korea." In his telegram to Peng on 14 January, Mao stressed the importance of preparing for "the last battle" in the spring in order to "fundamentally resolve the [Korean] issue."
These setbacks prompted General MacArthur to consider using nuclear weapons against the Chinese or North Korean interiors, with the intention that radioactive fallout zones would interrupt the Chinese supply chains. However, upon the arrival of the charismatic General Ridgway, the "esprit de corps" of the bloodied Eighth Army immediately began to revive.
UN forces retreated to Suwon in the west, Wonju in the center, and the territory north of Samcheok in the east, where the battlefront stabilized and held. The PVA had outrun its logistics capability and thus were unable to press on beyond Seoul as food, ammunition, and matériel were carried nightly, on foot and bicycle, from the border at the Yalu River to the three battle lines. In late January, upon finding that the PVA had abandoned their battle lines, General Ridgway ordered a reconnaissance-in-force, which became Operation Thunderbolt (25 January 1951). A full-scale advance followed, which fully exploited the UN's air superiority, concluding with the UN forces reaching the Han River and recapturing Wonju.
Following the failure of ceasefire negotiations in January, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 498 on 1 February, condemning the PRC as an aggressor, and called upon its forces to withdraw from Korea.
In early February, the ROK 11th Division ran the operation to destroy the guerrillas and their sympathizer citizens in Southern Korea. During the operation, the division and police conducted the Geochang massacre and Sancheong-Hamyang massacre. In mid-February, the PVA counterattacked with the Fourth Phase Offensive and achieved initial victory at Hoengseong. But the offensive was soon blunted by US IX Corps at Chipyong-ni in the center. The US 23rd Regimental Combat Team and the French Battalion fought a short but desperate battle that broke the attack's momentum. The battle is sometimes known as the "Gettysburg of the Korean War": 5,600 South Korean, U.S., and French troops were surrounded on all sides by 25,000 PVA. UN forces had previously retreated in the face of large PVA/KPA forces instead of getting cut off, but this time they stood and fought, and won.
In the last two weeks of February 1951, "Operation Thunderbolt" was followed by Operation Killer, carried out by the revitalized Eighth Army. It was a full-scale, battlefront-length attack staged for maximum exploitation of firepower to kill as many KPA and PVA troops as possible. Operation Killer concluded with US I Corps re-occupying the territory south of the Han River, and IX Corps capturing Hoengseong. On 7 March 1951, the Eighth Army attacked with Operation Ripper, expelling the PVA and the KPA from Seoul on 14 March 1951. This was the fourth and final conquest of the city in a year's time, leaving it a ruin; the 1.5 million pre-war population was down to 200,000, and people were suffering from severe food shortages.
On 1 March 1951, Mao sent a cable to Stalin emphasizing the difficulties faced by Chinese forces and the need for air cover, especially over supply lines. Apparently impressed by the Chinese war effort, Stalin agreed to supply two air force divisions, three anti-aircraft divisions, and six thousand trucks. PVA troops in Korea continued to suffer severe logistical problems throughout the war. In late April Peng Dehuai sent his deputy, Hong Xuezhi, to brief Zhou Enlai in Beijing. What Chinese soldiers feared, Hong said, was not the enemy, but having no food, bullets, or trucks to transport them to the rear when they were wounded. Zhou attempted to respond to the PVA's logistical concerns by increasing Chinese production and improving supply methods, but these efforts were never sufficient. At the same time, large-scale air defense training programs were carried out, and the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) began participating in the war from September 1951 onward. The Fourth Phase Offensive had catastrophically failed, in contrast to the success of the Second Phase Offensive and limited gains of the Third Phase Offensive. The U.N. forces, after earlier defeats and subsequent retraining, proved much harder to infiltrate by Chinese light infantry than they had been in previous months. From 31 January to 21 April, the Chinese had suffered 53,000 casualties.
On 11 April 1951, President Truman relieved General MacArthur as Supreme Commander in Korea. There were several reasons for the dismissal. MacArthur had crossed the 38th Parallel in the mistaken belief that the Chinese would not enter the war, leading to major allied losses. He believed that whether to use nuclear weapons should be his decision, not the President's. MacArthur threatened to destroy China unless it surrendered. While MacArthur felt total victory was the only honorable outcome, Truman was more pessimistic about his chances once involved in a land war in Asia, and felt a truce and orderly withdrawal from Korea could be a valid solution. MacArthur was the subject of congressional hearings in May and June 1951, which determined that he had defied the orders of the President and thus had violated the US Constitution. A popular criticism of MacArthur was that he never spent a night in Korea, and directed the war from the safety of Tokyo.
MacArthur was relieved primarily due to his determination to expand the war into China, which other officials believed would needlessly escalate a limited war and consume too many already overstretched resources. Despite MacArthur's claims that he was restricted to fighting a limited war when China was fighting all-out, congressional testimony revealed China was using restraint as much as the US was, as they were not using air power against front-line troops, communication lines, ports, naval air forces, or staging bases in Japan, which had been crucial to the survival of UN forces in Korea. Simply fighting on the peninsula had already tied down significant portions of US airpower; as Air Force chief of staff Hoyt Vandenberg said, 80–85% the tactical capacity, one-fourth of the strategic portion, and 20% of air defense forces of the USAF were engaged in a single country. There was also fear that crossing into China would provoke the Soviet Union into entering the war. General Omar Bradley testified that there were 35 Russian divisions totaling some 500,000 troops in the Far East, and if sent into action with the approximately 85 Russian submarines in the vicinity of Korea, they could overwhelm US forces and cut supply lines, as well as potentially assist China in taking over territory in Southeast Asia.
General Ridgway was appointed Supreme Commander in Korea, and he regrouped the UN forces for successful counterattacks, while General James Van Fleet assumed command of the US Eighth Army. Further attacks slowly depleted the PVA and KPA forces; Operations "Courageous" (23–28 March 1951) and "Tomahawk" (23 March 1951) (a combat jump by the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team) were a joint ground and airborne infilltration meant to trap PVA forces between Kaesong and Seoul. UN forces advanced to the "Kansas Line", north of the 38th Parallel.
The PVA counterattacked in April 1951, with the Fifth Phase Offensive, with three field armies (approximately 700,000 men). The first thrust of the offensive fell upon I Corps, which fiercely resisted in the Battle of the Imjin River (22–25 April 1951) and the Battle of Kapyong (22–25 April 1951), blunting the impetus of the offensive, which was halted at the "No-name Line" north of Seoul. Casualty ratios were grievously disproportionate; Peng had expected a 1-1 or 2-1 ratio, but instead, Chinese combat casualties from 22 to 29 April totaled between 40,000 and 60,000 compared to only 4,000 for the U.N. By the time Peng had called off the attack in the western sector on 29 April, the three participating armies had lost a third of their front line combat strength within a week. Additional casualties were incurred on 30 April. On 15 May 1951, the PVA commenced the second impulse of the Spring Offensive and attacked the ROK and US X Corps in the east at the Soyang River. 370,000 PVA and 114,000 KPA troops had been mobilized for the second step of the Fifth Phase Offensive, with the bulk attacking in the eastern sector with about a quarter attempting to pin the U.S. I Corps and IX Corps in the western sector. After initial success, they were halted by 20 May and repulsed over the following days, with western histories generally designating 22 May as the end of the offensive. At month's end, the Chinese planned the third step of the Fifth Phase Offensive (withdrawal), which they estimated would take 10 to 15 days to complete for their 340,000 remaining men, and set the retreat date for the night of 23 May. They were caught off guard when the U.S. Eighth Army counterattacked and regained the "Kansas Line" on the morning of 12 May, 23 hours before the expected withdrawal. The surprise attack turned the retreat into "the most severe loss since our forces had entered Korea"; from 16 May to 23 May, the PVA had suffered another 45,000 to 60,000 casualties before their remaining men managed to evacuate back north. Per official Chinese statistics, the Fifth Phase Offensive as a whole had cost the PVA 102,000 men (85,000 killed/wounded, 17,000 captured), with unknown but significant losses for the KPA.
The end of the Fifth Phase Offensive precluded the start of the UN May–June 1951 counteroffensive. During the counteroffensive, the U.S.-led coalition captured land up to about six miles north of the 38th Parallel, with most forces stopping at the "Kansas Line" and a minority going further to the "Wyoming Line." PVA and KPA forces suffered greatly during this offensive, especially in the Chuncheon sector and at Chiam-ni and Hwacheon; in the latter sector alone the PVA/KPA suffered over 73,207 casualties, including 8,749 captured, compared to 2,647 total casualties of the U.S. IX Corps which engaged them. The UN's "Kansas Line" halt and subsequent offensive action stand-down began the stalemate that lasted until the armistice of 1953. The disastrous failure of the Fifth Phase Offensive (which Peng later recalled as one of only four mistakes he made in his military career) "led Chinese leaders to change their goal from driving the UNF out of Korea to merely defending China's security and ending the war through negotiations."
For the remainder of the war the UN and the PVA/KPA fought but exchanged little territory, as the stalemate held. Large-scale bombing of North Korea continued, and protracted armistice negotiations began on 10 July 1951 at Kaesong, an ancient capital of North Korea located in PVA/KPA held territory. On the Chinese side, Zhou Enlai directed peace talks, and Li Kenong and Qiao Guanghua headed the negotiation team. Combat continued while the belligerents negotiated; the goal of the UN forces was to recapture all of South Korea and to avoid losing territory. The PVA and the KPA attempted similar operations, and later effected military and psychological operations in order to test the UN Command's resolve to continue the war. The two sides constantly traded artillery fire along the front, the American-led forces possessing a large firepower advantage over the Chinese-led forces. For example, in the last three months of 1952 the U.N. fired 3,553,518 field gun shells and 2,569,941 mortar shells, while the communists fired 377,782 field gun shells and 672,194 mortar shells: an overall 5.83:1 ratio in the U.N.'s favor. The communist insurgency, reinvigorated by North Korean support and scattered bands of KPA stragglers, also resurged in the south. In the autumn of 1951 Van Fleet ordered Major General Paik Sun-yup to break the back of guerrilla activity. From December 1951 to March 1952, ROK security forces claimed to have killed 11,090 partisans and sympathizers and captured 9,916 more.
The principal battles of the stalemate include the Battle of Bloody Ridge (18 August–15 September 1951), the Battle of the Punchbowl (31 August-21 September 1951), the Battle of Heartbreak Ridge (13 September–15 October 1951), the Battle of Old Baldy (26 June–4 August 1952), the Battle of White Horse (6–15 October 1952), the Battle of Triangle Hill (14 October–25 November 1952), the Battle of Hill Eerie (21 March–21 June 1952), the sieges of Outpost Harry (10–18 June 1953), the Battle of the Hook (28–29 May 1953), the Battle of Pork Chop Hill (23 March–16 July 1953) and the Battle of Kumsong (13–27 July 1953).
PVA troops suffered from deficient military equipment, serious logistical problems, overextended communication and supply lines, and the constant threat of UN bombers. All of these factors generally led to a rate of Chinese casualties that was far greater than the casualties suffered by UN troops. The situation became so serious that, in November 1951, Zhou Enlai called a conference in Shenyang to discuss the PVA's logistical problems. At the meeting it was decided to accelerate the construction of railways and airfields in the area, to increase the number of trucks available to the army, and to improve air defense by any means possible. These commitments did little to directly address the problems confronting PVA troops.
In the months after the Shenyang conference Peng Dehuai went to Beijing several times to brief Mao and Zhou about the heavy casualties suffered by Chinese troops and the increasing difficulty of keeping the front lines supplied with basic necessities. Peng was convinced that the war would be protracted, and that neither side would be able to achieve victory in the near future. On 24 February 1952, the Military Commission, presided over by Zhou, discussed the PVA's logistical problems with members of various government agencies involved in the war effort. After the government representatives emphasized their inability to meet the demands of the war, Peng, in an angry outburst, shouted: "You have this and that problem... You should go to the front and see with your own eyes what food and clothing the soldiers have! Not to speak of the casualties! For what are they giving their lives? We have no aircraft. We have only a few guns. Transports are not protected. More and more soldiers are dying of starvation. Can't you overcome some of your difficulties?" The atmosphere became so tense that Zhou was forced to adjourn the conference. Zhou subsequently called a series of meetings, where it was agreed that the PVA would be divided into three groups, to be dispatched to Korea in shifts; to accelerate the training of Chinese pilots; to provide more anti-aircraft guns to the front lines; to purchase more military equipment and ammunition from the Soviet Union; to provide the army with more food and clothing; and, to transfer the responsibility of logistics to the central government.
With peace negotiations ongoing, the Chinese attempted one final offensive in the final weeks of the year to capture territory: on 10 June, 30,000 Chinese troops struck two South Korean and one U.S. divisions on an eight-mile front, and on 13 July, 80,000 Chinese soldiers struck the east-central Kumsong sector, with the brunt of their attack falling on four South Korean divisions. In both cases, the Chinese had some success in penetrating South Korean lines, but failed to capitalize, particularly when the U.S. forces present responded with overwhelming firepower. Chinese casualties in their final major offensive of the war (above normal wastage for the front) were about 72,000, including 25,000 killed in action compared to 14,000 for the U.N. (the vast majority of these deaths were South Koreans, though 1,611 were Americans). The communists fired 704,695 field gun shells in June–July compared to 4,711,230 fired by the U.N., a ratio of 6.69:1. June 1953 saw the highest monthly artillery expenditure of the war by both sides.
The on-again, off-again armistice negotiations continued for two years, first at Kaesong, on the border between North and South Korea, and then at the neighboring village of Panmunjom. A major, problematic negotiation point was prisoner of war (POW) repatriation. The PVA, KPA and UN Command could not agree on a system of repatriation because many PVA and KPA soldiers refused to be repatriated back to the north, which was unacceptable to the Chinese and North Koreans. A Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission, under the chairman Indian General K. S. Thimayya, was subsequently set up to handle the matter.
In 1952, the US elected a new president, and on 29 November 1952, the president-elect, Dwight D. Eisenhower, went to Korea to learn what might end the Korean War. With the United Nations' acceptance of India's proposed Korean War armistice, the KPA, the PVA and the UN Command signed the Korean Armistice Agreement on 27 July 1953. South Korean president Syngman Rhee refused to sign the agreement. The war is considered to have ended at this point, even though there was no peace treaty. North Korea nevertheless claims that it won the Korean War.
Under the Armistice Agreement, the belligerents established the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), along the frontline which vaguely follows the 38th Parallel. The DMZ runs northeast of the 38th Parallel; to the south, it travels west. Kaesong, site of the initial armistice negotiations, originally was in pre-war South Korea, but now is part of North Korea. The DMZ has since been patrolled by the KPA and the ROK and US still operating as the UN Command.
The Armistice also called upon the governments of South Korea, North Korea, China and the United States to participate in continued peace talks.
After the war, Operation Glory was conducted from July to November 1954, to allow combatant countries to exchange their dead. The remains of 4,167 US Army and US Marine Corps dead were exchanged for 13,528 KPA and PVA dead, and 546 civilians dead in UN prisoner-of-war camps were delivered to the South Korean government. After Operation Glory, 416 Korean War unknown soldiers were buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (The Punchbowl), on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) records indicate that the PRC and North Korea transmitted 1,394 names, of which 858 were correct. From 4,167 containers of returned remains, forensic examination identified 4,219 individuals. Of these, 2,944 were identified as from the US, and all but 416 were identified by name. From 1996 to 2006, North Korea recovered 220 remains near the Sino-Korean border.
The Korean Armistice Agreement provided for monitoring by an international commission. Since 1953, the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), composed of members from the Swiss and Swedish Armed Forces, has been stationed near the DMZ.
In April 1975, South Vietnam's capital was captured by the People's Army of Vietnam. Encouraged by the success of Communist revolution in Indochina, Kim Il-sung saw it as an opportunity to invade the South. Kim visited China in April of that year, and met with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to ask for military aid. Despite Pyongyang's expectations, however, Beijing refused to help North Korea for another war in Korea.
Since the armistice, there have been numerous incursions and acts of aggression by North Korea. In 1976, the axe murder incident was widely publicized. Since 1974, four incursion tunnels leading to Seoul have been uncovered. In 2010, a North Korean submarine torpedoed and sank the South Korean corvette , resulting in the deaths of 46 sailors. Again in 2010, North Korea fired artillery shells on Yeonpyeong island, killing two military personnel and two civilians.
After a new wave of UN sanctions, on 11 March 2013, North Korea claimed that the armistice had become invalid. On 13 March 2013, North Korea confirmed it ended the 1953 Armistice and declared North Korea "is not restrained by the North-South declaration on non-aggression". On 30 March 2013, North Korea stated that it entered a "state of war" with South Korea and declared that "The long-standing situation of the Korean peninsula being neither at peace nor at war is finally over". Speaking on 4 April 2013, the US Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, informed the press that Pyongyang "formally informed" the Pentagon that it "ratified" the potential use of a nuclear weapon against South Korea, Japan and the United States of America, including Guam and Hawaii. Hagel also stated the US would deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-ballistic missile system to Guam, because of a credible and realistic nuclear threat from North Korea.
In 2016, it was revealed that North Korea approached the United States about conducting formal peace talks to formally end the war. While the White House agreed to secret peace talks, the plan was rejected due to North Korea's refusal to discuss nuclear disarmament as part of the terms of the treaty.
On 27 April 2018, it was announced that North Korea and South Korea agreed to talks to end the ongoing 65-year conflict. They committed themselves to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Approximately 3 million people died in the Korean War, the majority of whom were civilians, making it perhaps the deadliest conflict of the Cold War-era. Samuel S. Kim lists the Korean War as the deadliest conflict in East Asia—itself the region most affected by armed conflict related to the Cold War–from 1945 to 1994, with 3 million dead, more than the Vietnam War and Chinese Civil War during the same period. Although only rough estimates of civilian fatalities are available, scholars from Guenter Lewy to Bruce Cumings have noted that the percentage of civilian casualties in Korea was higher than in World War II or the Vietnam War, with Cumings putting civilian casualties at 2 million and Lewy estimating civilian deaths in the range of 2 million to 3 million. Cumings states that civilians represent "at least" half of the war's casualties, while Lewy suggests that the civilian portion of the death toll "may have gone as high as 70 percent," compared to Lewy's estimates of 42% in World War II and 30%-46% in the Vietnam War. Data compiled by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) lists just under 1 million "battle deaths" over the course of the Korean War (with a range of 644,696 to 1.5 million) and a mid-value estimate of 3 million total deaths (with a range of 1.5 million to 4.5 million), attributing the difference to excess mortality among civilians from one-sided massacres, starvation, and disease. Compounding this devastation for Korean civilians, virtually all of the major cities on the entire Korean Peninsula were destroyed as a result of the war. In both per capita and absolute terms, North Korea was the country most devastated by the war, which resulted in the death of an estimated 12%-15% of the North Korean population ( 10 million), "a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II," according to Charles K. Armstrong. The May 1953 bombing of major North Korean dams threatened several million more North Koreans with starvation, although large-scale famine was averted with emergency aid provided by North Korea's allies.
According to the data from the US Department of Defense, the US suffered 33,686 battle deaths, along with 2,830 non-battle deaths, during the Korean War. American combat casualties were over 90 percent of non-Korean UN losses. U.S. battle deaths were 8,516 up to their first engagement with the Chinese on 1 November 1950. The first four months of the Korean War, that is, the war prior to the Chinese intervention (which started near the end of October), were by far the bloodiest per day for the US forces as they engaged and destroyed the comparatively well-equipped KPA in intense fighting. American medical records show that from July to October 1950, the US Army sustained 31 percent of the combat deaths it would ultimately accumulate in the whole 37-month war. The U.S. spent $30 billion in total on the war. Some 1,789,000 American soldiers served in the Korean War, accounting for 31 percent of the 5,720,000 Americans who served on active-duty worldwide from June 1950 to July 1953.
South Korea reported some 137,899 military deaths and 24,495 missing. Deaths from the other non-American U.N. militaries totaled 3,730, with another 379 missing.
Data from official Chinese sources reported that the PVA had suffered 114,000 battle deaths, 34,000 non-battle deaths, 340,000 wounded, and 7,600 missing during the war. 7,110 Chinese POWs were repatriated to China. In 2010, the Chinese government would revise their official tally of war losses to 183,108 dead (114,084 in combat, 70,000 outside of combat) and 25,621 missing. Overall, 73 percent of Chinese infantry troops served in Korea (25 of 34 armies, or 79 of 109 infantry divisions, were rotated in). More than 52 percent of the Chinese air force, 55 percent of the tank units, 67 percent of the artillery divisions, and 100 percent of the railroad engineering divisions were sent to Korea as well. Chinese soldiers who served in Korea faced a greater chance of being killed than those who served in World War II or the Chinese Civil War. In terms of financial cost, China spent over 10 billion yuan on the war (roughly $3.3 billion), not counting USSR aid which had been donated or forgiven. This included $1.3 billion in money owed to the Soviet Union by the end of it. This was a relatively large cost, as China had only 1/25 the national income of the United States. Spending on the Korean War constituted 34-43 percent of China's annual government budget from 1950 to 1953, depending on the year. Despite its underdeveloped economy, Chinese military spending was the world's fourth largest globally for most of the war after that of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, though by 1953, with the winding down of the Korean War (which ended halfway through the year) and the escalation of the First Indochina War (which reached its peak in 1953-1954), French spending also surpassed Chinese spending by about a third.
According to the South Korean Ministry of National Defense, North Korean military losses totaled 294,151 dead, 91,206 missing, and 229,849 wounded, giving North Korea the highest military deaths of any belligerent in both absolute and relative terms. The PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset gave a similar figure for North Korean military deaths of 316,579. Chinese sources reported similar figures for the North Korean military of 290,000 "casualties" and 90,000 captured. The exact financial cost of the war for North Korea is unknown, but was known to be massive in terms of both direct losses and lost economic activity; the country was devastated both by the cost of the war itself and the American strategic bombing campaign, which among other things destroyed 85 percent of North Korea's buildings and 95 percent of its power generation capacity.
The Chinese and North Koreans estimated that about 390,000 soldiers from the United States, 660,000 soldiers from South Korea and 29,000 other UN soldiers were "eliminated" from the battlefield. Western sources estimate the PVA suffered about 400,000 killed and 486,000 wounded, while the KPA suffered 215,000 killed and 303,000 wounded. Cumings cites a much higher figure of 900,000 fatalities among Chinese soldiers.
According to the South Korean Ministry of National Defense, there were over three-quarters of a million confirmed violent civilians deaths during the war, another million civilians were pronounced missing, and millions more ended up as refugees. In South Korea, some 373,500 civilians were killed, more than 225,600 wounded, and over 387,740 were listed as missing. During the first communist occupation of Seoul alone, the KPA massacred 128,936 civilians and deported another 84,523 to North Korea. On the other side of the border, some 406,000 North Korean civilians were reported to have been killed, 1,594,000 were wounded, and 680,000 were missing. Over 1.5 million North Koreans fled to the South during the war.
In a postwar analysis of the unpreparedness of US Army forces deployed to Korea during the summer and fall of 1950, Army Major General Floyd L. Parks stated that "Many who never lived to tell the tale had to fight the full range of ground warfare from offensive to delaying action, unit by unit, man by man ... [T]hat we were able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat ... does not relieve us from the blame of having placed our own flesh and blood in such a predicament."
By 1950, US Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson had established a policy of faithfully following President Truman's defense economization plans, and had aggressively attempted to implement it even in the face of steadily increasing external threats. He consequently received much of the blame for the initial setbacks in Korea and the widespread reports of ill-equipped and inadequately trained US military forces in the war's early stages.
As an initial response to the invasion, Truman called for a naval blockade of North Korea, and was shocked to learn that such a blockade could be imposed only "on paper", since the US Navy no longer had the warships with which to carry out his request. Army officials, desperate for weaponry, recovered Sherman tanks from World War II Pacific battlefields and reconditioned them for shipment to Korea. Army Ordnance officials at Fort Knox pulled down M26 Pershing tanks from display pedestals around Fort Knox in order to equip the third company of the Army's hastily formed 70th Tank Battalion. Without adequate numbers of tactical fighter-bomber aircraft, the Air Force took F-51 (P-51) propeller-driven aircraft out of storage or from existing Air National Guard squadrons, and rushed them into front-line service. A shortage of spare parts and qualified maintenance personnel resulted in improvised repairs and overhauls. A Navy helicopter pilot aboard an active duty warship recalled fixing damaged rotor blades with masking tape in the absence of spares.
US Army Reserve and Army National Guard infantry soldiers and new inductees (called to duty to fill out understrength infantry divisions) found themselves short of nearly everything needed to repel the North Korean forces: artillery, ammunition, heavy tanks, ground-support aircraft, even effective anti-tank weapons such as the M20 3.5-inch (89 mm) "Super Bazooka". Some Army combat units sent to Korea were supplied with worn out, 'red-lined' M1 rifles or carbines in immediate need of ordnance depot overhaul or repair. Only the Marine Corps, whose commanders had stored and maintained their World War II surplus inventories of equipment and weapons, proved ready for deployment, though they still were woefully under-strength, as well as in need of suitable landing craft to practice amphibious operations (Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had transferred most of the remaining craft to the Navy and reserved them for use in training Army units).
Due to public criticism of his handling of the Korean War, Truman decided to ask for Johnson's resignation. On 19 September 1950, Johnson resigned as Secretary of Defense, and the president quickly replaced him with General George C. Marshall.
The initial assault by KPA forces was aided by the use of Soviet T-34-85 tanks. A KPA tank corps equipped with about 120 T-34s spearheaded the invasion. These drove against the ROK with few anti-tank weapons adequate to deal with the T-34s. Additional Soviet armor was added as the offensive progressed. The KPA tanks had a good deal of early successes against ROK infantry, Task Force Smith and the US M24 Chaffee light tanks that they encountered. Interdiction by ground attack aircraft was the only means of slowing the advancing KPA armor. The tide turned in favor of the UN forces in August 1950 when the KPA suffered major tank losses during a series of battles in which the UN forces brought heavier equipment to bear, including M4A3 Sherman medium tanks backed by M26 heavy tanks, and the British Centurion, Churchill and Cromwell tanks.
The Inchon landings on 15 September cut off the KPA supply lines, causing their armored forces and infantry to run out of fuel, ammunition, and other supplies. As a result of this and the Pusan perimeter breakout the KPA had to retreat, and many of the T-34s and heavy weapons had to be abandoned. By the time the KPA withdrew from the South, a total of 239 T-34s and 74 SU-76 self-propelled guns were lost. After November 1950, KPA armor was rarely encountered.
Following the initial assault by the north, the Korean War saw limited use of tanks and featured no large-scale tank battles. The mountainous, forested terrain, especially in the eastern central zone, was poor tank country, limiting their mobility. Through the last two years of the war in Korea, UN tanks served largely as infantry support and mobile artillery pieces.
Because neither Korea had a significant navy, the war featured few naval battles. A skirmish between North Korea and the UN Command occurred on 2 July 1950; the US Navy cruiser , the Royal Navy cruiser and the Royal Navy frigate fought four North Korean torpedo boats and two mortar gunboats, and sank them.
USS "Juneau" later sank several ammunition ships that had been present. The last sea battle of the Korean War occurred at Inchon, days before the Battle of Inchon; the ROK ship "PC-703" sank a North Korean mine layer in the Battle of Haeju Island, near Inchon. Three other supply ships were sunk by "PC-703" two days later in the Yellow Sea. Thereafter, vessels from the UN nations held undisputed control of the sea about Korea. The gun ships were used in shore bombardment, while the aircraft carriers provided air support to the ground forces.
During most of the war, the UN navies patrolled the west and east coasts of North Korea, sinking supply and ammunition ships and denying the North Koreans the ability to resupply from the sea. Aside from very occasional gunfire from North Korean shore batteries, the main threat to UN navy ships was from magnetic mines. During the war, five US Navy ships were lost to mines: two minesweepers, two minesweeper escorts, and one ocean tug. Mines and gunfire from North Korean coastal artillery damaged another 87 US warships, resulting in slight to moderate damage.
The war was the first in which jet aircraft played the central role in air combat. Once-formidable fighters such as the P-51 Mustang, F4U Corsair, and Hawker Sea Fury—all piston-engined, propeller-driven, and designed during World War II—relinquished their air-superiority roles to a new generation of faster, jet-powered fighters arriving in the theater. For the initial months of the war, the P-80 Shooting Star, F9F Panther, Gloster Meteor and other jets under the UN flag dominated the Korean People's Air Force (KPAF) propeller-driven Soviet Yakovlev Yak-9 and Lavochkin La-9s. By early August 1950, the KPAF was reduced to only about 20 planes.
The Chinese intervention in late October 1950 bolstered the KPAF with the MiG-15, one of the world's most advanced jet fighters. The heavily armed MiGs were faster than first-generation UN jets and therefore could reach and destroy US B-29 Superfortress bomber flights despite their fighter escorts. With increasing B-29 losses, the USAF was forced to switch from a daylight bombing campaign to the safer but less accurate nighttime bombing of targets.
The USAF countered the MiG-15 by sending over three squadrons of its most capable fighter, the F-86 Sabre. These arrived in December 1950. The MiG was designed as a bomber interceptor. It had a very high service ceiling— and carried very heavy weaponry: one 37 mm cannon and two 23 mm cannons. The F-86 had a ceiling of and were armed with six .50 caliber (12.7 mm) machine guns, which were range adjusted by radar gunsights. If coming in at higher altitude the advantage of engaging or not went to the MiG. Once in a level flight dogfight, both swept-wing designs attained comparable maximum speeds of around . The MiG climbed faster, but the Sabre turned and dived better.
In the summer and autumn of 1951, the outnumbered Sabres of the USAF's 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing—only 44 at one point—continued seeking battle in MiG Alley, where the Yalu River marks the Chinese border, against Chinese and North Korean air forces capable of deploying some 500 aircraft. Following Colonel Harrison Thyng's communication with the Pentagon, the 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing finally reinforced the beleaguered 4th Wing in December 1951; for the next year-and-a-half stretch of the war, aerial warfare continued.
Unlike the Vietnam War, in which the Soviet Union only officially sent "advisers", the 64th Fighter Aviation Corps saw action in the Korean air war. Fearful of confronting the US directly, the Soviet Union denied involvement of their personnel in anything other than an advisory role, but air combat quickly resulted in Soviet pilots dropping their code signals and speaking over the wireless in Russian. This known direct Soviet participation was a "casus belli" that the UN Command deliberately overlooked, lest the war expand to include the Soviet Union, and potentially escalate into atomic warfare.
After the war, and to the present day, the USAF reports an F-86 Sabre kill ratio in excess of 10:1, with 792 MiG-15s and 108 other aircraft shot down by Sabres, and 78 Sabres lost to enemy fire. The Soviet Air Force reported some 1,100 air-to-air victories and 335 MiG combat losses, while China's PLAAF reported 231 combat losses, mostly MiG-15s, and 168 other aircraft lost. The KPAF reported no data, but the UN Command estimates some 200 KPAF aircraft lost in the war's first stage, and 70 additional aircraft after the Chinese intervention. The USAF disputes Soviet and Chinese claims of 650 and 211 downed F-86s, respectively. However, one source claims that the USAF has more recently cited 224 losses (c.100 to air combat) out of 674 F-86s deployed to Korea.
Regardless of the actual ratio, American Sabres were very effective at controlling the skies over Korea; since no other UN fighter could contend with the MiG-15, F-86s largely took over air combat once they arrived, relegating other aircraft to performing air-to-ground duties. Despite being outnumbered (the number of Sabres in theater never exceeded 150 while MiG-15s reached 900 at their peak), North Korean and Chinese aircraft were seldom encountered south of Pyongyang. UN ground forces, supply lines, and infrastructure were not attacked from the air and although North Korea had 75 airfields capable of supporting MiGs, after 1951 any serious effort to operate from them was abandoned, keeping them based across the Yalu River in the safety of China. This confined most air-to-air engagements to MiG Alley, giving UN aircraft free rein to conduct strike missions over enemy territory with little fear of interception. Although jet dogfights are remembered as a prominent part of the Korean War, counter-air missions comprised just 12% of Far East Air Forces sorties, and four times as many sorties were performed for close air support and interdiction.
The war marked a major milestone not only for fixed-wing aircraft, but also for rotorcraft, featuring the first large-scale deployment of helicopters for medical evacuation (medevac). In 1944–1945, during the Second World War, the YR-4 helicopter saw limited ambulance duty, but in Korea, where rough terrain trumped the jeep as a speedy medevac vehicle, helicopters like the Sikorsky H-19 helped reduce fatal casualties to a dramatic degree when combined with complementary medical innovations such as Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals. The limitations of jet aircraft for close air support highlighted the helicopter's potential in the role, leading to development of the helicopter gunships used in the Vietnam War (1965–75).
The initial bombing attack on North Korea was approved on the fourth day of the war, 29 June 1950, by General Douglas MacArthur immediately upon request by the commanding general of the Far East Air Forces, George E. Stratemeyer. Major bombing began in late July. U.S. airpower conducted 7,000 close support and interdiction airstrikes that month, which helped slow the North Korean rate of advance to two miles a day. On 12 August 1950, the USAF dropped 625 tons of bombs on North Korea; two weeks later, the daily tonnage increased to some 800 tons.
From June through October, official US policy was to pursue precision bombing aimed at communication centers (railroad stations, marshaling yards, main yards, and railways) and industrial facilities deemed vital to war making capacity. The policy was the result of debates after World War II, in which US policy rejected the mass civilian bombings that had been conducted in the later stages of World War II as unproductive and immoral. In early July, General Emmett O'Donnell Jr. requested permission to firebomb five North Korean cities. He proposed that MacArthur announce that the UN would employ the firebombing methods that "brought Japan to its knees." The announcement would warn the leaders of North Korea "to get women and children and other noncombatants the hell out."
According to O'Donnell, MacArthur responded, "No, Rosie, I'm not prepared to go that far yet. My instructions are very explicit; however, I want you to know that I have no compunction whatever to your bombing bona fide military objectives, with high explosives, in those five industrial centers. If you miss your target and kill people or destroy other parts of the city, I accept that as a part of war."
In September 1950, MacArthur said in his public report to the UN, "The problem of avoiding the killing of innocent civilians and damages to the civilian economy is continually present and given my personal attention."
In October 1950, FEAF commander General Stratemeyer requested permission to attack the city of Sinuiju, a provincial capital with an estimated population of 60,000, "over the widest area of the city, without warning, by burning and high explosive." MacArthur's headquarters responded the following day: "The general policy enunciated from Washington negates such an attack unless the military situation clearly requires it. Under present circumstances this is not the case."
Following the intervention of the Chinese in November, General MacArthur ordered increased bombing on North Korea which included firebombing against the country's arsenals and communications centers and especially against the "Korean end" of all the bridges across the Yalu River. As with the aerial bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan in World War II, the nominal objective of the USAF was to destroy North Korea's war infrastructure and shatter the country's morale.
On 3 November 1950, General Stratemeyer forwarded to MacArthur the request of Fifth Air Force commander General Earle E. Partridge for clearance to "burn Sinuiju." As he had done previously in July and October, MacArthur denied the request, explaining that he planned to use the town's facilities after seizing it. However, at the same meeting, MacArthur agreed for the first time to a firebombing campaign, agreeing to Stratemeyer's request to burn the city of Kanggye and several other towns: "Burn it if you so desire. Not only that, Strat, but burn and destroy as a lesson to any other of those towns that you consider of military value to the enemy." The same evening, MacArthur's chief of staff told Stratemeyer that the firebombing of Sinuiju had also been approved. In his diary, Stratemeyer summarized the instructions as follows: "Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target." Stratemeyer sent orders to the Fifth Air Force and Bomber Command to "destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village."
On 5 November 1950, General Stratemeyer gave the following order to the commanding general of the Fifth Air Force: "Aircraft under Fifth Air Force control will destroy all other targets including all buildings capable of affording shelter." The same day, twenty-two B-29s attacked Kanggye, destroying 75% of the city.
After MacArthur was removed as UN Supreme Commander in Korea in April 1951, his successors continued this policy and ultimately extended it to all of North Korea. The U.S. dropped a total of 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, on Korea, more than during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II. North Korea ranks alongside Cambodia (500,000 tons), Laos (2 million tons) and South Vietnam (4 million tons) as among the most heavily-bombed countries in history, with Laos suffering the most extensive bombardment relative to its size and population.
Almost every substantial building in North Korea was destroyed as a result. The war's highest-ranking US POW, Major General William F. Dean, reported that the majority of North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wasteland. North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground, and air defenses were "non-existent." In November 1950, the North Korean leadership instructed their population to build dugouts and mud huts and to dig tunnels, in order to solve the acute housing problem. US Air Force General Curtis LeMay commented: "We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too." Pyongyang, which saw 75 percent of its area destroyed, was so devastated that bombing was halted as there were no longer any worthy targets. On 28 November, Bomber Command reported on the campaign's progress: 95 percent of Manpojin was destroyed, along with 90 percent of Hoeryong, Namsi and Koindong, 85 percent of Chosan, 75 percent of both Sakchu and Huichon and 20 percent of Uiju. According to USAF damage assessments, "Eighteen of twenty-two major cities in North Korea had been at least half obliterated." By the end of the campaign, US bombers had difficulty in finding targets and were reduced to bombing footbridges or jettisoning their bombs into the sea.
General Matthew Ridgway said that except for air power, "the war would have been over in 60 days with all Korea in Communist hands." UN air forces flew 1,040,708 combat and combat support sorties during the war. FEAF flew the majority at 710,886 (69.3% of sorties), with the U.S. Navy performing 16.1%, the U.S. Marine Corps 10.3%, and 4.3% by other allied air forces.
As well as conventional bombing, the Communist side claimed that the U.S. used biological weapons. These claims have been disputed; Conrad Crane asserts that while the US worked towards developing chemical and biological weapons, the US military "possessed neither the ability, nor the will", to use them in combat.
On 5 November 1950, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued orders for the retaliatory atomic bombing of Manchurian PRC military bases, if either their armies crossed into Korea or if PRC or KPA bombers attacked Korea from there. President Truman ordered the transfer of nine Mark 4 nuclear bombs "to the Air Force's Ninth Bomb Group, the designated carrier of the weapons ... [and] signed an order to use them against Chinese and Korean targets", which he never transmitted.
Many US officials viewed the deployment of nuclear-capable (but not nuclear-armed) B-29 bombers to Britain as helping to resolve the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949. Truman and Eisenhower both had military experience and viewed nuclear weapons as potentially usable components of their military. During Truman's first meeting to discuss the war on 25 June 1950, he ordered plans be prepared for attacking Soviet forces if they entered the war. By July, Truman approved another B-29 deployment to Britain, this time with bombs (but without their cores), to remind the Soviets of US offensive ability. Deployment of a similar fleet to Guam was leaked to "The New York Times". As UN forces retreated to Pusan, and the CIA reported that mainland China was building up forces for a possible invasion of Taiwan, the Pentagon believed that Congress and the public would demand using nuclear weapons if the situation in Korea required them.
As PVA forces pushed back the UN forces from the Yalu River, Truman stated during a 30 November 1950 press conference that using nuclear weapons was "always [under] active consideration", with control under the local military commander. The Indian ambassador, K. Madhava Panikkar, reports "that Truman announced he was thinking of using the atom bomb in Korea. But the Chinese seemed unmoved by this threat ... The PRC's propaganda against the US was stepped up. The 'Aid Korea to resist America' campaign was made the slogan for increased production, greater national integration, and more rigid control over anti-national activities. One could not help feeling that Truman's threat came in useful to the leaders of the Revolution, to enable them to keep up the tempo of their activities."
After his statement caused concern in Europe, Truman met on 4 December 1950 with UK prime minister and Commonwealth spokesman Clement Attlee, French Premier René Pleven, and French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman to discuss their worries about atomic warfare and its likely continental expansion. The US' forgoing atomic warfare was not because of "a disinclination by the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China to escalate [the Korean War]", but because UN allies—notably from the UK, the Commonwealth, and France—were concerned about a geopolitical imbalance rendering NATO defenseless while the US fought China, who then might persuade the Soviet Union to conquer Western Europe. The Joint Chiefs of Staff advised Truman to tell Attlee that the US would use nuclear weapons only if necessary to protect an evacuation of UN troops, or to prevent a "major military disaster".
On 6 December 1950, after the Chinese intervention repelled the UN armies from northern North Korea, General J. Lawton Collins (Army Chief of Staff), General MacArthur, Admiral C. Turner Joy, General George E. Stratemeyer and staff officers Major General Doyle Hickey, Major General Charles A. Willoughby and Major General Edwin K. Wright met in Tokyo to plan strategy countering the Chinese intervention; they considered three potential atomic warfare scenarios encompassing the next weeks and months of warfare.
Both the Pentagon and the State Department were cautious about using nuclear weapons because of the risk of general war with China and the diplomatic ramifications. Truman and his senior advisors agreed, and never seriously considered using them in early December 1950 despite the poor military situation in Korea.
In 1951, the US escalated closest to atomic warfare in Korea. Because China deployed new armies to the Sino-Korean frontier, ground crews at the Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, assembled atomic bombs for Korean warfare, "lacking only the essential pit nuclear cores". In October 1951, the United States effected Operation Hudson Harbor to establish a nuclear weapons capability. USAF B-29 bombers practiced individual bombing runs from Okinawa to North Korea (using dummy nuclear or conventional bombs), coordinated from Yokota Air Base in east-central Japan. "Hudson Harbor" tested "actual functioning of all activities which would be involved in an atomic strike, including weapons assembly and testing, leading, [and] ground control of bomb aiming". The bombing run data indicated that atomic bombs would be tactically ineffective against massed infantry, because the "timely identification of large masses of enemy troops was extremely rare."
General Matthew Ridgway was authorized to use nuclear weapons if a major air attack originated from outside Korea. An envoy was sent to Hong Kong to deliver a warning to China. The message likely caused Chinese leaders to be more cautious about potential US use of nuclear weapons, but whether they learned about the B-29 deployment is unclear and the failure of the two major Chinese offensives that month likely was what caused them to shift to a defensive strategy in Korea. The B-29s returned to the United States in June.
Despite the greater destructive power that atomic weapons would bring to the war, their effects on determining the war's outcome would have likely been minimal. Tactically, given the dispersed nature of PVA/KPA forces, the relatively primitive infrastructure for staging and logistics centers, and the small number of bombs available (most would have been conserved for use against the Soviets), atomic attacks would have limited effects against the ability of China to mobilize and move forces. Strategically, attacking Chinese cities to destroy civilian industry and infrastructure would cause the immediate dispersion of the leadership away from such areas and give propaganda value for the communists to galvanize the support of Chinese civilians. Since the Soviets were not expected to intervene with their few primitive atomic weapons on China or North Korea's behalf, the threat of a possible nuclear exchange was unimportant in the decision to not deploy atomic bombs; their use offered little operational advantage, and would undesirably lower the "threshold" for using atomic weapons against non-nuclear states in future conflicts.
When Eisenhower succeeded Truman in early 1953 he was similarly cautious about using nuclear weapons in Korea. The administration prepared contingency plans to use them against China, but like Truman, the new president feared that doing so would result in Soviet attacks on Japan. The war ended as it began, without US nuclear weapons deployed near battle.
There were numerous atrocities and massacres of civilians throughout the Korean War committed by both sides, starting in the war's first days. On 28 June, North Korean troops committed the Seoul National University Hospital massacre. On the same day, South Korean President Syngman Rhee ordered the Bodo League massacre, beginning mass killings of suspected leftist sympathizers and their families by South Korean officials and right-wing groups. Estimates of those killed during the Bodo League massacre range from at least 60,000–110,000 (Kim Dong-choon) to 200,000 (Park Myung-lim). The British protested to their allies about later South Korean mass executions and saved some citizens.
In 2005–2010, a South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated atrocities and other human rights violations through much of the 20th century, from the Japanese colonial period through the Korean War and beyond. It excavated some mass graves from the Bodo League massacres and confirmed the general outlines of those political executions. Of the Korean War-era massacres the commission was petitioned to investigate, 82% were perpetrated by South Korean forces, with 18% perpetrated by North Korean forces.
The commission also received petitions alleging more than 200 large-scale killings of South Korean civilians by the U.S. military during the war, mostly air attacks. It confirmed eight representative cases of what it found were wrongful U.S. killings of hundreds of South Korean civilians, including refugees crowded into a cave attacked with napalm bombs, which survivors said killed 360 people, and an air attack that killed 197 refugees gathered in a field in the far south. It recommended South Korea seek reparations from the United States, but in 2010 a reorganized commission under a new, conservative government held instead that many such U.S. mass killings resulted from “military necessity.”
In the most notorious U.S. massacre, investigated separately, not by the commission, American troops killed an estimated 250-300 refugees, mostly women and children, at No Gun Ri in central South Korea (26-29 July 1950). U.S. commanders, fearing enemy infiltrators among refugee columns, had adopted a policy of stopping civilian groups approaching U.S. lines, including by gunfire. After years of rejecting survivors’ accounts, the U.S. Army investigated and in 2001 acknowledged the No Gun Ri killings, but claimed they were not ordered and “not a deliberate killing.” South Korean officials, after a parallel investigation, said they believed there were orders to shoot. The survivors’ representatives denounced what they described as a U.S. “whitewash.”
At Geoje prison camp on Geoje Island, Chinese POWs experienced anti-communist lecturing and missionary work from secret agents from the US and Taiwan in No. 71, 72 and 86 camps. Pro-Communist POWs experienced torture, cutting off of limbs, or were executed in public. Being forced to write confession letters and receiving tattoos of an anti-Communism slogan and Flag of the Republic of China were also commonly seen, in case any wanted to go back to mainland China.
Pro-Communist POWs who could not endure the torture formed an underground group to fight the pro-Nationalist POWs secretly by assassination which led to the Geoje Uprising. The rebellion captured Francis Dodd, and was suppressed by the 187th Infantry Regiment.
In the end, 14,235 Chinese POWs went to Taiwan and less than 6,000 POWs went back to mainland China.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16772
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Karl Dönitz
Karl Dönitz (sometimes spelled Doenitz; ; 16 September 1891 24 December 1980) was a German admiral during the Nazi era who briefly succeeded Adolf Hitler as the German head of state in 1945. As Supreme Commander of the Navy since 1943, he played a major role in the naval history of World War II. The Nuremberg Trials court convicted him of war crimes in 1946.
He began his career in the Imperial German Navy before World War I. In 1918, he was commanding when she was sunk by British forces. Dönitz was taken prisoner. While in a prisoner of war camp, he formulated what he later called "Rudeltaktik" ("pack tactic", commonly called "wolfpack").
At the start of World War II, he was the senior submarine officer in the "Kriegsmarine", known as "Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote" (BdU). In January 1943, Dönitz achieved the rank of "Großadmiral" (grand admiral) and replaced Grand Admiral Erich Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. Dönitz was the main enemy of Allied naval forces in the Battle of the Atlantic. From 1939–1943 the U-boats fought effectively but lost the initiative from May 1943. Dönitz ordered his submarines into battle until 1945 to relieve the pressure on other branches of the "Wehrmacht" (armed forces). 648 U-boats were lost—429 with no survivors. A further 215 were lost on their first patrol. Around 30,000 of the 40,000 men to serve on U-boats perished.
On 30 April 1945, after the death of Adolf Hitler and in accordance with Hitler's last will and testament, Dönitz was named Hitler's successor as head of state, with the title of President of Germany and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. On 7 May 1945, he ordered Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations Staff of the OKW, to sign the German instruments of surrender in Reims, France. Dönitz remained as head of the Flensburg Government, as it became known, until it was dissolved by the Allied powers on 23 May.
By his own admission, Dönitz was a dedicated Nazi and supporter of Hitler; he held anti-Semitic beliefs and insisted that "Kriegsmarine" officers adhere to his political views. Following the war, Dönitz was indicted as a major war criminal at the Nuremberg Trials on three counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; and crimes against the laws of war. He was found not guilty of committing crimes against humanity, but guilty of committing crimes against peace and war crimes against the laws of war. He was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment; after his release, he lived in a village near Hamburg until his death in 1980.
Dönitz was born in Grünau near Berlin, Germany, to Anna Beyer and Emil Dönitz, an engineer, in 1891. Karl had an older brother. In 1910, Dönitz enlisted in the "Kaiserliche Marine" ("Imperial Navy").
On 27 September 1913, Dönitz was commissioned as a "Leutnant zur See" (acting sub-lieutenant). When World War I began, he served on the light cruiser in the Mediterranean Sea. In August 1914, the "Breslau" and the battlecruiser were sold to the Ottoman Navy; the ships were renamed the "Midilli" and the "Yavuz Sultan Selim", respectively. They began operating out of Constantinople, under Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, engaging Russian forces in the Black Sea. On 22 March 1916, Dönitz was promoted to "Oberleutnant zur See". He requested a transfer to the submarine forces, which became effective on 1 October 1916. He attended the submariner's school at Flensburg-Mürwik and passed out on 3 January 1917. He served as watch officer on , and from February 1918 onward as commander of . On 2 July 1918, he became commander of , operating in the Mediterranean. On 4 October, after suffering technical difficulties, Dönitz was forced to surface and scuttled his boat. He was captured by the British and remained a prisoner of war until 1919, in 1920 he returned to Germany.
On 27 May 1916, Dönitz married a nurse named Ingeborg Weber (1894–1962), the daughter of German general Erich Weber (1860–1933). They had three children whom they raised as Protestant Christians: daughter Ursula (1917–1990) and sons Klaus (1920–1944) and Peter (1922–1943). Both of Dönitz's sons were killed during the Second World War. Peter was killed on 19 May 1943 when was sunk in the North Atlantic with all hands.
Hitler had issued a policy stating that if a senior officer such as Dönitz lost a son in battle and had other sons in the military, the latter could withdraw from combat and return to civilian life.
After Peter's death Klaus was forbidden to have any combat role and was allowed to leave the military to begin studying to become a naval doctor. He returned to sea and was killed on 13 May 1944; he had persuaded his friends to let him go on the E-boat "S-141" for a raid on Selsey on his 24th birthday. The boat was sunk by the French destroyer "La Combattante".
He continued his naval career in the naval arm of the Weimar Republic's armed forces. On 10 January 1921, he became a "Kapitänleutnant" (lieutenant) in the new German navy ("Vorläufige Reichsmarine"). Dönitz commanded torpedo boats, becoming a "Korvettenkapitän" (lieutenant-commander) on 1 November 1928. On 1 September 1933, he became a "Fregattenkapitän" (commander) and, in 1934, was put in command of the cruiser "Emden", the ship on which cadets and midshipmen took a year-long world cruise as training.
In 1935, the "Reichsmarine" was renamed "Kriegsmarine". Germany was prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles from possessing a submarine fleet. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 allowed submarines and he was placed in command of the U-boat flotilla "Weddigen", which comprised three boats; ; and; . On 1 September 1935, he was promoted to "Kapitän zur See" (naval captain).
Dönitz opposed Raeder's views that surface ships should be given priority in the "Kriegsmarine" during the war, but in 1935 Dönitz doubted U-boat suitability in a naval trade war on account of their slow speed. This phenomenal contrast with Dönitz's wartime policy is explained in the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement. The accord was viewed by the navy with optimism, Dönitz included. He remarked, "Britain, in the circumstances, could not possibly be included in the number of potential enemies." The statement, made after June 1935, was uttered at a time when the naval staff were sure France and the Soviet Union were likely to be Germany's only enemies. Dönitz's statement was partially correct. Britain was not foreseen as an immediate enemy, but the navy still held onto a cadre of imperial officers, which along with its Nazi-instigated intake, understood war would be certain in the distant future, perhaps not until the mid-1940s.
Dönitz came to recognise the need for more of these vessels. Only 26 were in commission or under construction that summer. In the time before his command wth submarines, he perfected the group tactics that first appealed to him in 1917. At this time Dönitz first expressed his procurement policies. His preference for the submarine fleet was in the production of large numbers of small craft. In contrast to other warships, the fighting power of the U-boat in his opinion did not fluctuate in relation to its size for the torpedo, not the gun, was the machine's main weapon. Dönitz had a tendency to be critical of larger submarines and listed a number of disadvantages in their production, operation and tactical use. Dönitz recommended the Type VII submarine as the ideal submarine. The boat was reliable and had a range of 6,200 miles. Modifications lengthened this to 8,700 miles.
Dönitz revived Hermann Bauer's idea of grouping several submarines together into a "Rudeltaktik" ("pack tactic", commonly called "wolfpack") to overwhelm a merchant convoy's escorts. Implementation of wolfpacks had been difficult in World War I owing to the limitations of available radios. In the interwar years, Germany had developed ultrahigh frequency transmitters, while the Enigma cipher machine was believed to have made communications secure. A 1922 paper written by "Kapitäinleutnant" Wessner of the "Wehrabteilung" (Defence Ministry) pointed to the success of surface attacks at night and the need to coordinate operations with multiple boats to defeat the escorts. Dönitz knew of the paper and improved the ideas suggested by Wassner. This tactic had the added advantage that a submarine on the surface was undetectable by Asdic. Dönitz claimed after the war he would not allow his service to be intimidated by British disclosures about Asdic and the course of the war had proven him right. In reality, Dönitz harboured fears stretching back to 1937 that the new technology would render the U-boat impotent. Dönitz published his ideas on night attacks in January 1939 in a booklet called "Die U-Bootwaffe" which apparently went unnoticed by the British. The Royal Navy's overconfidence in Asdic encouraged the Admiralty to suppose it could deal with submarines whatever strategy they adopted—in this they were proven wrong; submarines were difficult to locate and destroy under operational conditions.
In 1939 he expressed his belief that he could win the war with 300 vessels. The Nazi leadership's rearmament priorities were fundamentally geared to land and aerial warfare. From 1933–1936, the navy was granted only 13 percent of total armament expenditure. The production of U-boats, despite the existing Z Plan, remained low. In 1935 shipyards produced 14 submarines, 21 in 1936, one 1937. In 1938 nine were commissioned and in 1939 18 U-boats were built. Dönitz's vision may have been misguided. The British had planned for contingency construction programmes for the summer, 1939. At least 78 small escorts and a crash construction programme of "Whale catchers" had been invoked. The British, according to one historian, had taken all the sensible steps necessary to deal with the U-boat menace as it existed in 1939 and were well placed to deal with large numbers of submarines, prior to events in 1940.
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II began. On Sunday 3 September, Dönitz chaired a conference at Wilhelmshaven. At 11:15 am the British Admiralty sent out a signal "Total Germany". B-Dienst intercepted the message and it was promptly reported to Dönitz. Dönitz paced around the room and his staff purportedly heard him repeatedly say, "My God! So it's war with England again!"
Dönitz abandoned the conference to return within the hour a far more composed man. He announced to his officers, "we know our enemy. We have today the weapon and a leadership that can face up to this enemy. The war will last a long time; but if each does his duty we will win." Dönitz had only 57 boats; of those, 27 were capable of reaching the Atlantic ocean from their German bases. A small building program was already underway but the number of U-boats did not rise noticeably until the autumn of 1941.
Dönitz's first major action was the cover up of the sinking of the British passenger liner "Athenia" later the same day. Acutely sensitive to international opinion and relations with the United States, the death of more than a hundred civilians was damaging. Dönitz suppressed the truth that the ship was sunk by a German submarine. He accepted the commander's explanation that he genuinely believed the ship was armed. Dönitz ordered the engagement to be struck from the submarine's logbook. Dönitz did not admit the cover up until 1946.
Hitler's original orders to wage war only in accordance with the Prize Regulations, were not issued in any altruistic spirit but in the belief hostilities with the Western Allies would be brief. On 23 September 1939, Hitler, on the recommendation of Admiral Raeder, approved that all merchant ships making use of their wireless on being stopped by U-boats should be sunk or captured. This German order marked a considerable step towards unrestricted warfare. Four days later enforcement of Prize Regulations in the North Sea was withdrawn; and on 2 October complete freedom was given to attack darkened ships encountered off the British and French coasts. Two days later the Prize Regulations were cancelled in waters extending as far as 15° West, and on 17 October the German Naval Staff gave U-boats permission to attack without warning all ships identified as hostile. The zone where darkened ships could be attacked with complete freedom was extended to 20° West on 19 October. Practically the only restrictions now placed on U-boats concerned attacks on passenger liners and, on 17 November, they too were allowed to be attacked without warning if clearly identifiable as hostile.
Although the phrase was not used, by November 1939 the BdU was practicing unrestricted submarine warfare. Neutral shipping was warned by the Germans against entering the zone which, by American neutrality legislation, was forbidden to American shipping, and against steaming without lights, zigzagging or taking any defensive precautions. The complete practice of unrestricted warfare was not enforced for fear of antagonising neutral powers, particularly the Americans. Admirals Raeder and Dönitz and the German Naval Staff had always wished and intended to introduce unrestricted warfare as rapidly as Hitler could be persuaded to accept the possible consequences.
Dönitz and Raeder accepted the death of the Z Plan upon the outbreak of war. The U-boat programme would be the only portion of it to survive 1939. Both men lobbied Hitler to increase the planned production of submarines to at least 29 per month. The immediate obstacle to the proposals was Hermann Göring, head of the Four Year Plan, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and future successor to Hitler. Göring would not acquiesce and in March 1940 Raeder was forced to drop the figure from 29 to 25, but even that plan proved illusory. In the first half of 1940, two boats were delivered, increased to six in the final half of the year. In 1941 the deliveries increased to 13 to June, and then 20 to December. It was not until late 1941 the number of vessels began to increase quickly. From September 1939 through to March 1940, 15 U-boats were lost—nine to convoy escorts. The impressive tonnage sunk had little impact on the Allied war effort at that point.
On 1 October 1939, Dönitz became a "Konteradmiral" (rear admiral) and "Commander of the Submarines" ("Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote", "BdU"). For the first part of the war, despite disagreements with Raeder where best to deploy his men, Dönitz was given considerable operational freedom for his junior rank.
From September–December 1939 U-boats sank 221 ships for 755, 237 gross tons, at the cost of nine U-Boats. Only 47 merchant ships were sunk in the North Atlantic, a tonnage of 249,195. Dönitz had difficulty in organising Wolfpack operations in 1939. A number of his submarines were lost en route to the Atlantic, through either the North Sea and heavily defended English Channel. Torpedo failures plagued commanders during convoy attacks. Along with successes against single ships, Dönitz authorised the abandonment of pack attacks in the autumn. The Norwegian Campaign amplified the defects. Dönitz wrote in May 1940, "I doubt whether men have ever had to rely on such a useless weapon." He ordered the removal of magnetic pistols in favour of contact fuses and their faulty depth control systems. In no fewer than 40 attacks on Allied warships, not a single sinking was achieved. The statistics show that from the outbreak of war to approximately the spring, 1940, faulty German torpedoes saved 50–60 ships equating to .
Dönitz was encouraged in operations against warships by the sinking of aircraft carrier "Courageous". On 28 September 1939 he said, "it is not true Britain possesses the means to eliminate the U-boat menace." The first specific operation, named "Special Operation P", authorised by Dönitz was Günther Prien's attack on Scapa Flow which sank a battleship. The attack became a propaganda success though Prien purportedly was unenthusiastic about being used that way. Stephen Roskill wrote, "It is now known that this operation was planned with great care by Admiral Dönitz, who was correctly informed of the weak state of the defences of the eastern entrances. Full credit must also be given to Lieutenant Prien for the nerve and determination with which he put Dönitz's plan into execution."
In May 1940, 101 ships were sunk—but only nine in the Atlantic—followed by 140 in June; 53 of them in the Atlantic for a total of that month. The first six months in 1940 cost Dönitz 15 U-Boats. Until mid-1940 there remained a chronic problem with the reliability of the G7e torpedo. As the battles of Norway and Western Europe raged, the "Luftwaffe" sank more ships than the U-boats. In May 1940, German aircraft sank 48 ships (), three times that of German submarines. The Allied evacuations from western Europe and Scandinavia in June 1940 attracted Allied warships in large numbers, leaving many of the Atlantic convoys travelling through the Western Approaches unprotected. From June 1940, the German submarines began to exact a heavy toll. In the same month, the "Luftwaffe" sank just 22 ships () in a reversal of the previous months.
Germany's defeat of Norway gave the U-boats new bases much nearer to their main area of operations off the Western Approaches. The U-boats operated in groups or 'wolf packs' which were coordinated by radio from land. With the fall of France, Germany acquired U-boat bases at Lorient, Brest, St Nazaire, and La Pallice/La Rochelle and Bordeaux. This extended the range of Type VIIs. Regardless, the war with Britain continued. The admiral remained sceptical of Operation Sea Lion, a planned invasion and expected a long war. The destruction of seaborne trade became German strategy against Britain after the defeat of the "Luftwaffe" in the Battle of Britain. Hitler was content with The Blitz and cutting off Britain's imports. Dönitz gained importance as the prospect of a quick victory faded. Dönitz concentrated groups of U-boats against the convoys and had them attack on the surface at night. In addition the Germans were helped by Italian submarines which in early 1941 actually surpassed the number of German U-boats. Having failed to persuade the Nazi leadership to prioritise U-boat construction, a task made more difficult by military victories in 1940 which convinced many people that Britain would give up the struggle, Dönitz welcomed the deployment of 26 Italian submarines to his force. Dönitz complimented Italian bravery and daring, but was critical of their training and submarine designs. Dönitz remarked they lacked the necessary toughness and discipline and consequently were "of no great assistance to us in the Atlantic."
The establishment of German bases on the French Atlantic coast allowed for the prospect of aerial support. Small numbers of German aircraft, such as the long-range Focke-Wulf Fw 200, sank a large number of ships in the Atlantic in the last quarter of 1940. In the long term, Göring proved an insurmountable problem in effecting cooperation between the navy and the "Luftwaffe". In early 1941, while Göring was on leave, Dönitz approached Hitler and secured from him a single bomber/maritime patrol unit for navy. Göring succeeded in overturning this decision and both Dönitz and Raeder were forced to settle for a specialist maritime air command under "Luftwaffe" control. Poorly supplied, "Fliegerführer Atlantik" achieved modest success in 1941, but thereafter failed to have an impact as British counter-measures evolved. Cooperation between the "Kriegsmarine" and "Luftwaffe" remained dysfunctional to the war's end. Göring and his unassailable position at the "Reichsluftfahrtministerium" (Air Ministry) prevented all but limited collaboration.
The U-boat fleet's successes in 1940 and early 1941 were spearheaded by a small number of highly trained and experienced pre-war commanders. Otto Kretschmer, Joachim Schepke, Günther Prien were the most famous, but others included Hans Jenisch, Victor Oehrn, Engelbert Endrass, Herbert Schulze and Hans-Rudolf Rösing. Although skilled and with impecceable judgement, the shipping lanes they descended upon were poorly defended. The U-boat force did not escape unscathed. Within the space of several days in March 1941, Prien and Schepke were dead and Kretschmer was a prisoner. All of them fell in battle with a convoy system. The number of boats in the Atlantic remained low. Six fewer existed in May 1940 than in September 1939. In January 1941 there were just six on station in the Atlantic—the lowest during the war, while still suffering from unreliable torpedoes. Dönitz insisted that operations continue while "the smallest prospect of hits" remained.
For his part, Dönitz was involved in the daily operations of his boats and all the major operational level decisions. His assistant, Eberhard Godt, was left to manage daily operations as the war continued. Dönitz was debriefed personally by his captains which helped establish a rapport between leader and led. Dönitz neglected nothing that would make the bond firmer. Often there would be a distribution of medals or awards. As an ex-submariner, Dönitz did not like to contemplate the thought of a man who had done well heading out to sea, perhaps never to return, without being rewarded or receiving recognition. Dönitz acknowledged where decorations were concerned there was no red tape and that awards were "psychologically important."
Intelligence played an important role in the Battle of the Atlantic. In general, BdU intelligence was poor. Counter-intelligence was not much better. At the height of the battle in mid-1943 some 2,000 signals were sent from the 110 U-Boats at sea. Radio traffic compromised his ciphers by giving the Allies more messages to work with. Furthermore, replies from the boats enabled the Allies to use direction finding (HF/DF, called "Huff-Duff") to locate a U-boat using its radio, track it and attack it. The over-centralised command structure of BdU and its insistence on micro-managing every aspect of U-boat operations with endless signals provided the Allied navies with enormous intelligence. The enormous "paper chase" [cross-referencing of materials] operations pursued by Allied intelligence agencies was not thought possible by BdU. The Germans did not suspect the Allies had identified the codes broken by B-Dienst. Conversely, when Dönitz suspected the enemy had penetrated his own communications BdU's response was to suspect internal sabotage and reduce the number of the staff officers to the most reliable, exacerbating the problem of over-centralisation. In contrast to the Allies, the "Wehrmacht" was suspicious of civilian scientific advisors and generally distrusted outsiders. The Germans were never as open to new ideas or thinking of war in intelligence terms. According to one analyst BdU "lacked imagination and intellectual daring" in the naval war. These Allied advantages failed to avert heavy losses in the June 1940 May 1941 period, known to U-Boat crews as the "First Happy Time." In June 1941, 68 ships were sunk in the North Atlantic () at a cost of four U-Boats, but the German submarines would not eclipse that number for the remainder of the year. Just 10 transports were sunk in November and December 1941.
On 7 May 1941, the Royal Navy captured the German Arctic meteorological vessel "München" and took its Enigma machine intact, this allowed the Royal Navy to decode U-boat radio communications in June 1941. Two days later the capture of "U-110" was an intelligence coup for the British. The settings for high-level "officer-only" signals, "short-signals" ("Kurzsignale") and codes standardising messages to defeat HF/DF fixes by sheer speed were found. Only the "Hydra" settings for May were missing. The papers were the only stores destroyed by the crew. The capture on 28 June of another weather ship, "Lauenburg", enabled British decryption operations to read radio traffic in July 1941. Beginning in August 1941, Bletchley Park operatives could decrypt signals between Dönitz and his U-boats at sea without any restriction. The capture of the "U-110" allowed the Admiralty to identify individual boats, their commanders, operational readiness, damage reports, location, type, speed, endurance from working up in the Baltic to Atlantic patrols. On 1 February 1942, the Germans had introduced the M4 cipher machine, which secured communications until it was cracked in December 1942. Even so, the U-boats achieved their best success against the convoys in March 1943, due to an increase in U-boat numbers, and the protection of the shipping lines was in jeopardy. Due to the cracked M4 and the use of radar, the Allies began to send air and surface reinforcements to convoys under threat. The shipping lines were secured, which came as a great surprise to Dönitz. The lack of intelligence and increased numbers of U-boats contributed enormously to Allied losses that year.
Signals security aroused Dönitz's suspicions during the war. On 12 January 1942 German supply submarine "U-459" arrived 800 nautical miles west of Freetown, well clear of convoy lanes. It was scheduled to rendezvous with an Italian submarine, until intercepted by a warship. The German captain's report coincided with reports of a decrease in sightings and a period of tension between Dönitz and Raeder. The number of U-boats in the Atlantic, by logic, should have increased, not lowered the number of sightings and the reasons for this made Dönitz uneasy. Despite several investigations, the conclusions of the BdU staff was that "Engima" was impenetrable. His signals officer responded to the "U-459" incident with answers ranging from coincidence, direction finding to Italian treachery. General Erich Fellgiebel, Chief Signal Officer of Army High Command and of Supreme Command of Armed Forces ("Chef des Heeresnachrichtenwesens"), apparently concurred with Dönitz. He concluded that there was "convincing evidence" that, after an "exhaustive investigation" that the Allied codebreakers had been reading high level communications. Other departments in the navy downplayed or dismissed these concerns. They vaguely implied "some components" of Enigma had been compromised, but there was "no real basis for acute anxiety as regards any compromise of operational security."
Following Hitler's declaration of war on the United States on 11 December 1941, Dönitz implemented Operation Drumbeat ("Unternehmen Paukenschlag"). The entry of the United States benefited German submarines in the short term. Dönitz intended to strike close to shore in American and Canadian waters and prevent the convoys—the most effective anti–U-boat system—from ever forming. Dönitz was determined to take advantage of Canadian and American unpreparedness before the situation changed.
The problem inhibiting Dönitz's plan was a lack of boats. On paper he had 259, but in January 1942, 99 were still undergoing sea trials and 59 were assigned to training flotillas, leaving only 101 on war operations. 35 of these were under repair in port, leaving 66 operational, of which 18 were low on fuel and returning to base, 23 were en route to areas where fuel and torpedoes needed to be conserved, and one was heading to the Mediterranean. Therefore, on 1 January Dönitz had a fighting strength of 16–25 in the Atlantic (six near to Iceland on "Norwegian operations"), three in the Arctic Ocean, three in the Mediterranean and three operating west of Gibraltar. Dönitz was severely limited to what he could accomplish in American waters in an initial offensive.
From 13 January 1942, Dönitz planned to begin a surprise offensive from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to Cape Hatteras. Unknown to him, ULTRA had read his Enigma signals and knew the position, size, and intentions of his boats, down to the date the operation was scheduled to begin. The attacks, when they came, were not a surprise. Of the 12 U-boats that began the offensive from the Grand Banks southward, just two survived the war. The operation began the Battle of the St. Lawrence, a series of battles which lasted into 1944. It remained possible for a U-boat to operate in the Gulf into 1944, but countermeasures were strong. In 1942, the global ratio of ships-to-U-boats sunk in Canadian waters was 112:1. The global average was 10.3:1. The solitary kill was achieved by the RCAF. Canadian operations, as with American efforts, were a failure during this year.
Along with conventional U-boat operations Dönitz authorised clandestine activities in Canadian waters, including spying, mine-laying, and recovery of German prisoners of war (as Dönitz wished to extract information from rescued submariners concerning Allied tactics). All of these things tied down Canadian military power and imposed industrial, fiscal, and psychological costs. The impunity with which U-boats carried out these operations in Canadian waters into 1944 provided a propaganda effect. . One of these operations was the well-known Operation Kiebitz to rescue Otto Kretschmer.
Even with operational problems great success was achieved in American waters. From January to July 1942, Dönitz's submarines were able to attack un-escorted ships off the United States' east coast and in the Caribbean Sea; U-boats sank more ships and tonnage than at any other time in the war. After a convoy system was introduced to protect the shipping, Dönitz shifted his U-boats back to the North Atlantic. The period, known in the U-Boat Arm as the "Second Happy Time", represented one of the greatest naval disasters of all time, and largest defeat suffered by American sea power. The success was achieved with only five U-Boats initially which sank 397 ships in waters protected by the United States Navy with an additional 23 sunk at the Panama Sea Frontier. Dönitz put the successes down to the American failure to initialize a blackout along the East Coast of the United States and ship captains' insistence on following peace-time safety procedures. The failure to implement a blackout stemmed from the American government's concern it would affect tourism trade. Dönitz wrote in his memoirs that the lighthouses and buoys "shone forth, though perhaps a little less brightly than usually".
By the time improved American air and naval defences had driven German submarines from American shores, 5,000 Allied sailors had been killed for negligible losses in U-Boats. Dönitz ordered simultaneous operations in the Caribbean Sea. The ensuing Battle of the Caribbean resulted in immediate dividends for U-boats. In a short time, at least 100 transports had been destroyed or sunk. The sinkings damaged inter-island trade substantially. Operation Neuland was among the most damaging naval campaigns in the region. Oil refinery production in region declined while the tanker fleet suffered losses of up to ten percent within twenty-four hours. However, ultimately Dönitz could not hope to sink more ships than American industry could build, so he targeted the tanker fleet in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico in the hope that depleted oil transport would paralyze shipyard output. 33 transports were sunk in July before Dönitz lost his first crew. The USN introduced effective convoy systems thereafter, ending the "carnage."
Dönitz maintained his demands for the concentration of all his crews in the Atlantic. As the military situation in North Africa and on the Eastern Front began to deteriorate Hitler diverted a number of submarines to the Battle of the Mediterranean upon the suggestions of Admiral Eberhard Weichold. Raeder and Dönitz resisted the deployment to the Mediterranean to no avail. Hitler felt compelled to act against Allied sea forces which were having an enormous impact on Axis supply lines to North Africa. The decision defied logic, for a victory in the Atlantic would end the war in the Mediterranean. The U-boat war in the Mediterranean was a costly failure, despite successes against warships. Approximately 60 crews were lost and only one crew managed to withdraw through the Strait of Gibraltar. Albrecht Brandi was one of Dönitz's highest performers but his record is a matter of controversy; post-war records prove systematic over-claiming of sinkings. He survived his boat's sinking and was smuggled to Germany through Spain. Dönitz had met his end as a submarine commander in the Mediterranean two decades earlier.
In 1942 Dönitz summed up his philosophy in one simple paragraph; "The enemy's shipping constitutes one single, great entity. It is therefore immaterial where a ship is sunk. Once it has been destroyed it has to be replaced by a new ship; and that's that." The remark was the green light to unrestricted submarine warfare and began the tonnage war proper. BdU intelligence concluded the Americans could produce 15,300,000 tons of shipping in 1942 and 1943—two million tons under actual production figures. Dönitz always calculated the worst case scenario using the highest figures of enemy production potential. Some 700,000 tons per month needed to be sunk to win the war. The "second happy time" reached a peak in June 1942, with 325,000 tons sunk, up from 311,000 in May, 255,000 in April and the highest since the 327,000 tons sunk in March 1942. With support from the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy, the new convoy systems compelled Dönitz to withdraw his captains to the mid-Atlantic once again. Nevertheless, there was still cause for optimism. B-Dienst had cracked the convoy ciphers and by July 1942 he could call upon 311 boats, 140 operational, to conduct a renewed assault. By October 1942 he had 196 operational from 365. Dönitz's force finally reached the desired number both he and Raeder had hoped for in 1939. Unaware of it, Dönitz and his men were aided by the ULTRA blackout. The addition of a fourth rotor to the Enigma left radio detection the only way to gather intelligence on dispositions and intentions of the German naval forces. German code breakers had their own success in the capture of the code book to Cipher Code Number 3 from a merchant ship. It was as treble success for the BdU.
Dönitz was content that he now had the naval power to extend U-boat operations to other areas aside the North Atlantic. The Caribbean, Brazilian waters with the coast of West Africa designated operational theatres. Waters in the southern hemisphere to South Africa could also be attacked with the new Type IX submarine. The strategy was sound and his tactical ideas were effective. The number of boats available allowed him to form Wolfpacks to comb convoy routes from east to west attacking one when found and pursuing it across the ocean. The pack then refuelled from a U-boat tanker and worked from west to east. Raeder and the operations staff disputed the value in attacking convoys heading westward with empty cargo holds. The tactics were successful but placed great strain on crews who spent up to eight days in constant action.
November 1942 was a new high in the Atlantic. 134 ships were sunk for 807,754 tons. 119 were destroyed by submarines, 83 (508,707 tons) in the Atlantic. The same month Dönitz suffered strategic defeat. His submarines failed to prevent Operation Torch, even with 196 of them operating in the Atlantic. Dönitz considered it a major self-inflicted defeat. Allied morale radically improved after the victories of Torch, Second Battle of El Alamein and Battle of Stalingrad; all occurred within days of one another. The U-boat war was the only military success the Germans enjoyed at the end of the year.
On 30 January 1943, Dönitz replaced Erich Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy ("Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine") and "Großadmiral" (grand admiral) of the Naval High Command ("Oberkommando der Marine"). In a communique to the navy he announced his intentions to retain practical control of the U-boats and his desire to fight to the end for Hitler. Dönitz's inability to delegate control of the U-boat service has been construed as a weakness in the U-boat arm, contributing to the perception that Dönitz was an "impatient warrior", preoccuppied with fighting battles and tactics rather than a strategist or organiser.
Dönitz's promotion earned Hitler his undying loyalty. For Dönitz, Hitler had given him a "true home-coming at last, to a country in which unemployment appeared to have been abolished, the class war no longer tore the nation apart, and the shame of defeat in 1918 was being expunged." When war came, Dönitz became more firmly wedded to his Nazi faith. Hitler recognised his patriotism, professionalism but above all, his loyalty. Dönitz remained so, long after the war was lost. In so doing, he wilfully ignored the genocidal nature of the regime and claimed ignorance of the Holocaust.
In the last quarter of 1942, 69 submarines had been commissioned taking the total number to 393, with 212 operational. Dönitz was not satisfied and immediately began a naval construction programme which in contrast to Raeder's, laid all its emphasis on torpedo boats and submarines. Dönitz's proposed expansion ran into difficulties experienced by all of his predecessors; the lack of steel. The navy had no representation in or to Albert Speer's armament ministry for naval production was the only sphere not under his control. Dönitz understood this worked against the navy because it lacked the elasticity to cope with breakdowns of production at any point, whereas the other services could make good production by compensating one sector at the expense of another. Without any representatives the battle of priorities was left to Speer and Göring. Dönitz had the sense to place U-boat production under Speer on the proviso 40 per month were completed. Dönitz persuaded Hitler not to scrap the surface fleet capital ships, though they played no role in the Atlantic during his time in command. Dönitz reasoned the destruction of the surface fleet would provide the British with a victory and heap pressure on the U-boats, for these warships were tying down British air and naval forces that would otherwise be sent into the Atlantic.
New construction procedures, dispensing with prototypes and the abandonment of modifications reduced construction times from 460,000-man hours to 260–300,000 to meet Speer's quota. In the spring 1944, the Type XXI submarine was scheduled to reach frontline units. In 1943 however, the Combined Bomber Offensive complicated the planned production. Dönitz and Speer were appalled by the destruction of Hamburg, a major construction site. The battles of 1943 and 1944 were fought with the existing VII and Type IX submarines. The type VII remained the backbone of the fleet in 1943.
At the end of 1942, Dönitz was faced with the appearance of escort carriers, and long-range aircraft working with convoy escorts. To protect his boats against the latter, he ordered his boats to restrict their operations to the Mid-Atlantic Gap , a stretch of ocean out of the range of land‐based aircraft referred to by the Germans as "the black hole." Allied air forces had few aircraft equipped with ASV radar for U-Boat detection into April and May 1943, and such units would not exist in Newfoundland until June. Convoys relied on RAF Coastal Command aircraft operating from Northern Ireland and Iceland. The aircraft imposed restraints on U-boat captains, who feared them for their ability to sink a submarine or alert surface warships to their position. In 1942 Coastal Command began forming units combined with ASV and Leigh Light groups to attack U-boats in transit to the Atlantic via the Bay of Biscay, which continued into 1943. The Command was moderately successful after mid-1942.
1943 began with continued tactical success for Dönitz in battle. In January Convoy TM 1 was nearly destroyed. The loss of 100,000 tons of fuel in one convoy represented the most devastating loss percentage of the war—only two of nine tankers reached port. The British 8th Army were forced to ration their fuel for a time, earning Dönitz the gratitude of the Afrika Korps. The Casablanca Conference, held that month, identified the Atlantic as the urgent priority. It was agreed that until the defeat of Dönitz and his men, there could be no amphibious landings in continental Europe. Unknown to Dönitz, Bletchley Park had restored the flow of Enigma information and the Admiralty was able to re-route convoys around wolfpacks. During January and February 1943 information was decrypted within 24 hours proving operationally useful, although this slipped at the end of the second month contributing to German interceptions. Even so, in appalling hunter weather, the Germans sank only 44 ships during the month, even with 100 U-boats at sea, the majority stationed in the mid-Atlantic air gap.
In February 1943 the strength of Allied defences were an ominous sign for Dönitz. The battle of HX 224 was ended upon the intervention of air power from Iceland. Dönitz sent 20 boats to attack SC 118 and both sides suffered heavy losses—11 merchants for three U-boats plus four damaged. It was "what both sides considered one of the hardest fought battles of the Atlantic war." Despite sending 20 crews into action, Dönitz was concerned that most captains did not press home attacks. The majority of the ships sunk were by one crew, commanded by Siegfried von Forstner—he sank seven.
In March, Convoy SC 121 was attacked by 31 U-boats in two patrol lines. It was the most successful battle of the war for Dönitz. The battle of Convoys HX 229/SC 122 was the largest convoy battle, with 40 U-boats involved. Each operation was successful, but all were fought in the mid-Atlantic. Allied losses reached a peak in March 1943. The Admiralty later issued a report on the matter; "The Germans never came so near [to] disrupting communications between the new world and the old as in the first twenty days of March 1943." Dönitz later conceded the March battles were to be the U-boats last victories. New Allied techniques, tactics and technology began to turn the tide. By April 1943 U-boat morale was reaching a crisis point. 98 new boats were sent into the Atlantic that month, and although the training was thorough the crews were inexperienced and it showed. 15 U-boats were destroyed in March 1943 and another 15 in April. Werner Hartenstein and Johann Mohr were notable casualties over the course of these eight weeks; the former's decision to rescue survivors of a sunken ship led to Dönitz's Laconia Order, which later formed part of the criminal case against Dönitz.
Ominous for BdU was the sudden growth of Allied air power. The Allied command accepted that air cover over the mid-Atlantic was totally inadequate and had drawn attention to the fact that not one VLR (Very Long Range) aircraft was to be found at any Allied air base west of Iceland. The Americans released 255 Liberators for the North Atlantic. At the end of March 1943 20 VLR aircraft were operational rising to 41 by mid-April, all of them flown by British crews. 28 anti-submarine and 11 anti-shipping squadrons were available to RAF Coastal Command, 619 aircraft in all—a striking change since September 1939. The influx of radar equipped aircraft into mid-Atlantic was matched by air patrols over the Bay of Biscay. Dönitz detected a drop in morale among his captains, as did the British. Dönitz encouraged his commanders to show a "hunter's instinct" and "warrior spirit" in the face of the air–surface support group threat.
Along with air power, the BdU was forced to contend with a large increase in available Allied convoy escorts which replenished their tanks from tankers in the convoys allowing escort across the ocean. The escort carrier support groups, protected by destroyers, which, in the words of the official naval historian of the Second World War, proved decisive; "it was the advent of the Support Groups, the Escort Carriers and the Very Long Range Aircraft which turned the tables on the U-boats-and did so with astonishing rapidity."
108 ships were sunk in the first 20 days of March, and just 15 in the last 10. The official naval historian wrote, "The collapse of the enemy's offensive, when it came, was so sudden that it took him completely by surprise. We now know that, in fact, a downward trend in the U-boats' recent accomplishments could have forewarned him, but was concealed from him by the exaggerated claims made by their commanders." In April Dönitz lost five crews to Coastal Command's ASV Bay offensive. Encouraged by the isolated successes of anti-aircraft artillery installed on submarines, he ordered crews to stay on the surface and fight it out with the aircraft. The decision caused casualties—four boats were lost in the first week of May alone, and three more by the end.
For the month of April Allied losses fell to 56 ships of 327,943 tons. In May 1943 the battle reached a climax with the battles of Convoy ONS 5, Convoy SC 129, Convoy SC 130. Throughout the battles only two ships were sunk in convoy in the Atlantic while an air anti-submarine escort was present. Dönitz depended on the surface manoeuvreability of his U-boats to locate targets, assemble wolfpacks and the complicated business of positioning his forces ahead of a convoy for an attack. Allied air power determined where and when U-boats could move freely surfaced. It was the combination of convoy escorts and air power that made the Atlantic unsuitable for pack operations. The US Navy introduced the K-class blimp. They forced a commander to dive to prevent the vehicle marking his position or attacking directly. From 10–24 May 1943, ten convoys passed through the mid-Atlantic. Six of the 370 ships were sunk; three were stragglers. 13 U-boats were sunk; four by warships, seven by aircraft, and two shared.
By 24 May, when Dönitz conceded defeat and withdrew the surviving crews from the field of battle, they had already lost 33 U-boats. At the end of May it had risen to 41. Dönitz tried to limit the damage to morale by declaring that the withdrawal was only temporary "to avoid unnecessary losses in a period when our weapons are shown to be at a disadvantage" and that "the battle in the north Atlantic—the decisive area-will be resumed." Dönitz did make a further attempt to regain the initiative, but the battle never reached the same pitch of intensity, or hung in the balance, as during the spring of 1943. Consequently, the Allied success is described as decisive in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. On 24 May Dönitz ordered the suspension of Atlantic operations, bringing an end to Black May.
Defeat in the mid-Atlantic left Dönitz in a dilemma. The U-boats had proven unable to elude convoy escorts and attack convoys with success. He was concerned about crew morale suffering from idleness and a loss of experience with the latest Allied developments in anti-submarine warfare. Aside from problems of seaworthiness among machines and crew, there were not enough Submarine pens to store idle boats and they were a target for aircraft in port. Dönitz would not withdraw his submarines from combat operations, for he felt the ships, men and aircraft engaged in suppressing the U-boats could then be turned on Germany directly. The U-boat war was to continue.
From mid-June 1943 the technological and industrial superiority of the Allied navies allowed the Americans, Canadians, and British to form hunter-killer groups consisting of fast anti-submarine escorts and aircraft carriers. The purpose of naval operations changed from avoiding U-boats and safeguarding convoys to seeking them out and destroying them where ever they operated. USN hunter-killer groups operated throughout the Atlantic. Argentia had been an important base for the naval taskforces until superseded by the Royal Canadian Navy in early 1943. U-boat operations were "crushed" by these task forces: 14 were sunk and only two of seven crews operating in Brazilian waters returned to Germany.
Dönitz reacted by deploying his U-boats near the Azores where land-based aircraft still had difficulty reaching them. In this region he hoped to threaten the Gibraltar—Britain convoy route. Dönitz intended to concentrate his power in a rough arc from West Africa to South America and the Caribbean. He hoped to maintain a presence in the western and central Atlantic, reduce losses and await new weapons and anti-detection devices. In this, he failed to "stem the tide of U-boat losses." A large portion of the 39 U-boats deployed on these operations were intercepted. From May 1943, one historian wrote "U-boats rash enough to close with an Atlantic convoy...were simply inviting destruction."
Dönitz's crews faced danger from the outset. The transit routes through the Bay of Biscay were heavily patrolled by aircraft. From May to December 1943, 25 U-boats were sunk by Coastal Command, more were sunk by the USAAF and Royal Navy—five and four respectively; with one shared by the navy and Coastal Command. To counter radar aircraft, Dönitz ordered his submarines to group together and merge their powerful anti-aircraft armament together while surfaced and recharging their batteries, after initially ordering the groups to remain surfaced throughout the journey and fight off aerial attackers with gunfire. The decision was to cost BdU heavy casualties. A group of U-boats were more likely to attract a radar contact, and Allied pilots soon learned to swarm their targets. Dönitz ordered his captains to traverse the Bay under the lee of the neutral Spanish coast, with a sharply rising coast which shielded U-boats from radar. After 4 August 1943, the number of destroyed U-boats fell from one every four days, to one every 27 until June 1944.
US hunter–killer groups extended their patrols to the central Atlantic in the summer. They sank 15 U-boats from June through to August 1943. A number of supply submarines were destroyed crippling the Germans ability to conduct long range operations. At the end of the summer, practically all supply U-boats had been destroyed. In September 1943, Dönitz ordered his submarines back to the North Atlantic. U-boats were equipped with the G7es torpedo, an acoustic torpedo, which the grand admiral hoped would wrest the technological initiative back. The torpedo was the centre piece to Dönitz's plan. Great faith was also placed in the installation of "Wanze" radar to detect aircraft. It was intended as a successor to the Metox radar detector. A number of his boats were later retrofitted with the submarine snorkel, permitting the submarine to stay submerged. Dönitz placed much faith in the Type XXI submarine. He accepted that the older submarines were obsolete now that Allied defences in the air were complete. He required a "true submarine", equipped with snorkel to allow his crews to stay submerged, at least to snorkel-depth, and evade radar-equipped aircraft. Dönitz was pleased with the promised top speed of 18 knots.
That month, 21 boats fought a battle with two formations; Convoys ONS 18/ON 202. The battle was a failure. In October an attack on Convoy SC 143 failed, even with limited air support from the "Luftwaffe". The battle with Convoys ONS 20/ON 206 in the same month was a comprehensive defeat. A fourth major battle, Convoy SL 138/MKS 28, developed in the last days of October and ended in another failure for Dönitz. The November battle around Convoy SL 139/MKS 30 ended in the repulse of 29 U-boats with the loss of only a single ship. Intelligence proved its worth. During the battles of convoys ONS 18/ON 202, Dönitz's admonitions to his commanders allowed the Allied intelligence services to uncover German tactical intentions. Dönitz had tried and failed to push his forces through lethal convoy defences. The hunter-killer groups were called in to hunt the remaining members of the wolfpacks, with predictable results. In mid-December 1943, Dönitz finally conceded not only the Atlantic, but the Gibraltar routes as well.
The hunter-killer and convoy escorts brought the wolfpack era to an end at the close of 1943. Dönitz resorted to sending out single submarines to the far reaches of the oceans in a bid to escape Allied naval power. In November 1943 he sent the last U-boat into the Gulf of Mexico just after the blackout restrictions were lifted. "U-193" achieved one final success. The end of 1943 ended the attempt of the U-boat arm to achieve a strategic victory in the Atlantic. That left only the Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union. On Christmas Eve, this became the sole preserve of the U-boats after the dispatch of "Scharnhorst" at the Battle of the North Cape.
Dönitz's plan for 1944 was simply to survive and await the XXI and Type XXIII submarine. New radars were on the horizon and a direction finding antenna for "Naxos" was scheduled for use. Dönitz established a naval operations scientific staff to focus on more powerful centimetric radars. Production of submarines was streamlined. Parts for eight major sections were fabricated across 60 plants in Europe an assembled at Hamburg, Danzig and Bremen to ease the pressure of bombing and congestion at shipyards. The first of the new generation boats were expected by April 1944. Dönitz hoped for 33 per month by September. In early 1944, Dönitz opted to concentrate west of Ireland, at 15 and 17° west, in the hope convoys would come to them. Single boats were still sent to the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. With 66 vessels at sea at any one time, and with 200 boats operational, the BdU was still a viable threat and he believed the force could achieve modest success. The U-boats were painfully slow, strategically, operationally and tactically. Crossing the Atlantic took up to a month compared to a week in 1942. Positioning west of Ireland could take several weeks submerged. In the first quarter of 1944, U-boats sank only three of the 3,360 ships that passed south of Ireland. In return 29 crews were lost.
A major concern to Dönitz was Operation Overlord, the long predicted landing in France, and what role the U-boat arm and surface forces could play in the defence. He was sensitive to a landing on the Bay of Biscay but retained boats there only for operational readiness. Dönitz ended reconnaissance operations in the region. In the BdU war diary he wrote of ending operations since "otherwise the strong enemy air activity will lead to high losses which would only be acceptable if an immediate landing on the Biscay coast were expected. As this is no longer considered an acute danger the boats will remain at readiness in the concrete shelters."
When the D-day landings took place on 6 June 1944, the U-boats were ordered into action with the awareness that the western flank of the invasion would be well protected at sea. Operational experience with the snorkel was too scant to devise instructions for its use. The narrow, shallow, waters of the English Channel provided few opportunities for charging the batteries. Dönitz feared the task was impossible. The "Holzbein" group based at Brest, sent 15 submarines into action against the Cherbourg peninsula landings part of a 36-strong flotilla. Only eight had snorkels. The seven non-snorkel boats were ordered to attack on the surface. The BdU war diary entry on 6 June 1944 states that "for those boats without schnorchel this means the last operation." Of the 15, only five got near to the invasion fleet. Five of the snorkel boats survived. In exchange for 10 U-boats with the survivors damaged, two frigates, four freighters, and one tank landing ship were sunk. 24 U-boats were sunk from 6–30 June 1944. On 5 July 1944, the Allied Operation "Dredger" permitted hunter-killer groups to roam the Western Approaches and Biscay making it a "no-go area" for U-boats. U-boat operations against Normandy landings were a fiasco. Dönitz and the high command had been ignorant of the true scale of the naval D-day effort. Dönitz claimed his men sank five escorts, 12 merchant ships and four landing craft for 20 submarines and 1,000 men, of whom 238 were rescued. Dönitz's claims underplayed German losses, which were, in fact, 41 submarines from 82 in France, a 50 percent loss rate.
The collapse of the German front in Normandy left only the bases in German-occupied Norway nearest to the Atlantic. The newer boats were not forthcoming either. 90 XXI and 31 XIII's were built by the end of 1944. 60 of the former and 23 of the latter were in service but none were operational. Dönitz was left with the old VIIs to carry the war into 1945. A large number had snorkels, which enabled them to surface only upon reaching port. Submerged, this meant no radio or Enigma communications and far fewer sightings for the Allied intelligence network to exploit. Dönitz ordered his submarines to British coastal waters with some success in November and December 1944, achieving 85,639 tons. Admiral Andrew Cunningham remarked of the strategy, "We are having a difficult time with the U-boats...the air are about 90 percent out of business and Asdic is failing us." The inshore waters impeded the use of Asdic, which became confused with wrecks, rocks, and tidal swirls. The new types could conceivably have capitalised on these developments but the war was nearly over. On 1 January 1945, Dönitz had 425 submarines; 144 operational. On 1 April 1945, it was 166 from 429. He threw into battle every available weapon as the German Reich collapsed. Dönitz supported the use of Human torpedoes; the Neger, Marder, Seehund and Biber were all used in suicide missions on his orders, perhaps inspired by the Japanese Kamikaze.
On 30 April 1945 Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Dönitz succeeded him as head of state and "Führer". Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg succeeded Dönitz as commander-in-chief of the "Kriegsmarine". On 4 May 1945 the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath took place. Dönitz issued an order to all U-boats to cease combat operations and return to port or surrender to Allied naval vessels. The order was obeyed with a handful of notable exceptions—the Actions of 5–6 May 1945, and Actions of 7–8 May 1945 occurred after the surrender. The surrendered U-boats numbered into the hundreds and were destroyed in the postwar Operation Deadlight. The U-boat war finally came to an end on 8 May 1945, the date of the German Instrument of Surrender.
Dönitz admired Hitler and was vocal about the qualities he perceived in Hitler's leadership. In August 1943 he praised his foresightedness and confidence; "anyone who thinks he can do better than the "Führer" is stupid." Dönitz's relationship with Hitler strengthened through to the end of the war, particularly after the 20 July plot, for the naval staff officers were not involved; when news of it came there was indignation in the OKM. Even after the war, Dönitz said he could never have joined the conspirators. Dönitz tried to imbue National Socialist ideas among his officers, though the indoctrination of the naval officer corps was not the brainchild of Dönitz, but rather a continuation of the Nazification of the navy begun under his predecessor Raeder. Naval officers were required to attend a five-day education course in Nazi ideology. Dönitz's loyalty to him and the cause was rewarded by Hitler, who, owing to Dönitz's leadership, never felt abandoned by the navy. A grateful Hitler appointed the navy's commander as his successor when he chose to die.
Dönitz's influence on military matters was also evident. Hitler acted on Dönitz's advice in September 1944 to block the Gulf of Finland after Finland abandoned the Axis powers. Operation Tanne Ost was a poorly executed disaster. Dönitz shared Hitler's senseless strategic judgement—with the Courland Pocket on the verge of collapse, and the air and army forces requesting a withdrawal, the two men were preoccupied in planning an attack on an isolated island in the far north. Hitler's willingness to listen to the naval commander was based on his high opinion of the navy's usefulness at this time. It reinforced isolated coastal garrisons along the Baltic and enacted the arduous task of evacuating thousands of soldiers and civilians to safety in order that they might continue the struggle into the spring, 1945.
In the final days of the war, after Hitler had taken refuge in the "Führerbunker" beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin, "Reichsmarschall" Hermann Göring was considered the obvious successor to Hitler, followed by "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler. Göring, however, infuriated Hitler by radioing him in Berlin asking for permission to assume leadership of the Reich. Himmler also tried to seize power by entering into negotiations with Count Bernadotte. On 28 April 1945, the BBC reported Himmler had offered surrender to the western Allies and that the offer had been declined.
From mid-April 1945, Dönitz and elements of what remained of the Reich government moved into the buildings of the "Stadtheide Barracks" in Plön. In his last will and testament, dated 29 April 1945, Hitler named Dönitz his successor as "Staatsoberhaupt" (Head of State), with the titles of "Reichspräsident" (President) and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The same document named Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as Head of Government with the title of "Reichskanzler" (Chancellor). Furthermore, Hitler declared both Göring and Himmler traitors and expelled them from the party. He killed himself on 30 April.
On 1 May, the day after Hitler's own suicide, Goebbels committed suicide. Dönitz thus became the sole representative of the crumbling German Reich. On 2 May, the new government of the Reich fled to Flensburg-Mürwik where he remained until his arrest on 23 May 1945. That night, 2 May, Dönitz made a nationwide radio address in which he announced Hitler's death and said the war would continue in the East "to save Germany from destruction by the advancing Bolshevik enemy."
Dönitz knew that Germany's position was untenable and the Wehrmacht was no longer capable of offering meaningful resistance. During his brief period in office, he devoted most of his effort to ensuring the loyalty of the German armed forces and trying to ensure German personnel would surrender to the British or Americans and not the Soviets. He feared vengeful Soviet reprisals, and hoped to strike a deal with the Western Allies. In the end, Dönitz's tactics were moderately successful, enabling about 1.8 million German soldiers to escape Soviet capture. As many as 2.2 million may have been evacuated.
Through 1944 and 1945 the Dönitz-initiated Operation Hannibal, which had the distinction of being the largest naval evacuation in history. The Baltic Fleet was presented with a mass of targets, the subsequent Soviet submarine Baltic Sea campaign in 1944 and Soviet naval Baltic Sea campaign in 1945 inflicted grievous losses during "Hannibal". The most notable was the sinking of the "MV Wilhelm Gustloff" by a Soviet submarine. The liner had nearly 10,000 people on board. The evacuations continued after the surrender. From 3 to 9 May 1945, 81,000 of the 150,000 persons waiting on the Hel Peninsula were evacuated without loss. Albrecht Brandi, commander of the eastern Baltic, initiated a counter operation, the Gulf of Finland campaign, but failed to have an impact.
On 4 May, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, representing Dönitz, surrendered all German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark, and northwestern Germany to Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath southeast of Hamburg, signalling the end of World War II in northwestern Europe.
A day later, Dönitz sent Friedeburg to US General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters in Rheims, France, to negotiate a surrender to the Allies. The Chief of Staff of OKW, "Generaloberst" (Colonel-General) Alfred Jodl, arrived a day later. Dönitz had instructed them to draw out the negotiations for as long as possible so that German troops and refugees could surrender to the Western powers, but when Eisenhower let it be known he would not tolerate their stalling, Dönitz authorised Jodl to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender at 1:30 on the morning of 7 May. Just over an hour later, Jodl signed the documents. The surrender documents included the phrase, "All forces under German control to cease active operations at 23:01 hours Central European Time on 8 May 1945." At Stalin's insistence, on 8 May, shortly before midnight, ("Generalfeldmarschall") Wilhelm Keitel repeated the signing in Berlin at Marshal Georgiy Zhukov's headquarters, with General Carl Spaatz of the USAAF present as Eisenhower's representative. At the time specified, World War II in Europe ended.
On 23 May, the Dönitz government was dissolved when Dönitz was arrested by an RAF Regiment task force. The Großadmiral's Kriegsmarine flag, which was removed from his headquarters, can be seen at the RAF Regiment Heritage Centre at RAF Honington. "Generaloberst" Jodl, "Reichsminister" Speer and other members were also handed over to troops of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry at Flensburg. His ceremonial baton, awarded to him by Hitler, can be seen in the regimental museum of the KSLI in Shrewsbury Castle.
Dönitz was a dedicated Nazi and a passionate supporter of Hitler, something he tried to obscure after the war. Raeder described him as "a picture-book Nazi and confirmed anti-Semite". Several naval officers described him as "closely tied to Hitler and Nazi ideology." On one occasion, he spoke of Hitler's humanity. Another event, in which he spoke to Hitler Youth in what was defined as an "inappropriate way," earned him the nickname of "Hitler Youth Dönitz." He refused to help Albert Speer stop the scorched earth policy dictated by Hitler and is also noted to have declared, "In comparison to Hitler we are all pipsqueaks. Anyone who believes he can do better than the Führer is stupid."
Dönitz contributed to the spread of Nazism within the "Kriegsmarine". He insisted that officers share his political views and, as head of the "Kriegsmarine", formally joined the Nazi Party on 1 February 1944, as member 9,664,999. He was awarded the Golden Party Badge for his loyalty to the party later that year. Dönitz's influence over naval officers contributed to none joining the attempts to kill Hitler.
From an ideological standpoint, Dönitz was anti-Marxist and antisemitic who believed that Germany needed to fight the "poison of Jewry". Several anti-Semitic statements by Dönitz are known. When Sweden closed its international waters to Germany, he blamed this action on their fear and dependence on "international Jewish capital." In August 1944, he declared, "I would rather eat dirt than see my grandchildren grow up in the filthy, poisonous atmosphere of Jewry."
His fellow officers noted he was under Hitler's influence, and closely wedded to Nazi ideology. On German Heroes' Day (12 March) of 1944, Dönitz declared that, without Adolf Hitler, Germany would be beset by "the poison of Jewry," and the country destroyed for lack of the "uncompromising ideology" of National Socialism. "What would have become of our country today, if the Fuehrer had not united us under National Socialism? Divided along party lines, beset with the spreading poison of Jewry and vulnerable to it, because we lacked the defense of our present uncompromising ideology, we would have long since succumbed under the burden of this war and delivered ourselves to the enemy who would have mercilessly destroyed us."
At the Nuremberg trials, Dönitz claimed the statement about the "poison of Jewry" was regarding "the endurance, the power to endure, of the people, as it was composed, could be better preserved than if there were Jewish elements in the nation." Later, during the Nuremberg trials, Dönitz claimed to know nothing about the extermination of Jews and declared that nobody among "my men thought about violence against Jews." Dönitz told Leon Goldensohn, an American psychiatrist at Nuremberg, "I never had any idea of the goings-on as far as Jews were concerned. Hitler said each man should take care of his business and mine was U-boats and the Navy." After the war Dönitz tried to hide his knowledge of the Holocaust. He was present at the October 1943 Posen Conference where Himmler described the mass murder of Jews with the intent of making the audience complicit in this crime. It cannot be proven beyond doubt that he was present during Himmler's segment of the conference, which openly discussed the murder of European Jewry.
Even during his imprisonment, after Nuremberg, with the crimes of the Nazi state well-known, Dönitz remained an antisemite. In April 1953, he told Speer that if it was the choice of the Americans and not the Jews, he would have been released.
Following the war, Dönitz was held as a prisoner of war by the Allies. He was indicted as a major war criminal at the Nuremberg Trials on three counts. One: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Two: planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression. Three: crimes against the laws of war. Dönitz was found not guilty on count one of the indictment, but guilty on counts two and three.
During the trial, army psychologist Gustave Gilbert was allowed to examine Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes. Among other tests, a German version of the Wechsler–Bellevue IQ test was administered. Dönitz and Hermann Göring scored 138, which made them equally the third-highest among the Nazi leaders tested.
At the trial, Dönitz was charged with waging unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping, permitting Hitler's Commando Order of 18 October 1942 to remain in full force when he became commander-in-chief of the Navy, and to that extent responsibility for that crime. His defence was that the order excluded men captured in naval warfare, and that the order had not been acted upon by any men under his command. Added to that was his knowledge of 12,000 involuntary foreign workers working in the shipyards, and doing nothing to stop it. Dönitz was unable to defend himself on this charge convincingly when cross-examined by prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe.
On 25 February 1945, Hitler asked Dönitz whether the Geneva Convention should be denounced. Hitler's motives were twofold. The first was that reprisals could be taken against Western Allied prisoners of war; second, it would deter German forces from surrendering to the Western Allies, as was happening on the Eastern Front where the convention was in abeyance. Instead of arguing the conventions should never be denounced, Dönitz suggested it was not expedient to do so, so the court found against him on this issue; but as the convention was not denounced by Germany, and British prisoners in camps under Dönitz's jurisdiction were treated strictly according to the Convention, the Court considered these mitigating circumstances.
Among the war-crimes charges, Dönitz was accused of waging unrestricted submarine warfare for issuing War Order No. 154 in 1939, and another similar order after the "Laconia" incident in 1942, not to rescue survivors from ships attacked by submarine. By issuing these two orders, he was found guilty of causing Germany to be in breach of the Second London Naval Treaty of 1936. However, as evidence of similar conduct by the Allies was presented at his trial, his sentence was not assessed on the grounds of this breach of international law.
On the specific war crimes charge of ordering unrestricted submarine warfare, Dönitz was found "[not] guilty for his conduct of submarine warfare against British armed merchant ships", because they were often armed and equipped with radios which they used to notify the admiralty of attack. As stated by the judges: "Dönitz is charged with waging unrestricted submarine warfare contrary to the Naval Protocol of 1936 to which Germany acceded, and which reaffirmed the rules of submarine warfare laid down in the London Naval Agreement of 1930 ... The order of Dönitz to sink neutral ships without warning when found within these zones was, therefore, in the opinion of the Tribunal, violation of the Protocol ... The orders, then, prove Dönitz is guilty of a violation of the Protocol ... The sentence of Dönitz is not assessed on the ground of his breaches of the international law of submarine warfare."
His sentence on unrestricted submarine warfare was not assessed, because of similar actions by the Allies. In particular, the British Admiralty, on 8 May 1940, had ordered all vessels in the Skagerrak sunk on sight, and Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, stated the US Navy had waged unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific from the day the US officially entered the war. Thus, Dönitz was not charged of waging unrestricted submarine warfare against unarmed neutral shipping by ordering all ships in designated areas in international waters to be sunk without warning.
Dönitz was imprisoned for 10 years in Spandau Prison in what was then West Berlin. During his period in prison he was unrepentant, and maintained that he had done nothing wrong. He also rejected Speer's attempts to persuade him to end his devotion to Hitler and accept responsibility for the wrongs the German Government had committed. Over 100 senior Allied officers also sent letters to Dönitz conveying their disappointment over the fairness and verdict of his trial.
Dönitz was released on 1 October 1956 and retired to the small village of Aumühle in Schleswig-Holstein in northern West Germany. There, he worked on two books. His memoirs, "Zehn Jahre, Zwanzig Tage" ("Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days"), were released in Germany in 1958 and became available in an English translation the following year. This book recounted Dönitz's experiences as U-boat commander (10 years) and President of Germany (20 days). In it, Dönitz explains the Nazi regime as a product of its time, but argues he was not a politician and thus not morally responsible for many of the regime's crimes. He likewise criticizes dictatorship as a fundamentally flawed form of government and blames it for many of the Nazi era's failings. Historian Alan P. Rems has written that Dönitz’s memoirs are unconvincing and that "unimpeded by a meaningful Nuremberg verdict, Dönitz fashioned a legend that could be embraced by the most unregenerate Nazis as well as credulous Allied officers who accepted his sanitized version of history and showered Dönitz with letters of support as a wronged brother-in-arms".
Dönitz's second book, "Mein wechselvolles Leben" ("My Ever-Changing Life") is less known, perhaps because it deals with the events of his life before 1934. This book was first published in 1968, and a new edition was released in 1998 with the revised title "Mein soldatisches Leben" ("My Martial Life"). In 1973, he appeared in the Thames Television production "The World at War", in one of his few television appearances.
Dönitz was unrepentant regarding his role in World War II, saying that he had acted at all times out of duty to his nation. He lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity in Aumühle, occasionally corresponding with collectors of German naval history, and died there of a heart attack on 24 December 1980. As the last German officer with the rank of "Großadmiral" (grand admiral), he was honoured by many former servicemen and foreign naval officers who came to pay their respects at his funeral on 6 January 1981. He was buried in Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Aumühle without military honours, and service members were not allowed to wear uniforms to the funeral. Also in attendance were over 100 holders of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.
Informational notes
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16774
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Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty which extends the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that commits state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the scientific consensus that (part one) global warming is occurring and (part two) it is extremely likely that human-made CO2 emissions have predominantly caused it. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005. There are currently 192 parties (Canada withdrew from the protocol, effective December 2012) to the Protocol.
The Kyoto Protocol implemented the objective of the UNFCCC to reduce the onset of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to "a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" (Article 2). The Kyoto Protocol applies to the six greenhouse gases listed in Annex A: Carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), Nitrous oxide (N2O), Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), Perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6).
The Protocol is based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities: it acknowledges that individual countries have different capabilities in combating climate change, owing to economic development, and therefore puts the obligation to reduce current emissions on developed countries on the basis that they are historically responsible for the current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The Protocol's first commitment period started in 2008 and ended in 2012. All 36 countries that fully participated in the first commitment period complied with the Protocol. However, nine countries had to resort to the flexibility mechanisms by funding emission reductions in other countries because their national emissions were slightly greater than their targets. The financial crisis of 2007–08 helped reduce the emissions. The greatest emission reductions were seen in the former Eastern Bloc countries because the dissolution of the Soviet Union reduced their emissions in the early 1990s. Even though the 36 developed countries reduced their emissions, the global emissions increased by 32% from 1990 to 2010.
A second commitment period was agreed in 2012, known as the Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol, in which 37 countries have binding targets: Australia, the European Union (and its 28 member states), Belarus, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine have stated that they may withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol or not put into legal force the Amendment with second round targets. Japan, New Zealand, and Russia have participated in Kyoto's first-round but have not taken on new targets in the second commitment period. Other developed countries without second-round targets are Canada (which withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2012) and the United States (which has not ratified). As of May 2020, 138 states have accepted the Doha Amendment, while entry into force requires the acceptances of 144 states. Of the 37 parties with binding commitments, 34 have ratified.
Negotiations were held in the framework of the yearly UNFCCC Climate Change Conferences on measures to be taken after the second commitment period ends in 2020. This resulted in the 2015 adoption of the Paris Agreement, which is a separate instrument under the UNFCCC rather than an amendment of the Kyoto Protocol.
The view that human activities are likely responsible for most of the observed increase in global mean temperature ("global warming") since the mid-20th century is an accurate reflection of current scientific thinking. Human-induced warming of the climate is expected to continue throughout the 21st century and beyond.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) have produced a range of projections of what the future increase in global mean temperature might be. The IPCC's projections are "baseline" projections, meaning that they assume no future efforts are made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC projections cover the time period from the beginning of the 21st century to the end of the 21st century. The "likely" range (as assessed to have a greater than 66% probability of being correct, based on the IPCC's expert judgment) is a projected increase in global mean temperature over the 21st century of between 1.1 and 6.4 °C.
The range in temperature projections partly reflects different projections of future greenhouse gas emissions. Different projections contain different assumptions of future social and economic development (economic growth, population level, energy policies), which in turn affects projections of future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The range also reflects uncertainty in the response of the climate system to past and future GHG emissions (measured by the climate sensitivity).
1992 – The UN Conference on the Environment and Development is held in Rio de Janeiro. It results in the Framework Convention on Climate Change ("FCCC" or "UNFCCC") among other agreements.
1995 – Parties to the UNFCCC meet in Berlin (the 1st Conference of Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC) to outline specific targets on emissions.
1997 – In December the parties conclude the Kyoto Protocol in Kyoto, Japan, in which they agree to the broad outlines of emissions targets.
2004 – Russia and Canada ratify the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC bringing the treaty into effect on 16 February 2005.
2011 – Canada became the first signatory to announce its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.
2012 – On 31 December 2012, the first commitment period under the Protocol expired.
Most countries are Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Article 2 of the Convention states its ultimate objective, which is to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere "at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human) interference with the climate system."
The natural, technical and social sciences can provide information on decisions relating to this objective including the possible magnitude and rate of future climate changes. However, the IPCC has also concluded that the decision of what constitutes "dangerous" interference requires value judgements, which will vary between different regions of the world. Factors that might affect this decision include the local consequences of climate change impacts, the ability of a particular region to adapt to climate change (adaptive capacity), and the ability of a region to reduce its GHG emissions (mitigative capacity).
The main goal of the Kyoto Protocol is to control emissions of the main anthropogenic (human-emitted) greenhouse gases (GHGs) in ways that reflect underlying national differences in GHG emissions, wealth, and capacity to make the reductions. The treaty follows the main principles agreed in the original 1992 UN Framework Convention. According to the treaty, in 2012, Annex I Parties who have ratified the treaty must have fulfilled their obligations of greenhouse gas emissions limitations established for the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period (2008–2012). These emissions limitation commitments are listed in Annex B of the Protocol.
The Kyoto Protocol's first round commitments are the first detailed step taken within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Protocol establishes a structure of rolling emission reduction commitment periods. It set a timetable starting in 2006 for negotiations to establish emission reduction commitments for a second commitment period. The first period emission reduction commitments expired on 31 December 2012.
The ultimate objective of the UNFCCC is the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would stop dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." Even if Annex I Parties succeed in meeting their first-round commitments, much greater emission reductions will be required in future to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations.
For each of the different anthropogenic GHGs, different levels of emissions reductions would be required to meet the objective of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations (see United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change#Stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations). Carbon dioxide () is the most important anthropogenic GHG. Stabilizing the concentration of in the atmosphere would ultimately require the effective elimination of anthropogenic emissions.
Some of the principal concepts of the Kyoto Protocol are:
is that it established legally binding commitments to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases for Annex I Parties. The commitments were based on the Berlin Mandate, which was a part of UNFCCC negotiations leading up to the Protocol.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, 37 industrialized countries and the European Community (the European Union-15, made up of 15 states at the time of the Kyoto negotiations) commit themselves to binding targets for GHG emissions. The targets apply to the four greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (), methane (), nitrous oxide (), sulphur hexafluoride (), and two groups of gases, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and perfluorocarbons (PFCs). The six GHG are translated into CO2 equivalents in determining reductions in emissions. These reduction targets are in addition to the industrial gases, chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which are dealt with under the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
Under the Protocol, only the Annex I Parties have committed themselves to national or joint reduction targets (formally called "quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives" (QELRO) – Article 4.1). Parties to the Kyoto Protocol not listed in Annex I of the Convention (the non-Annex I Parties) are mostly low-income developing countries, and may participate in the Kyoto Protocol through the Clean Development Mechanism (explained below).
The emissions limitations of Annex I Parties varies between different Parties. Some Parties have emissions limitations reduce below the base year level, some have limitations at the base year level (no permitted increase above the base year level), while others have limitations above the base year level.
Emission limits do not include emissions by international aviation and shipping. Although Belarus and Turkey are listed in the Convention's Annex I, they do not have emissions targets as they were not Annex I Parties when the Protocol was adopted. Kazakhstan does not have a target, but has declared that it wishes to become an Annex I Party to the Convention.
For most state parties, 1990 is the base year for the national GHG inventory and the calculation of the assigned amount. However, five state parties have an alternative base year:
Annex I Parties can use a range of sophisticated "flexibility" mechanisms (see below) to meet their targets. Annex I Parties can achieve their targets by allocating reduced annual allowances to major operators within their borders, or by allowing these operators to exceed their allocations by offsetting any excess through a mechanism that is agreed by all the parties to the UNFCCC, such as by buying emission allowances from other operators which have excess emissions credits.
The Protocol defines three "flexibility mechanisms" that can be used by Annex I Parties in meeting their emission limitation commitments. The flexibility mechanisms are International Emissions Trading (IET), the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and Joint Implementation (JI). IET allows Annex I Parties to "trade" their emissions (Assigned Amount Units, AAUs, or "allowances" for short).
The economic basis for providing this flexibility is that the marginal cost of reducing (or abating) emissions differs among countries. "Marginal cost" is the cost of abating the last tonne of -eq for an Annex I/non-Annex I Party. At the time of the original Kyoto targets, studies suggested that the flexibility mechanisms could reduce the overall (aggregate) cost of meeting the targets. Studies also showed that national losses in Annex I gross domestic product (GDP) could be reduced by the use of the flexibility mechanisms.
The CDM and JI are called "project-based mechanisms," in that they generate emission reductions from projects. The difference between IET and the project-based mechanisms is that IET is based on the setting of a quantitative restriction of emissions, while the CDM and JI are based on the idea of "production" of emission reductions. The CDM is designed to encourage production of emission reductions in non-Annex I Parties, while JI encourages production of emission reductions in Annex I Parties.
The production of emission reductions generated by the CDM and JI can be used by Annex I Parties in meeting their emission limitation commitments. The emission reductions produced by the CDM and JI are both measured against a hypothetical baseline of emissions that would have occurred in the absence of a particular emission reduction project. The emission reductions produced by the CDM are called Certified Emission Reductions (CERs); reductions produced by JI are called Emission Reduction Units (ERUs). The reductions are called "credits" because they are emission reductions credited against a hypothetical baseline of emissions.
Only emission reduction projects that do not involve using nuclear energy are eligible for accreditation under the CDM, in order to prevent nuclear technology exports from becoming the default route for obtaining credits under the CDM.
Each Annex I country is required to submit an annual report of inventories of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from sources and removals from sinks under UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. These countries nominate a person (called a "designated national authority") to create and manage its greenhouse gas inventory. Virtually all of the non-Annex I countries have also established a designated national authority to manage their Kyoto obligations, specifically the "CDM process". This determines which GHG projects they wish to propose for accreditation by the CDM Executive Board.
A number of emissions trading schemes (ETS) have been, or are planned to be, implemented.
The design of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) implicitly allows for trade of national Kyoto obligations to occur between participating countries (Carbon Trust, 2009, p. 24). Carbon Trust (2009, pp. 24–25) found that other than the trading that occurs as part of the EU ETS, no intergovernmental emissions trading had taken place.
One of the environmental problems with IET is the large surplus of allowances that are available. Russia, Ukraine, and the new EU-12 member states (the Kyoto Parties Annex I Economies-in-Transition, abbreviated "IET": Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine) have a surplus of allowances, while many OECD countries have a deficit. Some of the EITs with a surplus regard it as potential compensation for the trauma of their economic restructuring. When the Kyoto treaty was negotiated, it was recognized that emissions targets for the EITs might lead to them having an excess number of allowances. This excess of allowances were viewed by the EITs as "headroom" to grow their economies. The surplus has, however, also been referred to by some as "hot air," a term which Russia (a country with an estimated surplus of 3.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent allowances) views as "quite offensive."
OECD countries with a deficit could meet their Kyoto commitments by buying allowances from transition countries with a surplus. Unless other commitments were made to reduce the total surplus in allowances, such trade would not actually result in emissions being reduced (see also the section below on the Green Investment Scheme).
A Green Investment Scheme (GIS) refers to a plan for achieving environmental benefits from trading surplus allowances (AAUs) under the Kyoto Protocol. The Green Investment Scheme (GIS), a mechanism in the framework of International Emissions Trading (IET), is designed to achieve greater flexibility in reaching the targets of the Kyoto Protocol while preserving environmental integrity of IET. However, using the GIS is not required under the Kyoto Protocol, and there is no official definition of the term.
Under the GIS a Party to the Protocol expecting that the development of its economy will not exhaust its Kyoto quota, can sell the excess of its Kyoto quota units (AAUs) to another Party. The proceeds from the AAU sales should be "greened", i.e. channeled to the development and implementation of the projects either acquiring the greenhouse gases emission reductions (hard greening) or building up the necessary framework for this process (soft greening).
Latvia was one of the front-runners of GISs. World Bank (2011) reported that Latvia has stopped offering AAU sales because of low AAU prices. In 2010, Estonia was the preferred source for AAU buyers, followed by the Czech Republic and Poland.
Japan's national policy to meet their Kyoto target includes the purchase of AAUs sold under GISs. In 2010, Japan and Japanese firms were the main buyers of AAUs. In terms of the international carbon market, trade in AAUs are a small proportion of overall market value. In 2010, 97% of trade in the international carbon market was driven by the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). However, firms regulated under the EU ETS are unable to use AAUs in meeting their emissions caps.
Between 2001, which was the first year Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects could be registered, and 2012, the end of the first Kyoto commitment period, the CDM is expected to produce some 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in emission reductions. Most of these reductions are through renewable energy commercialisation, energy efficiency, and fuel switching (World Bank, 2010, p. 262). By 2012, the largest potential for production of CERs are estimated in China (52% of total CERs) and India (16%). CERs produced in Latin America and the Caribbean make up 15% of the potential total, with Brazil as the largest producer in the region (7%).
The formal crediting period for Joint Implementation (JI) was aligned with the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, and did not start until January 2008 (Carbon Trust, 2009, p. 20). In November 2008, only 22 JI projects had been officially approved and registered. The total projected emission savings from JI by 2012 are about one tenth that of the CDM. Russia accounts for about two-thirds of these savings, with the remainder divided up roughly equally between the Ukraine and the EU's New Member States. Emission savings include cuts in methane, HFC, and N2O emissions.
As noted earlier on, the first-round Kyoto emissions limitation commitments are not sufficient to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of GHGs. Stabilization of atmospheric GHG concentrations will require further emissions reductions after the end of the first-round Kyoto commitment period in 2012.
Analysts have developed scenarios of future changes in GHG emissions that lead to a stabilization in the atmospheric concentrations of GHGs. Climate models suggest that lower stabilization levels are associated with lower magnitudes of future global warming, while higher stabilization levels are associated with higher magnitudes of future global warming (see figure opposite).
To achieve stabilization, global GHG emissions must peak, then decline. The lower the desired stabilization level, the sooner this peak and decline must occur (see figure opposite). For a given stabilization level, larger emissions reductions in the near term allow for less stringent emissions reductions later. On the other hand, less stringent near term emissions reductions would, for a given stabilization level, require more stringent emissions reductions later on.
The first period Kyoto emissions limitations can be viewed as a first-step towards achieving atmospheric stabilization of GHGs. In this sense, the first period Kyoto commitments may affect what future atmospheric stabilization level can be achieved.
At the 16th Conference of the Parties held in 2010, Parties to the UNFCCC agreed that future global warming should be limited below 2°C relative to the pre-industrial temperature level. One of the stabilization levels discussed in relation to this temperature target is to hold atmospheric concentrations of GHGs at 450 parts per million (ppm) - eq. Stabilization at 450 ppm could be associated with a 26 to 78% risk of exceeding the 2 °C target.
Scenarios assessed by Gupta "et al." (2007) suggest that Annex I emissions would need to be 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% to 95% below 1990 levels by 2050. The only Annex I Parties to have made voluntary pledges in line with this are Japan (25% below 1990 levels by 2020) and Norway (30–40% below 1990 levels by 2020).
Gupta "et al." (2007) also looked at what 450 ppm scenarios projected for non-Annex I Parties. Projections indicated that by 2020, non-Annex I emissions in several regions (Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia, and centrally planned Asia) would need to be substantially reduced below "business-as-usual". "Business-as-usual" are projected non-Annex I emissions in the absence of any new policies to control emissions. Projections indicated that by 2050, emissions in all non-Annex I regions would need to be substantially reduced below "business-as-usual".
The agreement is a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which did not set any legally binding limitations on emissions or enforcement mechanisms. Only Parties to the UNFCCC can become Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted at the third session of the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC (COP 3) in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan.
National emission targets specified in the Kyoto Protocol exclude international aviation and shipping. Kyoto Parties can use land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) in meeting their targets. LULUCF activities are also called "sink" activities. Changes in sinks and land use can have an effect on the climate, and indeed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Land use, land-use change, and forestry estimates that since 1750 a third of global warming has been caused by land use change. Particular criteria apply to the definition of forestry under the Kyoto Protocol.
Forest management, cropland management, grazing land management, and revegetation are all eligible LULUCF activities under the Protocol. Annex I Parties use of forest management in meeting their targets is capped.
Article 4.2 of the UNFCCC commits industrialized countries to "[take] the lead" in reducing emissions. The initial aim was for industrialized countries to stabilize their emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. The failure of key industrialized countries to move in this direction was a principal reason why Kyoto moved to binding commitments.
At the first UNFCCC Conference of the Parties in Berlin, the G77 was able to push for a mandate (the "Berlin mandate") where it was recognized that:
, in
were still relatively low.
During negotiations, the G-77 represented 133 developing countries. China was not a member of the group but an associate. It has since become a member.
The Berlin mandate was recognized in the Kyoto Protocol in that developing countries were not subject to emission reduction commitments in the first Kyoto commitment period. However, the large potential for growth in developing country emissions made negotiations on this issue tense. In the final agreement, the Clean Development Mechanism was designed to limit emissions in developing countries, but in such a way that developing countries do not bear the costs for limiting emissions. The general assumption was that developing countries would face quantitative commitments in later commitment periods, and at the same time, developed countries would meet their first round commitments.
Views on the Kyoto Protocol#Commentaries on negotiations contains a list of the emissions cuts that were proposed by UNFCCC Parties during negotiations. The G77 and China were in favour of strong uniform emission cuts across the developed world. The US originally proposed for the second round of negotiations on Kyoto commitments to follow the negotiations of the first. In the end, negotiations on the second period were set to open no later than 2005. Countries over-achieving in their first period commitments can "bank" their unused allowances for use in the subsequent period.
The EU initially argued for only three GHGs to be included – , , and – with other gases such as HFCs regulated separately. The EU also wanted to have a "bubble" commitment, whereby it could make a collective commitment that allowed some EU members to increase their emissions, while others cut theirs.
The most vulnerable nations – the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) – pushed for deep uniform cuts by developed nations, with the goal of having emissions reduced to the greatest possible extent. Countries that had supported differentiation of targets had different ideas as to how it should be calculated, and many different indicators were proposed. Two examples include differentiation of targets based on gross domestic product (GDP), and differentiation based on energy intensity (energy use per unit of economic output).
The final targets negotiated in the Protocol are the result of last minute political compromises. The targets closely match those decided by Argentinian Raul Estrada, the diplomat who chaired the negotiations. The numbers given to each Party by Chairman Estrada were based on targets already pledged by Parties, information received on latest negotiating positions, and the goal of achieving the strongest possible environmental outcome. The final targets are weaker than those proposed by some Parties, e.g., the Alliance of Small Island States and the G-77 and China, but stronger than the targets proposed by others, e.g., Canada and the United States.
The Protocol also reaffirms the principle that developed countries have to pay billions of dollars, and supply technology to other countries for climate-related studies and projects. The principle was originally agreed in UNFCCC. One such project is The Adaptation Fund, which has been established by the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to finance concrete adaptation projects and programmes in developing countries that are Parties to the Kyoto Protocol.
The protocol left several issues open to be decided later by the sixth Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC, which attempted to resolve these issues at its meeting in the Hague in late 2000, but it was unable to reach an agreement due to disputes between the European Union (who favoured a tougher implementation) and the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia (who wanted the agreement to be less demanding and more flexible).
In 2001, a continuation of the previous meeting (COP6-bis) was held in Bonn, where the required decisions were adopted. After some concessions, the supporters of the protocol (led by the European Union) managed to secure the agreement of Japan and Russia by allowing more use of carbon dioxide sinks.
The first Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (MOP1) was held in Montreal from 28 November to 9 December 2005, along with the 11th conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP11). See United Nations Climate Change Conference.
During COP13 in Bali, 36 developed Contact Group countries (plus the EU as a party in the European Union) agreed to a 10% emissions increase for Iceland; but, since the EU's member states each have individual obligations, much larger increases (up to 27%) are allowed for some of the less developed EU countries (see below Kyoto Protocol#Increase in greenhouse gas emission since 1990). Reduction limitations expired in 2013.
The protocol defines a mechanism of "compliance" as a "monitoring compliance with the commitments and penalties for non-compliance." According to Grubb (2003), the explicit consequences of non-compliance of the treaty are weak compared to domestic law. Yet, the compliance section of the treaty was highly contested in the Marrakesh Accords.
If the enforcement branch determines that an Annex I country is not in compliance with its emissions limitation, then that country is required to make up the difference during the second commitment period plus an additional 30%. In addition, that country will be suspended from making transfers under an emissions trading program.
The Protocol was adopted by COP 3 of UNFCCC on 11 December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan. It was opened on 16 March 1998 for signature during one year by parties to UNFCCC, when it was signed Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, the Maldives, Samoa, St. Lucia and Switzerland. At the end of the signature period, 82 countries and the European Community had signed. Ratification (which is required to become a party to the Protocol) started on 17 September with ratification by Fiji. Countries that did not sign acceded to the convention, which has the same legal effect.
Article 25 of the Protocol specifies that the Protocol enters into force "on the ninetieth day after the date on which not less than 55 Parties to the Convention, incorporating Parties included in Annex I which accounted in total for at least 55% of the total carbon dioxide emissions for 1990 of the Annex I countries, have deposited their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession."
The EU and its Member States ratified the Protocol in May 2002. Of the two conditions, the "55 parties" clause was reached on 23 May 2002 when Iceland ratified the Protocol. The ratification by Russia on 18 November 2004 satisfied the "55%" clause and brought the treaty into force, effective 16 February 2005, after the required lapse of 90 days.
As of May 2013, 191 countries and one regional economic organization (the EC) have ratified the agreement, representing over 61.6% of the 1990 emissions from Annex I countries. One of the 191 ratifying states—Canada—has renounced the protocol.
The US signed the Protocol on 12 November 1998, during the Clinton presidency. To become binding in the US, however, the treaty had to be ratified by the Senate, which had already passed the 1997 non-binding Byrd-Hagel Resolution, expressing disapproval of any international agreement that did not require developing countries to make emission reductions and "would seriously harm the economy of the United States". The resolution passed 95–0. Therefore, even though the Clinton administration signed the treaty, it was never submitted to the Senate for ratification.
When George W. Bush was elected US president in 2000, he was asked by US Senator Chuck Hagel what his administration's position was on climate change. Bush replied that he took climate change "very seriously", but that he opposed the Kyoto treaty because "it exempts 80% of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy." The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research reported in 2001:This policy reversal received a massive wave of criticism that was quickly picked up by the international media. Environmental groups blasted the White House, while Europeans and Japanese alike expressed deep concern and regret. [...] Almost all world leaders (e.g. China, Japan, South Africa, Pacific Islands, etc.) expressed their disappointment at Bush's decision.In response to this criticism, Bush stated: "I was responding to reality, and reality is the nation has got a real problem when it comes to energy". The Tyndall Centre called this "an overstatement used to cover up the big benefactors of this policy reversal, i.e., the US oil and coal industry, which has a powerful lobby with the administration and conservative Republican congressmen."
As of 2016, the US is the only signatory that has not ratified the Protocol. The US accounted for 36% of emissions in 1990. As such, for the treaty to go into legal effect without US ratification, it would require a coalition including the EU, Russia, Japan, and small parties. A deal, without the US Administration, was reached in the Bonn climate talks (COP-6.5), held in 2001.
In 2011, Canada, Japan and Russia stated that they would not take on further Kyoto targets. The Canadian government announced its withdrawal—possible at any time three years after ratification—from the Kyoto Protocol on 12 December 2011, effective 15 December 2012. Canada was committed to cutting its greenhouse emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012, but in 2009 emissions were 17% higher than in 1990. The Harper government prioritized oil sands development in Alberta, and deprioritized the reduction of greenhouse emissions. Environment minister Peter Kent cited Canada's liability to "enormous financial penalties" under the treaty unless it withdrew. He also suggested that the recently signed Durban agreement may provide an alternative way forward. The Harper government claimed it would find a "Made in Canada" solution. Canada's decision received a generally negative response from representatives of other ratifying countries.
Andorra, Palestine, South Sudan, the United States and, following their withdrawal on 15 December 2012, Canada are the only UNFCCC Parties that are not party to the Protocol. Furthermore, the Protocol is not applied to UNFCCC observer the Holy See. Although the Kingdom of the Netherlands approved the protocol for the whole Kingdom, it did not deposit an instrument of ratification for Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten or the Caribbean Netherlands.
Total aggregate GHG emissions excluding emissions/removals from land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF, i.e., carbon storage in forests and soils) for all Annex I Parties (see list below) including the United States taken together decreased from 19.0 to 17.8 thousand teragrams (Tg, which is equal to 109 kg) equivalent, a decline of 6.0% during the 1990–2008 period. Several factors have contributed to this decline. The first is due to the economic restructuring in the Annex I Economies in Transition (the EITs – see Intergovernmental Emissions Trading for the list of EITs). Over the period 1990–1999, emissions fell by 40% in the EITs following the collapse of central planning in the former Soviet Union and east European countries. This led to a massive contraction of their heavy industry-based economies, with associated reductions in their fossil fuel consumption and emissions.
Emissions growth in Annex I Parties have also been limited due to policies and measures (PaMs). In particular, PaMs were strengthened after 2000, helping to enhance energy efficiency and develop renewable energy sources. Energy use also decreased during the economic crisis in 2007–2008.
Collectively the group of industrialized countries committed to a Kyoto target, i.e., the Annex I countries excluding the US, had a target of reducing their GHG emissions by 4.2% on average for the period 2008–2012 relative to the base year, which in most cases is 1990.
As noted in the preceding section, between 1990–1999, there was a large reduction in the emissions of the EITs. The reduction in the EITs is largely responsible for the total (aggregate) reduction (excluding LULUCF) in emissions of the Annex I countries, excluding the US. Emissions of the Annex II countries (Annex I minus the EIT countries) have experienced a limited increase in emissions from 1990–2006, followed by stabilization and a more marked decrease from 2007 onwards. The emissions reductions in the early nineties by the 12 EIT countries who have since joined the EU, assist the present EU-27 in meeting its collective Kyoto target.
In December 2011, Canada's environment minister, Peter Kent, formally announced that Canada would withdraw from the Kyoto accord a day after the end of the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference (see the section on the withdrawal of Canada).
Belarus, Malta, and Turkey are Annex I Parties but did not have first-round Kyoto targets. The US had a Kyoto target of a 7% reduction relative to the 1990 level, but has not ratified the treaty. If the US had ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the average percentage reduction in total GHG emissions for the Annex I group would have been a 5.2% reduction relative to the base year.
38 developed countries committed to limiting their greenhouse gas emissions. Because the United States did not ratify and Canada withdrew, the emission limits remained in force for 36 countries. All of them complied with the Protocol. However, nine countries (Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Switzerland) had to resort to the flexibility mechanisms because their national emissions were slightly greater than their targets.
In total, the 36 countries that fully participated in the Protocol were committed to reducing their aggregate emissions by 4% from the 1990 base year. Their average annual emissions in 2008–2012 were 24.2% below the 1990 level. Hence, they surpassed their aggregate commitment by a large margin. If the United States and Canada are included, the emissions decreased by 11.8%. The large reductions were mainly thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which reduced the emissions of the Eastern Bloc by tens of percents in the early 1990s. In addition, the financial crisis of 2007–08 significantly reduced emissions during the first Kyoto commitment period.
The 36 countries that were committed to emission reductions only accounted for 24% of the global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. Even though these countries significantly reduced their emissions during the Kyoto commitment period, other countries increased their emissions so much that the global emissions increased by 32% from 1990 to 2010.
UNFCCC (2005) compiled and synthesized information reported to it by non-Annex I Parties. Most non-Annex I Parties belonged in the low-income group, with very few classified as middle-income. Most Parties included information on policies relating to sustainable development. Sustainable development priorities mentioned by non-Annex I Parties included poverty alleviation and access to basic education and health care. Many non-Annex I Parties are making efforts to amend and update their environmental legislation to include global concerns such as climate change.
A few Parties, e.g., South Africa and Iran, stated their concern over how efforts to reduce emissions by Annex I Parties could adversely affect their economies. The economies of these countries are highly dependent on income generated from the production, processing, and export of fossil fuels.
Emissions
GHG emissions, excluding land use change and forestry (LUCF), reported by 122 non-Annex I Parties for the year 1994 or the closest year reported, totalled 11.7 billion tonnes (billion = 1,000,000,000) of CO2-eq. CO2 was the largest proportion of emissions (63%), followed by methane (26%) and nitrous oxide (N2O) (11%).
The energy sector was the largest source of emissions for 70 Parties, whereas for 45 Parties the agriculture sector was the largest. Per capita emissions (in tonnes of CO2-eq, excluding LUCF) averaged 2.8 tonnes for the 122 non-Annex I Parties.
Parties reported a high level of uncertainty in LUCF emissions, but in aggregate, there appeared to only be a small difference of 1.7% with and without LUCF. With LUCF, emissions were 11.9 billion tonnes, without LUCF, total aggregate emissions were 11.7 billion tonnes.
"Trends"
In several large developing countries and fast growing economies (China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Egypt, and Iran) GHG emissions have increased rapidly (PBL, 2009). For example, emissions in China have risen strongly over the 1990–2005 period, often by more than 10% year. Emissions per-capita in non-Annex I countries are still, for the most part, much lower than in industrialized countries. Non-Annex I countries do not have quantitative emission reduction commitments, but they are committed to mitigation actions. China, for example, has had a national policy programme to reduce emissions growth, which included the closure of old, less efficient coal-fired power plants.
Barker "et al." (2007, p. 79) assessed the literature on cost estimates for the Kyoto Protocol. Due to non-US participation in the Kyoto treaty, costs estimates were found to be much lower than those estimated in the previous IPCC Third Assessment Report. Without the U.S. participation, and with full use of the Kyoto flexible mechanisms, costs were estimated at less than 0.05% of Annex B GDP. This compared to earlier estimates of 0.1–1.1%. Without use of the flexible mechanisms, costs without the U.S. participation were estimated at less than 0.1%. This compared to earlier estimates of 0.2–2%. These cost estimates were viewed as being based on much evidence and high agreement in the literature.
Gupta "et al." (2007) assessed the literature on climate change policy. They found that no authoritative assessments of the UNFCCC or its Protocol asserted that these agreements had, or will, succeed in solving the climate problem. In these assessments, it was assumed that the UNFCCC or its Protocol would not be changed. The Framework Convention and its Protocol include provisions for future policy actions to be taken.
Gupta "et al." (2007) described the Kyoto first-round commitments as "modest," stating that they acted as a constraint on the treaty's effectiveness. It was suggested that subsequent Kyoto commitments could be made more effective with measures aimed at achieving deeper cuts in emissions, as well as having policies applied to a larger share of global emissions. In 2008, countries with a Kyoto cap made up less than one-third of annual global carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion.
World Bank (2010) commented on how the Kyoto Protocol had only had a slight effect on curbing global emissions growth. The treaty was negotiated in 1997, but in 2006, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions had grown by 24%. World Bank (2010) also stated that the treaty had provided only limited financial support to developing countries to assist them in reducing their emissions and adapting to climate change.
Some of the criticism of the Protocol has been based on the idea of climate justice (Liverman, 2008, p. 14).
This has particularly centered on the balance between the low emissions and high vulnerability of the developing world to climate change, compared to high emissions in the developed world. Another criticism of the Kyoto Protocol and other international conventions, is the right of indigenous peoples right to participate. Quoted here from The Declaration of the First International Forum of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change, it says "Despite the recognition of our role in preventing global warming, when it comes time to sign international conventions like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, once again, our right to participate in national and international discussions that directly affect or Peoples and territories is denied." Additionally, later in the declaration, it reads "We denounce the fact that neither the [United Nations] nor the Kyoto Protocol recognizes the existence or the contributions of Indigenous Peoples. Furthermore, the debates under these instruments have not considered the suggestions and proposals of the Indigenous Peoples nor have the appropriate mechanisms to guarantee our participation in all the debates that directly concern the Indigenous Peoples has been established."Some environmentalists have supported the Kyoto Protocol because it is "the only game in town," and possibly because they expect that future emission reduction commitments may demand more stringent emission reductions (Aldy "et al."., 2003, p. 9). In 2001, seventeen national science academies stated that ratification of the Protocol represented a "small but essential first step towards stabilising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases." Some environmentalists and scientists have criticized the existing commitments for being too weak (Grubb, 2000, p. 5).
The United States (under former President George W. Bush) and Australia (initially, under former Prime Minister John Howard) did not ratify the Kyoto treaty. According to Stern (2006), their decision was based on the lack of quantitative emission commitments for emerging economies (see also the 2000 onwards section). Australia, under former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, has since ratified the treaty, which took effect in March 2008.
Another area which has been commented on is the role of the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms – emissions trading, Joint Implementation, and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The flexibility mechanisms have attracted both positive and negative comments.
As mentioned earlier, a number of Annex I Parties have implemented emissions trading schemes (ETSs) as part of efforts to meet their Kyoto commitments. General commentaries on emissions trading are contained in emissions trading and carbon emission trading. Individual articles on the ETSs contain commentaries on these schemes (see Kyoto Protocol#International Emissions Trading for a list of ETSs).
One of the arguments made in favour of the flexibility mechanisms is that they can reduce the costs incurred by Annex I Parties in meeting their Kyoto commitments. Criticisms of flexibility have, for example, included the ineffectiveness of emissions trading in promoting investment in non-fossil energy sources, and adverse impacts of CDM projects on local communities in developing countries.
As the Kyoto Protocol seeks to reduce environmental pollutants while at the same time altering the freedoms of some citizens.
As discussed by Milton Friedman, one can achieve both economic and political freedom through capitalism; nonetheless, it is never guaranteed that one is going to have equality of wealth of those on top of the "food chain" of this capitalistic world. All these alterations come to what the leaders of the citizens choose to impose in means of improving ones lifestyle. In the case of the Kyoto Protocol, it seeks to impose regulations that will reduce production of pollutants towards the environment. Furthermore, seeking to compromise the freedoms of both private and public citizens. In one side it imposes bigger regulations towards companies and reducing their profits as they need to fulfil such regulations with, which are oftentimes more expensive, alternatives for production. On the other hand, it seeks to reduce the emissions that cause the rapid environmental change called climate change.
The conditions of the Kyoto Protocol consist of mandatory targets on greenhouse gas emissions for the world's leading economies. As provided by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, "These targets range from −8 per cent to +10 per cent of the countries' individual 1990 emissions levels with a view to reducing their overall emissions of such gases by at least 5 per cent below existing 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012."
These goals are challenged, however, by climate change deniers, who condemn strong scientific evidence of the human impact on climate change. One prominent scholar opines that these climate change deniers "arguably" breach Rousseau's notion of the social contract, which is an implicit agreement among the members of a society to coordinate efforts in the name of overall social benefit. The climate change denial movement hinders efforts at coming to agreements as a collective global society on climate change.
The official meeting of all states party to the Kyoto Protocol is the "Conference of the Parties". It is held every year as part of the United Nations Climate Change conference, which also serves as the formal meeting of UNFCCC. The first Meetings of Parties of the Kyoto Protocol (CMP) was held in 2005 in conjunction with the eleventh Conferences of parties to UNFCCC (COP). Also parties to the Convention that are not parties to the Protocol can participate in Protocol-related meetings as observers. The first conference was held in 1995 in Berlin, while the 2013 conference was held in Warsaw. Later COPs were held in Lima, Peru in 2014 and in Paris, France in 2015. COP 21 aims to hold the increase in the global average rise in temperature below 2 degree. COP 22 Marakash, Morocco and COP 23 in Bonn, Germany.
In the non-binding "Washington Declaration" agreed on 16 February 2007, heads of governments from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa agreed in principle on the outline of a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. They envisaged a global cap-and-trade system that would apply to both industrialized nations and developing countries, and initially hoped that it would be in place by 2009.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 was one of the annual series of UN meetings that followed the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. In 1997 the talks led to the Kyoto Protocol, and the conference in Copenhagen was considered to be the opportunity to agree a successor to Kyoto that would bring about meaningful carbon cuts.
The 2010 Cancún agreements include voluntary pledges made by 76 developed and developing countries to control their emissions of greenhouse gases. In 2010, these 76 countries were collectively responsible for 85% of annual global emissions.
By May 2012, the US, Japan, Russia, and Canada had indicated they would not sign up to a second Kyoto commitment period. In November 2012, Australia confirmed it would participate in a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol and New Zealand confirmed that it would not.
New Zealand's climate minister Tim Groser said the 15-year-old Kyoto Protocol was outdated, and that New Zealand was "ahead of the curve" in looking for a replacement that would include developing nations. Non-profit environmental organisations such as the World Wildlife Fund criticised New Zealand's decision to pull out.
On 8 December 2012, at the end of the 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference, an agreement was reached to extend the Protocol to 2020 and to set a date of 2015 for the development of a successor document, to be implemented from 2020 (see lede for more information). The outcome of the Doha talks has received a mixed response, with small island states critical of the overall package. The Kyoto second commitment period applies to about 11% of annual global emissions of greenhouse gases. Other results of the conference include a timetable for a global agreement to be adopted by 2015 which includes all countries. At the Doha meeting of the parties to the UNFCCC on 8 December 2012, the European Union chief climate negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, pledged to extend the treaty, binding on the 27 European Member States, up to the year 2020 pending an internal ratification procedure.
Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, called on world leaders to come to an agreement on halting global warming during the 69th Session of the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2014 in New York. The next climate summit was held in Paris in 2015, out of which emerged the Paris Agreement, the successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
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Kaddish
Kaddish or Qaddish or Qadish ( ""holy"") is a hymn of praises about God found in Jewish prayer services. The central theme of the "Kaddish" is the magnification and sanctification of God's name. In the liturgy, different versions of the Kaddish are used functionally as separators between sections of the service.
The term "Kaddish" is often used to refer specifically to "The Mourner's Kaddish", said as part of the mourning rituals in Judaism in all prayer services, as well as at funerals (other than at the gravesite, see Qaddish aḥar Haqqəvurah ""Qaddish after Burial"") and memorials; for 11 Hebrew months after the death of a parent, and for 30 days after the death of a spouse, sibling, or child. When mention is made of "saying Kaddish", this unambiguously refers to the rituals of mourning. Mourners say Kaddish to show that despite the loss they still praise God.
Along with the Shema Yisrael and Amidah, the Kaddish is one of the most important and central elements in the Jewish liturgy. Kaddish cannot be recited alone. Along with some prayers, it can only be recited with a minyan of ten Jews.
The various versions of the Kaddish are:
All versions of the Kaddish begin with the "Hatzi Kaddish" (there are some extra passages in the Kaddish after a burial or a siyum). The longer versions contain additional paragraphs, and are often named after distinctive words in those paragraphs.
Historically there existed another type of Kaddish, called "Qaddish Yahid" ("Individual's Kaddish"). This is included in the "Siddur of Amram Gaon", but is a meditation taking the place of Kaddish rather than a Kaddish in the normal sense. It is not recited in modern times.
The Half Kaddish is used to punctuate divisions within the service: for example, before Barechu, after the Amidah, and following readings from the Torah.
The "Kaddish d'Rabbanan" is used after any part of the service that includes extracts from the Mishnah or the Talmud, as its original purpose was to close a study session.
"Kaddish Titkabbal" originally marked the end of a prayer service, though in later times extra passages and hymns were added to follow it.
The following includes the half, complete, mourner's and rabbi's kaddish. The variant lines of the kaddish after a burial or a siyum are given below.
In the burial kaddish, and that after a siyum according to Ashkenazim,i, lines 2-3 are replaced by:
In some recent prayerbooks, for example, the American Reform Machzor, line 36 is replaced with:
This effort to extend the reach of Oseh Shalom to non-Jews is said to have been started by the British Liberal Jewish movement in 1967, with the introduction of "v'al kol bnai Adam" ("and upon all humans"); these words continue to be used by some in the UK.
The opening words of Kaddish are inspired by , a vision of God becoming great in the eyes of all the nations.
The central line of the Kaddish is the congregation's response: (Yǝhē šmēh rabbā mǝvārakh lǝʿālam u-lʿalmē ʿālmayyā, ""May His great name be blessed for ever, and to all eternity""), a public declaration of God's greatness and eternality. This response is similar to the wording of . It is also parallel to the Hebrew "" (commonly recited after the first verse of the Shema); Aramaic versions of both יה שמה רבה and ברוך שם כבוד appear in the various versions of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Genesis 49:2 and Deuteronomy 6:4.
The Mourners, Rabbis and Complete Kaddish end with a supplication for peace ("Oseh Shalom..."), which is in Hebrew, and is somewhat similar to the Tanakh .
Kaddish does not contain God's name. It is said that this is because Kaddish has 26 words, equalling the gematria of the Lord's name itself (יהוה), and the Kaddish text proves that from the very beginning with words ""May His great name be exalted and sanctified"".
Kaddish, as used in the services on special days, is chanted. There are different melodies in different Jewish traditions, and within each tradition the melody can change according to the version, the day it is said and even the position in the service. Many mourners recite Kaddish slowly and contemplatively.
In Sephardi synagogues the whole congregation sits for Kaddish, except:
In Ashkenazi synagogues, the custom varies. Very commonly, in both Orthodox and Reform congregations, everyone stands for the mourner's kaddish; but in some (especially many Conservative and Hasidic) synagogues, most of the congregants sit. Sometimes, a distinction is made between the different forms of Kaddish, or each congregant stands or sits according to his or her own custom. The Mourner's Kaddish is often treated differently from the other variations of Kaddish in the service, as is the Half Kaddish before the maftir.
Those standing to recite Kaddish bow, by widespread tradition, at various places. Generally: At the first word of the prayer, at each "Amen", at "Yitbarakh", at "Brikh hu", and for the last verse ("Oseh shalom"). For "Oseh shalom" it is customary take three steps back (if possible) then bow to one's left, then to one's right, and finally bow forward, as if taking leave of the presence of a king, in the same way as when the same words are used as the concluding line of the Amidah.
"Masekhet Soferim", an eighth-century compilation of Jewish laws regarding the preparation of holy books and public reading, states (Chapter 10:7) that Kaddish may be recited only in the presence of a minyan (a quorum of at least 10 men in Orthodox Judaism or 10 adults in Reform and Conservative Judaism). While the traditional view is that "if kaddish is said in private, then by definition it is not kaddish," some alternatives have been suggested, including the "Kaddish L'yachid" ("Kaddish for an individual"), attributed to ninth-century Gaon Amram bar Sheshna, and the use of kavanah prayer, asking heavenly beings to join with the individual "to make a minyan of both Earth and heaven". In some Reform congregations, a minyan is not required for recitation of the Kaddish, but other Reform congregations disagree and believe that the Kaddish should be said publicly.
"The Kaddish is in origin a closing doxology to an Aggadic discourse." Most of it is written in Aramaic, which, at the time of its original composition, was the lingua franca of the Jewish people. It is not composed in the vernacular Aramaic, however, but rather in a "literary, jargon Aramaic" that was used in the academies, and is identical to the dialect of the Targum.
Professor Yoel Elitzur, however, argues that the Kaddish was originally written in Hebrew, and later translated to Aramaic to be better understood by the masses. He notes that quotations from the Kaddish in the Talmud and Sifrei are in Hebrew, and that even today some of the words are Hebrew rather than Aramaic.
The oldest version of the Kaddish is found in the "Siddur of Rab Amram Gaon", c. 900. "The first mention of mourners saying Kaddish at the end of the service is in a thirteenth century halakhic writing called the Or Zarua. The Kaddish at the end of the service became designated as Kaddish Yatom or Mourner's Kaddish (literally, "Orphan's Kaddish")."
Professor Yoel Elitzur made an attempt at reconstructing the theorized original Hebrew version of Kaddish:
Rav David Bar-Hayim also attempted a reconstruction:
Mourner's Kaddish is said at all prayer services and certain other occasions. It is written in Aramaic. It takes the form of "Kaddish Yehe Shelama Rabba", and is traditionally recited several times, most prominently at or towards the end of the service, after the Aleinu and/or closing Psalms and/or (on the Sabbath) Ani'im Zemirot. Following the death of a child, spouse, or sibling it is customary to recite the Mourner's Kaddish in the presence of a congregation daily for thirty days, or eleven months in the case of a parent, and then at every anniversary of the death (the Yahrzeit). The mourner who says the Kaddish will be any person present at a service who has the obligation to recite Kaddish in accordance with these rules.
Customs for reciting the Mourner's Kaddish vary markedly among various communities. In Sephardi synagogues, the custom is that all the mourners stand and chant the Kaddish together. In Ashkenazi synagogues before the year 1831, one mourner was chosen to lead the prayer on behalf of the rest, but since then most congregations have adopted the Sephardi custom. In many Reform synagogues, the entire congregation recites the Mourner's Kaddish together. This is sometimes said to be for those victims of the Holocaust who have no one left to recite the Mourner's Kaddish on their behalf and in support of the mourners. In some congregations (especially Reform and Conservative ones), the Rabbi reads a list of the deceased who have a Yahrzeit on that day (or who have died within the past month), and then ask the congregants to name any people they are mourning for. Some synagogues, especially Orthodox and Conservative ones, multiply the number of times that the Mourner's Kaddish is recited, for example by reciting a separate Mourner's Kaddish after both Aleinu and then each closing Psalm. Other synagogues limit themselves to one Mourner's Kaddish at the end of the service.
Notably, the Mourner's Kaddish does not mention death at all, but instead praises God. Though the Kaddish is often popularly referred to as the "Jewish Prayer for the Dead," that designation more accurately belongs to the prayer called "El Malei Rachamim", which specifically prays for the soul of the deceased. The Mourner's Kaddish can be more accurately represented as an expression of "justification for judgment" by the mourners on their loved ones' behalf. It is believed that mourners adopted this version of the Kaddish around the 13th century during harsh persecution of Jews by crusaders in Germany because of the opening messianic line about God bringing the dead back to life (though this line is not in many modern versions).
Though there is evidence of some women saying the Mourner's Kaddish for their parents at the grave, during shiva, and in daily prayers since the 17th century, and though R. Bacharach concluded in "the Amsterdam case" that women could recite the Mourner's Kaddish, this is still controversial in Orthodox communities, with various rabbis restricting the ruling. Despite these restrictions, recitation of the Mourner's Kaddish by Orthodox Jewish women is becoming more common. In 2013 the Israeli Orthodox rabbinical organization Beit Hillel issued a halachic ruling that women may say the Kaddish in memory of their deceased parents. In Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism, the Mourner's Kaddish is traditionally said by women who are also counted in the minyan.
The Kaddish has been a particularly common theme and reference point in the arts, including the following:
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Kalevala
The Kalevala (, ) is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology.
It is regarded as the national epic of Karelia and Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature. The "Kalevala" was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity and the intensification of Finland's language strife that ultimately led to Finland's independence from Russia in 1917.
The first version of the "Kalevala", called the "Old Kalevala", was published in 1835. The version most commonly known today was first published in 1849 and consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty folk stories (Finnish: "runot").
Elias Lönnrot (9 April 1802 – 19 March 1884) was a physician, botanist, linguist, and poet. During the time he was compiling the "Kalevala" he was the district health officer based in Kajaani responsible for the whole Kainuu region in the eastern part of what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland. He was the son of Fredrik Johan Lönnrot, a tailor and Ulrika Lönnrot; he was born in the village of Sammatti, Uusimaa.
At the age of 21, he entered the Imperial Academy of Turku and obtained a master's degree in 1826. His thesis was entitled "De Vainamoine priscorum fennorum numine" ("Väinämöinen, a Divinity of the Ancient Finns"). The monograph's second volume was destroyed in the Great Fire of Turku the same year.
In the spring of 1828, he set out with the aim of collecting folk songs and poetry. Rather than continue this work, though, he decided to complete his studies and entered Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki to study medicine. He earned a master's degree in 1832. In January 1833, he started as the district health officer of Kainuu and began his work on collecting poetry and compiling the "Kalevala". Throughout his career Lönnrot made a total of eleven field trips within a period of fifteen years.
Prior to the publication of the "Kalevala", Elias Lönnrot compiled several related works, including the three-part "Kantele" (1829–1831), the "Old Kalevala" (1835) and the "Kanteletar" (1840).
Lönnrot's field trips and endeavours helped him to compile the "Kalevala", and brought considerable enjoyment to the people he visited; he would spend much time retelling what he had collected as well as learning new poems.
Before the 18th century the "Kalevala" poetry was common throughout Finland and Karelia, but in the 18th century it began to disappear in Finland, first in western Finland, because European rhymed poetry became more common in Finland. Finnish folk poetry was first written down in the 17th century and collected by hobbyists and scholars through the following centuries. Despite this, the majority of Finnish poetry remained only in the oral tradition.
Finnish born nationalist and linguist Kaarle Akseli Gottlund (1796–1875) expressed his desire for a Finnish epic in a similar vein to the "Iliad", "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungenlied" compiled from the various poems and songs spread over most of Finland. He hoped that such an endeavour would incite a sense of nationality and independence in the native Finnish people. In 1820, Reinhold von Becker founded the journal "Turun Wiikko-Sanomat" (Turku Weekly News) and published three articles entitled "Väinämöisestä" ("Concerning Väinämöinen"). These works were an inspiration for Elias Lönnrot in creating his masters thesis at Turku University.
In the 19th century, collecting became more extensive, systematic and organised. Altogether, almost half a million pages of verse have been collected and archived by the Finnish Literature Society and other collectors in what are now Estonia and the Republic of Karelia. The publication "Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot" ("Ancient Poems of the Finns") published 33 volumes containing 85,000 items of poetry over a period of 40 years. They have archived 65,000 items of poetry that remain unpublished. By the end of the 19th century this pastime of collecting material relating to Karelia and the developing orientation towards eastern lands had become a fashion called Karelianism, a form of national romanticism.
The chronology of this oral tradition is uncertain. The oldest themes, the origin of Earth, have been interpreted to have their roots in distant, unrecorded history and could be as old as 3,000 years.
The newest events, e.g. the arrival of Christianity, seem to be from the Iron Age. Finnish folklorist Kaarle Krohn proposes that 20 of the 45 poems of the "Kalevala" are of possible Ancient Estonian origin or at least deal with a motif of Estonian origin (of the remainder, two are Ingrian and 23 are Western Finnish).
It is understood that during the Finnish reformation in the 16th century the clergy forbade all telling and singing of pagan rites and stories. In conjunction with the arrival of European poetry and music this caused a significant reduction in the number of traditional folk songs and their singers. Thus the tradition faded somewhat but was never totally eradicated.
In total, Lönnrot made eleven field trips in search of poetry. His first trip was made in 1828 after his graduation from Turku University, but it was not until 1831 and his second field trip that the real work began. By that time he had already published three articles entitled "Kantele" and had significant notes to build upon. This second trip was not very successful and he was called back to Helsinki to attend to victims of the Second cholera pandemic.
The third field trip was much more successful and led Elias Lönnrot to Viena in east Karelia where he visited the town of Akonlahti, which proved most successful. This trip yielded over 3,000 verses and copious notes. In 1833, Lönnrot moved to Kajaani where he was to spend the next 20 years as the district health officer for the region. His fourth field trip was undertaken in conjunction with his work as a doctor; a 10-day jaunt into Viena. This trip resulted in 49 poems and almost 3,000 new lines of verse. It was during this trip that Lönnrot formulated the idea that the poems might represent a wider continuity when poem entities were performed to him along with comments in normal speech connecting them.
On the fifth field trip, Lönnrot met Arhippa Perttunen who provided a large portion of the verses for the "Kalevala". He met a singer called Matiska in the hamlet of Lonkka on the Russian side of the border. While this singer had a somewhat poor memory, he did help to fill in many gaps in the work Lönnrot had already catalogued. This trip resulted in the discovery of almost 300 poems at just over 13,000 verses.
In autumn of 1834, Lönnrot had written the vast majority of the work needed for what was to become the "Old Kalevala"; all that was required was to tie up some narrative loose ends and complete the work. His sixth field trip took him into Kuhmo, a municipality in Kainuu to the south of Viena. There he collected over 4,000 verses and completed the first draft of his work. He wrote the foreword and published in February of the following year.
With the "Old Kalevala" well into its first publication run, Lönnrot decided to continue collecting poems to supplement his existing work and to understand the culture more completely. The seventh field trip took him on a long winding path through the southern and eastern parts of the Viena poem singing region. He was delayed significantly in Kuhmo because of bad skiing conditions. By the end of that trip, Lönnrot had collected another 100 poems consisting of over 4,000 verses. Lönnrot made his eighth field trip to the Russian border town of Lapukka where the great singer Arhippa Perttunen had learned his trade. In correspondence he notes that he has written down many new poems but is unclear on the quantity.
Elias Lönnrot departed on the first part of his ninth field trip on 16 September 1836. He was granted a 14-month leave of absence and a sum of travelling expenses from the Finnish Literary Society. His funds came with some stipulations: he must travel around the Kainuu border regions and then on to the north and finally from Kainuu to the south-east along the border. For the expedition into the north he was accompanied by Juhana Fredrik Cajan. The first part of the trip took Lönnrot all the way to Inari in northern Lapland. The second, southern part of the journey was more successful than the northern part, taking Lönnrot to the Russian town of Sortavala on Lake Ladoga then back up through Savo and eventually back to Kajaani. Although these trips were long and arduous, they resulted in very little Kalevala material; only 1,000 verses were recovered from the southern half and an unknown quantity from the northern half.
The tenth field trip is a relative unknown. What is known however, is that Lönnrot intended to gather poems and songs to compile into the upcoming work "Kanteletar". He was accompanied by his friend C. H. Ståhlberg for the majority of the trip. During that journey the pair met Mateli Kuivalatar in the small border town of Ilomantsi. Kuivalatar was very important to the development of the "Kanteletar". The eleventh documented field trip was another undertaken in conjunction with his medical work. During the first part of the trip, Lönnrot returned to Akonlahti in Russian Karelia, where he gathered 80 poems and a total of 800 verses. The rest of the trip suffers from poor documentation.
Lönnrot and his contemporaries, e.g. Matthias Castrén, Anders Johan Sjögren,
and David Emmanuel Daniel Europaeus collected most of the poem variants; one poem could easily have countless variants, scattered across rural areas of Karelia and Ingria. Lönnrot was not really interested in, and rarely wrote down the name of the singer except for some of the more prolific cases. His primary purpose in the region was that of a physician and of an editor, not of a biographer or counsellor. He rarely knew anything in-depth about the singer himself and primarily only catalogued verse that could be relevant or of some use in his work.
The student David Emmanuel Daniel Europaeus is credited with discovering and cataloguing the majority of the Kullervo story.
Of the dozens of poem singers who contributed to the "Kalevala", significant ones are:
The poetry was often sung to music built on a pentachord, sometimes assisted by a kantele player. The rhythm could vary but the music was arranged in either two or four lines in metre. The poems were often performed by a duo, each person singing alternative verses or groups of verses. This method of performance is called an antiphonic performance, it is a kind of "singing match".
Despite the vast geographical distance and customary spheres separating individual singers, the folk poetry the "Kalevala" is based on was always sung in the same metre.
The "Kalevala"s metre is a form of trochaic tetrameter that is now known as the "Kalevala metre". The metre is thought to have originated during the Proto-Finnic period. Its syllables fall into three types: strong, weak, and neutral. Its main rules are as follows:
There are two main types of line:
Traditional poetry in the Kalevala metre uses both types with approximately the same frequency. The alteration of normal and broken tetrameters is a characteristic difference between the Kalevala metre and other forms of trochaic tetrameter.
There are four additional rules:
There are two main schemes featured in the "Kalevala":
The verses are sometimes inverted into chiasmus.
Verses 221 to 232 of song forty.
Very little is actually known about Elias Lönnrot's personal contributions to the "Kalevala". Scholars to this day still argue about how much of the "Kalevala" is genuine folk poetry and how much is Lönnrot's own work - and the degree to which the text is 'authentic' to the oral tradition. During the compilation process it is known that he merged poem variants and characters together, left out verses that did not fit and composed lines of his own in order to connect certain passages into a logical plot. Similarly, individual singers would use their own words and dialect when reciting their repertoire, even going so far as to perform different versions of the same song at different times.
The Finnish historian Väinö Kaukonen suggests that 3% of thev"Kalevala"s lines are Lönnrot's own composition, 14% are Lönnrot compositions from variants, 50% are verses which Lönnrot kept mostly unchanged except for some minor alterations, and 33% are original unedited oral poetry.
The first version of Lönnrot's compilation was entitled "Kalewala, taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen Kansan muinoisista ajoista" ("The Kalevala, or old Karelian poems about ancient times of the Finnish people"), also known as the "Old Kalevala". It was published in two volumes in 1835–1836. The "Old Kalevala" consisted of 12,078 verses making up a total of thirty-two poems.
Even after the publication of the "Old Kalevala" Lönnrot continued to collect new material for several years. He later integrated this additional material, with significantly edited existing material, into a second version, the "Kalevala". This "New Kalevala", published in 1849, contains fifty poems, and is the standard text of the "Kalevala" read and translated to this day.
The name "Kalevala" rarely appears in the original folk poetry of the time; it was coined by Lönnrot for the official name of his project sometime at the end of 1834.
The first appearance of "Kalevala" in collected poetry was recorded in April 1836. The choice of "Kalevala" as the name for his work was not a random choice however. The name "Kalev" appears in Finnic and Baltic folklore in many locations and the "Sons of Kalev" are known throughout Finnish and Estonian folklore.
Of the few complete translations into English, it is only the older translations by John Martin Crawford (1888) and William Forsell Kirby (1907) which attempt to strictly follow the original (Kalevala metre) of the poems.
Eino Friberg's 1988 translation uses it selectively but in general is more attuned to pleasing the ear than being an exact metrical translation; it also often reduces the length of songs for aesthetic reasons. In the introduction to his 1989 translation, Keith Bosley stated: "The only way I could devise of reflecting the vitality of Kalevala metre was to invent my own, based on syllables rather than feet. While translating over 17,000 lines of Finnish folk poetry before I started on the epic, I found that a line settled usually into seven syllables of English, often less, occasionally more. I eventually arrived at seven, five and nine syllables respectively, using the "impair" (odd number) as a formal device and letting the stresses fall where they would."
A notable partial translation of Franz Anton Schiefner's German translation was made by Prof. John Addison Porter in 1868 and published by Leypoldt & Holt.
Edward Taylor Fletcher, a British-born Canadian literature enthusiast, translated selections of the "Kalevala" in 1869. He read them before the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec on 17 March 1869.
Francis Peabody Magoun published a scholarly translation of the "Kalevala" in 1963 written entirely in prose. The appendices of this version contain notes on the history of the poem, comparisons between the original "Old Kalevala" and the current version, and a detailed glossary of terms and names used in the poem. Magoun translated the "Old Kalevala", which was published six years later entitled "The Old Kalevala and Certain Antecedents".
Modern translations were published in the Karelian and Urdu languages between 2009 and 2015. Thus, the "Kalevala" was published in its originating Karelian language only after 168 years since its first translation into Swedish.
So far the "Kalevala" has been translated into sixty-one languages and is Finland's most translated work of literature.
The "Kalevala" begins with the traditional Finnish creation myth, leading into stories of the creation of the earth, plants, creatures, and the sky. Creation, healing, combat and internal story telling are often accomplished by the character(s) involved singing of their exploits or desires. Many parts of the stories involve a character hunting or requesting lyrics (spells) to acquire some skill, such as boat-building or the mastery of iron making.
As well as magical spell casting and singing, there are many stories of lust, romance, kidnapping and seduction. The protagonists of the stories often have to accomplish feats that are unreasonable or impossible which they often fail to achieve leading to tragedy and humiliation.
The Sampo is a pivotal element of the whole work. Many actions and their consequences are caused by the Sampo itself or a character's interaction with the Sampo. It is described as a magical talisman or device that brings its possessor great fortune and prosperity, but its precise nature has been the subject of debate to the present day.
There are similarities with mythology and folklore from other cultures, for example the Kullervo character and his story bearing some likeness to the Greek Oedipus. The similarity of the virginal maiden Marjatta to the Christian Virgin Mary is striking. The arrival of Marjatta's son in the final song spelling the end of Väinämöinen's reign over Kalevala is similar to the arrival of Christianity bringing about the end of Paganism in Finland and Europe at large.
Songs 1 and 2: The poem begins with an introduction by the singers. The Earth is created from the shards of a goldeneye (a small duck) egg and the first man (Väinämöinen) is born to the goddess Ilmatar. Väinämöinen brings trees and life to the barren world.
Songs 3 to 5: Väinämöinen encounters the jealous Joukahainen and they do battle. Joukahainen loses and pledges his sister's hand in return for his life; the sister (Aino) soon drowns herself in the sea.
Songs 6 to 10: Väinämöinen heads to Pohjola to propose to the maiden of the north. Joukahainen attacks Väinämöinen again; Väinämöinen floats for days on the sea until he is carried by an eagle to Pohjola. He makes a deal with Louhi to get Ilmarinen to create the Sampo. Ilmarinen refuses to go to Pohjola so Väinämöinen forces him against his will. The Sampo is forged. Ilmarinen returns without a bride.
Songs 11 to 15: Lemminkäinen sets out to Saari ("English: The Island") in search of a bride. He and the maid Kyllikki make vows to each other but thinking Lemminkäinen has repudiated his, the maiden repudiates hers so Lemminkäinen discards her and sets off to woo the Maiden of the North. His mother tries to stop him and be the voice of reason, but Lemminkäinen disregards her warnings, claiming that when he's in danger, his hairbrush starts to bleed.
After a long journey to the North, he asks Louhi for her daughter's hand and she assigns tasks to him. While hunting for the Tuonelan joutsen ("Swan of Death") Lemminkäinen is shot by the Pohjolan paimen ("The Shepherd of the North") who is annoyed by his bad behavior and disrespect, and falls into the river of death. As he lies dead in the river, his mother at home notices blood flowing from Lemminkäinen's hairbrush. Remembering her son's words, she goes in search of him. With a rake given to her by Ilmarinen, she collects the pieces of Lemminkäinen scattered in the river and pieces him back together, a bee bringing her the ingredients necessary to revive him.
Songs 16 to 18: Väinämöinen builds a boat to travel to Pohjola once again in search of a bride. He visits Tuonela ("English: The land of Death") and is held prisoner. Väinämöinen uses his magical powers to escape and warns his people of the dangers present in Tuonela. Väinämöinen now sets out to gather the necessary spells from Antero Vipunen. Väinämöinen is swallowed and has to torture Antero Vipunen for the spells and his escape. His boat completed, Väinämöinen sets sail for Pohjola. Ilmarinen learns of this and resolves to go to Pohjola himself to woo the maiden. The Maiden of the North chooses Ilmarinen.
Songs 19 to 25: Ilmarinen is assigned dangerous unreasonable tasks in order to win the hand of the Maiden of the North. He accomplishes these tasks with some help from the maiden herself. In preparation for the wedding beer is brewed, a giant steer is slaughtered and invitations are sent out. Lemminkäinen is uninvited. The wedding party begins and all are happy. Väinämöinen sings and lauds the people of Pohjola. The bride and bridegroom are prepared for their roles in matrimony. The couple arrive home and are greeted with drink and viands.
Songs 26 to 30: Lemminkäinen is resentful for not having been invited to the wedding and sets out immediately for Pohjola. On his arrival he is challenged to and wins a duel with Sariola, the Master of the North. An army is conjured to enact revenge upon Lemminkäinen and he flees to his mother. She advises him to head to the Island of Refuge. On his return he finds his house burned to the ground. He goes to Pohjola with his companion Tiera to get his revenge, but Louhi freezes the seas and Lemminkäinen has to return home. When he arrives home he is reunited with his mother and vows to build larger better houses to replace the ones burned down.
Songs 31–36: Untamo kills his brother Kalervo's people, but spares his wife who later begets Kullervo. Untamo sees the boy as a threat, and after trying to have him killed several times without success, sells Kullervo as a slave to Ilmarinen. Ilmarinen's wife torments and bullies Kullervo, so he tricks her into being torn apart by a pack of wolves and bears. Kullervo escapes from Ilmarinen's homestead and learns from an old lady in the forest that his family is still alive, and is soon reunited with them. While returning home from paying taxes, he meets and rapes a young maiden, only to find out that she is his sister. She kills herself and Kullervo returns home distressed. He decides to wreak revenge upon Untamo and sets out to find him. Kullervo wages war on Untamo and his people, laying all to waste, and then returns home, where he finds his farm deserted. Filled with remorse and regret, he kills himself in the place where he seduced his sister.
Songs 37–38: Grieving for his lost love, Ilmarinen forges himself a wife out of gold and silver, but finds her to be cold and discards her. He heads for Pohjola and kidnaps the youngest daughter of Louhi. She is outraged and insults him badly so he sings magic and turns her into a bird. He returns to Kalevala and tells Väinämöinen about the prosperity and wealth that has met Pohjola's people thanks to the Sampo.
Songs 39–44: Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen sail to Pohjola to recover the Sampo. While on their journey they kill a monstrous pike and from its jaw bone the first kantele is made. The heroes arrive in Pohjola and demand a share of the Sampo's wealth or they will take the whole Sampo by force. Louhi musters her army however Väinämöinen lulls to sleep everyone in Pohjola with his music. The Sampo is taken from its vault of stone and the heroes set out for home. Louhi conjures a great army, turns herself into an eagle and fights for the Sampo. In the battle the Sampo is lost to the sea and destroyed.
Songs 45–49: Enraged at the loss of the Sampo, Louhi sends the people of Kalevala diseases and a great bear to kill their cattle. She hides the sun and the moon and steals fire from Kalevala. Väinämöinen heals all of the ailments and, with Ilmarinen, restores the fire. Väinämöinen forces Louhi to return the Sun and the Moon to the skies.
Song 50: The shy young virgin Marjatta becomes impregnated from a lingonberry she ate while tending to her flock. She begets a son. Väinämöinen orders the killing of the boy, but the boy begins to speak and reproaches Väinämöinen for ill judgement. The child is then baptised King of Karelia. Väinämöinen sails away leaving only his songs and kantele as legacy.
The poem ends and the singers sing a farewell and thank their audience.
Väinämöinen, the central character of "The Kalevala", is a shamanistic hero with a magical power of song and music similar to that of Orpheus. He is born of Ilmatar and contributes to the creation of Earth as it is today. Many of his travels resemble shamanistic journeys, most notably one where he visits the belly of a ground-giant, Antero Vipunen, to find the songs of boat building.
Väinämöinen created and plays the kantele, a Finnish stringed instrument that resembles and is played like a zither.
Väinämöinen's search for a wife is a central element in many stories; although he never finds one. One of his potential brides, Joukahainen's sister Aino, drowns herself instead of marrying him. He is the leading member of the group which steals the Sampo from the people of Pohjola.
Seppo Ilmarinen, is a heroic artificer (comparable to the Germanic Weyland and the Greek Daedalus). He crafted the dome of the sky, the Sampo and various other magical devices featured in "The Kalevala". Ilmarinen is the second member of the group who steal the Sampo.
Ilmarinen, like Väinämöinen, also has many stories told of his search for a wife, reaching the point where he forges one of gold.
Lemminkäinen, a handsome, arrogant and reckless ladies-man, is the son of Lempi ("English: lust or favourite"). He shares a very close relationship with his mother, who revives him after he has been drowned in the river of Tuonela while pursuing the object of his romantic desires. This section of "The Kalevala" echoes the myth of Osiris. Lemminkäinen is the third member of the group which steals the Sampo from Pohjola.
Ukko ("English: Old man") is the god of sky and thunder, and the leading deity mentioned within "The Kalevala". He corresponds to Thor and Zeus. John Martin Crawford wrote that the name may be related to the obsolete Hungarian word for an old man ("agg").
Joukahainen is a base, young man who arrogantly challenges Väinämöinen to a singing contest which he loses. In exchange for his life Joukahainen promises his young sister Aino to Väinämöinen. Joukahainen attempts to gain his revenge on Väinämöinen by killing him with a crossbow but only succeeds in killing Väinämöinen's horse. Joukahainen's actions lead to Väinämöinen promising to build a Sampo in return for Louhi rescuing him.
Louhi, the Mistress of the North, is the shamanistic matriarch of the people of Pohjola, a people rivalling those of Kalevala. She is the cause of much trouble for Kalevala and its people.
Louhi at one point saves Väinämöinen's life. She has many daughters whom the heroes of Kalevala make many attempts, some successful, to seduce. Louhi plays a major part in the battle to prevent the heroes of Kalevala from stealing back the Sampo, which as a result is ultimately destroyed. She is a powerful witch with a skill almost on a par with that of Väinämöinen.
Kullervo is the vengeful, mentally ill, tragic son of Kalervo. He was abused as a child and sold into slavery to Ilmarinen. He is put to work and treated badly by Ilmarinen's wife, whom he later kills. Kullervo is a misguided and troubled youth, at odds with himself and his situation. He often goes into berserk rage and in the end commits suicide.
Marjatta is the young virgin of Kalevala. She becomes pregnant from eating a lingonberry. When her labour begins she is expelled from her parents' home and leaves to find a place where she can sauna and give birth. She is turned away from numerous places but finally finds a place in the forest and gives birth to a son.
Marjatta's nature, impregnation and searching for a place to give birth are in allegory to the Virgin Mary and the Christianisation of Finland. Marjatta's son is later condemned to death by Väinämöinen for being born out of wedlock. The boy in turn chastises Väinämöinen and is later crowned King of Karelia. This angers Väinämöinen, who leaves Kalevala after bequeathing his songs and kantele to the people as his legacy.
The "Kalevala" is a major part of Finnish culture and history. It has affected the arts in Finland and in other cultures around the world.
The influence of the "Kalevala" in daily life and business in Finland is tangible. Names and places associated with the "Kalevala" have been adopted as company and brand names and even as place names.
There are several places within Finland with "Kalevala"-related names, for example: the district of Tapiola in the city of Espoo; the district of Pohjola in the city of Turku, the district of Metsola in the city of Vantaa and the district of Kaleva in the city of Tampere; the historic provinces of Savo and Karjala and the Russian town of Hiitola are all mentioned within the songs of the "Kalevala". In addition the Russian town of Ukhta was in 1963 renamed Kalevala. In the United States a small community founded in 1900 by Finnish immigrants is named Kaleva, Michigan; many of the street names are taken from the "Kalevala".
The banking sector of Finland has had at least three "Kalevala"-related brands: Sampo Bank (name changed to Danske Bank in late 2012), "OP-Pohjola Group and Tapiola Bank.
The jewellery company Kalevala Koru was founded in 1935 on the 100th anniversary of the publication of the "Old Kalevala". It specialises in the production of unique and culturally important items of jewellery. It is co-owned by the Kalevala Women's League and offers artistic scholarships to a certain number of organisations and individuals every year.
The Finnish dairy company Valio has a brand of ice-cream named Aino, specialising in more exotic flavours than their normal brand.
The construction group Lemminkäinen was formed in 1910 as a roofing and asphalt company, the name was chosen specifically to emphasise that they were a wholly Finnish company. They now operate internationally.
Kalevala Day is celebrated in Finland on 28 February, to match Elias Lönnrot's first version of the "Kalevala" in 1835. By its other official name, the day is known as the Finnish Culture Day.
Several of the names in the "Kalevala" are celebrated as Finnish name days. The name days themselves and the dates they fall upon have no direct relationship with the "Kalevala" itself; however, the adoption of the names became commonplace after the release of the "Kalevala".
Several artists have been influenced by the "Kalevala", most notably Akseli Gallen-Kallela who has painted many pieces relating to the "Kalevala".
Iittala group's Arabia brand kilned a series of "Kalevala" commemorative plates, designed by Raija Uosikkinen (1923–2004). The series ran from 1976 to 1999 and are highly sought after collectables.
One of the earliest artists to depict a scene from the "Kalevala" is Robert Wilhelm Ekman. One of his paintings depicts Väinämöinen playing his kantele.
In 1989, the fourth full translation of the "Kalevala" into English was published, illustrated by Björn Landström.
The "Kalevala" has been translated over one-hundred and fifty times into over sixty different languages. (See § translations.)
Finnish cartoonist Kristian Huitula illustrated the comic book adaptation of the "Kalevala". The "Kalevala Graphic Novel" contains the storyline of all the 50 chapters in original text form.
Finnish cartoonist and children's writer Mauri Kunnas wrote and illustrated "Koirien Kalevala" ("The Canine Kalevala"). The story is that of the "Kalevala" with the characters presented as anthropomorphised dogs, wolves and cats. The story deviates from the full "Kalevala" to make the story more appropriate for children.
The "Kalevala" inspired the American Disney cartoonist Don Rosa to draw a Donald Duck story based on the "Kalevala", called "The Quest for Kalevala". The comic was released in the year of the 150th anniversary of the "Kalevala"s publication.
Franz Anton Schiefner's translation of the "Kalevala" was one inspiration for Longfellow's 1855 poem "The Song of Hiawatha", which is written in a similar trochaic tetrameter.
Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald's Estonian national epic "Kalevipoeg" was inspired by the "Kalevala". Both Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen are mentioned in the work and the overall story of Kalevipoeg, Kalev's son, bears similarities with the Kullervo story.
J. R. R. Tolkien claimed the "Kalevala" as one of his sources for "The Silmarillion". For example, Kullervo is the basis of Túrin Turambar in "Narn i Chîn Húrin", including the sword that speaks when the anti-hero uses it to commit suicide. Echoes of the "Kalevala"s characters, Väinämöinen in particular, can be found in Tom Bombadil of "The Lord of the Rings".
Poet and playwright Paavo Haavikko took influence from the "Kalevala", including the poem "Kaksikymmentä ja yksi" (1974), and the TV-drama "Rauta-aika" (1982).
American science fiction and fantasy authors L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt used the "Kalevala" as source materials for their 1953 fantasy novella "The Wall of Serpents". This is the fourth story in the authors' Harold Shea series, in which the hero and his companions visit various mythic and fictional worlds. In this story, the characters visit the world of the Kalevala, where they encounter characters from the epic drawn with a skeptical eye.
Emil Petaja was an American science fiction and fantasy author of Finnish descent. His best known works, known as the "Otava Series", a series of novels based on the "Kalevala". The series brought Petaja readers from around the world, while his mythological approach to science fiction was discussed in scholarly papers presented at academic conferences. He has a further "Kalevala" based work which is not part of the series, entitled "The Time Twister".
British fantasy author Michael Moorcock's sword and sorcery anti-hero, Elric of Melniboné is influenced by the character Kullervo.
British fantasy author Michael Scott Rohan's "Winter of the World" series feature Louhi as a major antagonist and include many narrative threads from the "Kalevela".
The web comic "A Redtail's Dream", written and illustrated by Minna Sundberg, cites the "Kalevala" as an influence. (Physical edition 2014.)
The British science fiction writer Ian Watson's "Books of Mana" duology, "Lucky's Harvest" and "The Fallen Moon", both contain references to places and names from the "Kalevala".
Music is the area which has the richest influence from the "Kalevala", which is apt considering the way that the folk poetry and songs were originally performed.
The first recorded example of a musician influenced by the "Kalevala" is Filip von Schantz. In 1860, he composed the Kullervo Overture. The piece premièred on the opening of a new theatre building in Helsinki on November of the same year. Von Schantz's work was followed by Robert Kajanus' "Kullervo's death" and the symphonic poem "Aino" in 1881 and 1885 respectively. "Aino" is credited with inspiring Jean Sibelius to investigate the richness of the "Kalevala". "Die Kalewainen in Pochjola", the first opera freely based upon the "Kalevala", was composed by Karl Müller-Berghaus in 1890, but the work has never been performed.
Jean Sibelius is the best-known "Kalevala"-influenced classical composer. Twelve of Sibelius' best-known works are based upon or influenced by the "Kalevala", including his "Kullervo", a tone poem for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra composed in 1892. Sibelius also composed the music of "Jääkärimarssi" (The Jäger March) to words written by Finnish soldier and writer Heikki Nurmio. The march features the line "Me nousemme kostona Kullervon" ("We shall rise in vengeance like that of Kullervo's").
Other classical composers influenced by the "Kalevala":
A number of folk metal bands have drawn on the "Kalevala" heavily for inspiration. In 1993 the Finnish bands Amorphis and Sentenced released two concept albums, "Tales from the Thousand Lakes" and "North from Here" respectively, which were the first of many that have been "Kalevala"-themed. Amorphis's 2009 album "Skyforger" also draws heavily on the "Kalevala". The Finnish folk metal band Ensiferum have released songs, such as "Old Man" and "Little Dreamer", which are influenced by the "Kalevala". The third track of their "Dragonheads" EP is entitled "Kalevala Melody". It is an instrumental piece following the rhythm of the Kalevala metre. Another Finnish folk metal band, Turisas, have adapted several verses from song nine of the "Kalevala", "The Origin of Iron", for the lyrics of their song "Cursed Be Iron", which is the third track of the album "The Varangian Way". Finnish metal band Amberian Dawn use lyrics inspired by the "Kalevala" in their album "River of Tuoni", as well as in its successor, "The Clouds of Northland Thunder". On 3 August 2012, Finnish folk metal band Korpiklaani released a new album entitled "Manala". Jonne Järvelä from the band said, "Manala is the realm of the dead – the underworld in Finnish mythology. Tuonela, Tuoni, Manala and Mana are used synonymously. This place is best known for its appearance in the Finnish national epic "Kalevala", on which many of our new songs are based."
In the mid-1960s, the progressive rock band Kalevala was active within Finland and in 1974, the now prolific singer-songwriter Jukka Kuoppamäki released the song "Väinämöinen". These were some of the first pieces of modern music inspired by the "Kalevala".
In 1998, Ruth MacKenzie recorded the album "Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden", a song cycle covering the part of the story concerning Aino and her choice to refuse the hand of the sorcerer Väinämöinen and instead transform herself into a salmon. MacKenzie has continued to perform the piece live.
The Karelian Finnish folk music group Värttinä has based some of its lyrics on motifs from the "Kalevala". The Vantaa Chamber Choir have songs influenced by the "Kalevala". Their "Kalevala"-themed third album, "Marian virsi" (2005), combines contemporary folk with traditionally performed folk poetry.
In 2003, the Finnish progressive rock quarterly Colossus and French Musea Records commissioned 30 progressive rock groups from around the world to compose songs based on parts of the "Kalevala". The publication assigned each band with a particular song from the "Kalevala", which the band was free to interpret as they saw fit. The result, titled "Kalevala", is a three-disc, multilingual, four-hour epic telling.
In the beginning of 2009, in celebration of the 160th anniversary of the "Kalevala"s first published edition, the Finnish Literature Society, the Kalevala Society, premièred ten new and original works inspired by the "Kalevala". The works included poems, classical and contemporary music and artwork. A book was published by the Finnish Literature Society in conjunction with the event and a large exhibition of "Kalevala"-themed artwork and cultural artefacts was put on display at the Ateneum museum in Helsinki.
In 2017 a New York-based production "Kalevala the Musical" got started in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Republic of Finland. The production features original pop, folk and world music score written by Johanna Telander. The concert version way performed across the United States and Finland.
In 1959, a joint Finnish-Soviet production entitled "Sampo", also known as "The Day the Earth Froze", was released, inspired by the story of the "Sampo" from the "Kalevala".
In 1982, the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) produced a television mini-series called "Rauta-aika" (The Age of Iron), with music composed by Aulis Sallinen and book by Paavo Haavikko. The series was set "during the Kalevala times" and based upon events which take place in the "Kalevala". The series' part 3/4 won Prix Italia in 1983.
The martial arts film "Jadesoturi", also known as "Jade Warrior", released in Finland on 13 October 2006, is based upon the "Kalevala" and set in Finland and China.
The "Kalevala" has attracted many scholars and enthusiasts to interpret its contents in a historical context. Many interpretations of the themes have been tabled. Some parts of the epic have been perceived as ancient conflicts between the early Finns and the Sami. In this context, the country of "Kalevala" could be understood as Southern Finland and "Pohjola" as Lapland.
However, the place names in "Kalevala" seem to transfer the "Kalevala" further south, which has been interpreted as reflecting the Finnic expansion from the South that came to push the Sami further to the north. Some scholars locate the lands of "Kalevala" in East Karelia, where most of the "Kalevala" stories were written down. In 1961, the small town of "Uhtua" in the then Soviet Republic of Karelia was renamed Kalevala, perhaps to promote that theory.
Finnish politician and linguist Eemil Nestor Setälä rejected the idea that the heroes of "Kalevala" are historical in nature and suggested they are personifications of natural phenomena. He interprets Pohjola as the northern heavens and the Sampo as the pillar of the world. Setälä suggests that the journey to regain the Sampo is a purely imaginary one with the heroes riding a mythological boat or magical steed to the heavens.
The practice of bear worship was once very common in Finland and there are strong echoes of this in the "Kalevala".
The old Finnish word "väinä" (a strait of deep water with a slow current) appears to be the origin of the name Väinämöinen; one of Väinämöinen's other names is Suvantolainen, "suvanto" being the modern word for "väinä". Consequently, it is possible that the "Saari" (Island) might be the island of Saaremaa in Estonia and "Kalevala" the Estonian mainland.
Finnish folklorists Matti Kuusi and Pertti Anttonen state that terms such as "the people of Kalevala" or "the tribe of Kalevala" were fabricated by Elias Lönnrot. Moreover, they contend that the word "Kalevala" is very rare in traditional poetry and that by emphasizing dualism (Kalevala vs. Pohjola) Elias Lönnrot created the required tension that made the "Kalevala" dramatically successful and thus fit for a national epic of the time.
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Graphite
Graphite (), archaically referred to as plumbago, is a crystalline form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a hexagonal structure. It occurs naturally in this form and is the most stable form of carbon under standard conditions. Under high pressures and temperatures it converts to diamond. Graphite is used in pencils and lubricants. It is a good conductor of heat and electricity. Its high conductivity makes it useful in electronic products such as electrodes, batteries, and solar panels.
The principal types of natural graphite, each occurring in different types of ore deposits, are
Graphite occurs in metamorphic rocks as a result of the reduction of sedimentary carbon compounds during metamorphism. It also occurs in igneous rocks and in meteorites. Minerals associated with graphite include quartz, calcite, micas and tourmaline. The principal export sources of mined graphite are in order of tonnage: China, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, and Madagascar.
In meteorites, graphite occurs with troilite and silicate minerals. Small graphitic crystals in meteoritic iron are called cliftonite. Some microscopic grains have distinctive isotopic compositions, indicating that they were formed before the Solar system. They are one of about 12 known types of mineral that predate the Solar System and have also been detected in molecular clouds. These minerals were formed in the ejecta when supernovae exploded or low- to intermediate-sized stars expelled their outer envelopes late in their lives. Graphite may be the second or third oldest mineral in the Universe.
Solid carbon comes in different forms known as allotropes depending on the type of chemical bond. The two most common are diamond and graphite (less common ones include buckminsterfullerene). In diamond the bonds are sp3 and the atoms form tetrahedra with each bound to four nearest neighbors. In graphite they are sp2 orbital hybrids and the atoms form in planes with each bound to three nearest neighbors 120 degrees apart.
The individual layers are called graphene. In each layer, the carbon atoms are arranged in a honeycomb lattice with separation of 0.142 nm, and the distance between planes is 0.335 nm. Atoms in the plane are bonded covalently, with only three of the four potential bonding sites satisfied. The fourth electron is free to migrate in the plane, making graphite electrically conductive. However, it does not conduct in a direction at right angles to the plane. Bonding between layers is via weak van der Waals bonds, which allows layers of graphite to be easily separated, or to slide past each other.
The two known forms of graphite, "alpha" (hexagonal) and "beta" (rhombohedral), have very similar physical properties, except that the graphene layers stack slightly differently. The alpha graphite may be either flat or buckled. The alpha form can be converted to the beta form through mechanical treatment and the beta form reverts to the alpha form when it is heated above 1300 °C.
The equilibrium pressure and temperature conditions for a transition between graphite and diamond is well established theoretically and experimentally. The pressure changes linearly between at and at (the diamond/graphite/liquid triple point).
However, the phases have a wide region about this line where they can coexist. At normal temperature and pressure, and , the stable phase of carbon is graphite, but diamond is metastable and its rate of conversion to graphite is negligible. However, at temperatures above about , diamond rapidly converts to graphite. Rapid conversion of graphite to diamond requires pressures well above the equilibrium line: at , a pressure of is needed.
The acoustic and thermal properties of graphite are highly anisotropic, since phonons propagate quickly along the tightly bound planes, but are slower to travel from one plane to another. Graphite's high thermal stability and electrical and thermal conductivity facilitate its widespread use as electrodes and refractories in high temperature material processing applications. However, in oxygen-containing atmospheres graphite readily oxidizes to form carbon dioxide at temperatures of 700 °C and above.
Graphite is an electrical conductor, hence useful in such applications as arc lamp electrodes. It can conduct electricity due to the vast electron delocalization within the carbon layers (a phenomenon called aromaticity). These valence electrons are free to move, so are able to conduct electricity. However, the electricity is primarily conducted within the plane of the layers. The conductive properties of powdered graphite allow its use as pressure sensor in carbon microphones.
Graphite and graphite powder are valued in industrial applications for their self-lubricating and dry lubricating properties. There is a common belief that graphite's lubricating properties are solely due to the loose interlamellar coupling between sheets in the structure. However, it has been shown that in a vacuum environment (such as in technologies for use in space), graphite degrades as a lubricant, due to the hypoxic conditions. This observation led to the hypothesis that the lubrication is due to the presence of fluids between the layers, such as air and water, which are naturally adsorbed from the environment. This hypothesis has been refuted by studies showing that air and water are not absorbed. Recent studies suggest that an effect called superlubricity can also account for graphite's lubricating properties. The use of graphite is limited by its tendency to facilitate pitting corrosion in some stainless steel, and to promote galvanic corrosion between dissimilar metals (due to its electrical conductivity). It is also corrosive to aluminium in the presence of moisture. For this reason, the US Air Force banned its use as a lubricant in aluminium aircraft, and discouraged its use in aluminium-containing automatic weapons. Even graphite pencil marks on aluminium parts may facilitate corrosion. Another high-temperature lubricant, hexagonal boron nitride, has the same molecular structure as graphite. It is sometimes called "white graphite", due to its similar properties.
When a large number of crystallographic defects bind these planes together, graphite loses its lubrication properties and becomes what is known as pyrolytic graphite. It is also highly anisotropic, and diamagnetic, thus it will float in mid-air above a strong magnet. If it is made in a fluidized bed at 1000–1300 °C then it is isotropic turbostratic, and is used in blood contacting devices like mechanical heart valves and is called pyrolytic carbon, and is not diamagnetic. Pyrolytic graphite and pyrolytic carbon are often confused but are very different materials.
Natural and crystalline graphites are not often used in pure form as structural materials, due to their shear-planes, brittleness, and inconsistent mechanical properties.
In the 4th millennium BC, during the Neolithic Age in southeastern Europe, the Marița culture used graphite in a ceramic paint for decorating pottery.
Some time before 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), an enormous deposit of graphite was discovered on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England, which the locals found useful for marking sheep. During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), Borrowdale graphite was used as a refractory material to line moulds for cannonballs, resulting in rounder, smoother balls that could be fired farther, contributing to the strength of the English navy. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and soft, and could easily be cut into sticks. Because of its military importance, this unique mine and its production were strictly controlled by the Crown.
During the 19th century, graphite's uses greatly expanded to include stove polish, lubricants, paints, crucibles, foundry facings, and pencils, a major factor in the expansion of educational tools during the first great rise of education for the masses. The British empire controlled most of the world's production (especially from Ceylon), but production from Austrian, German and American deposits expanded by mid-century. For example, the Dixon Crucible Company of Jersey City, New Jersey, founded by Joseph Dixon and partner Orestes Cleveland in 1845, opened mines in the Lake Ticonderoga district of New York, built a processing plant there, and a factory to manufacture pencils, crucibles and other products in New Jersey, described in the "Engineering & Mining Journal" 21 December 1878. The Dixon pencil is still in production.
The beginnings of the revolutionary froth flotation process are associated with graphite mining. Included in the "E&MJ" article on the Dixon Crucible Company is a sketch of the "floating tanks" used in the age-old process of extracting graphite. Because graphite is so light, the mix of graphite and waste was sent through a final series of water tanks where a cleaner graphite “floated” off, which left waste to drop out. In an 1877 patent, the two brothers Bessel (Adolph and August) of Dresden, Germany, took this "floating" process a step further and added a small amount of oil to the tanks and boiled the mix – an agitation or frothing step – to collect the graphite, the first steps toward the future flotation process. Adolph Bessel received the Wohler Medal for the patented process that upgraded the recovery of graphite to 90% from the German deposit. In 1977, the German Society of Mining Engineers and Metallurgists organized a special symposium dedicated to their discovery and, thus, the 100th anniversary of flotation.
In the United States, in 1885, Hezekiah Bradford of Philadelphia patented a similar process, but it is uncertain if his process was used successfully in the nearby graphite deposits of Chester County, Pennsylvania, a major producer by the 1890s. The Bessel process was limited in use, primarily because of the abundant cleaner deposits found around the globe, which needed not much more than hand-sorting to gather the pure graphite. The state of the art, ca. 1900, is described in the Canadian Department of Mines report on graphite mines and mining, when Canadian deposits began to become important producers of graphite.
Historically, graphite was called black lead or plumbago. Plumbago was commonly used in its massive mineral form. Both of these names arise from confusion with the similar-appearing lead ores, particularly galena. The Latin word for lead, "plumbum", gave its name to the English term for this grey metallic-sheened mineral and even to the leadworts or plumbagos, plants with flowers that resemble this colour.
The term "black lead" usually refers to a powdered or processed graphite, matte black in color.
Abraham Gottlob Werner coined the name "graphite" ("writing stone") in 1789. He attempted to clear up the confusion between molybdena, plumbago and black lead after Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1778 proved that there are at least three different minerals. Scheele's analysis showed that the chemical compounds molybdenum sulfide (molybdenite), lead(II) sulfide (galena) and graphite were three different soft black minerals.
Natural graphite is mostly used for refractories, batteries, steelmaking, expanded graphite, brake linings, foundry facings and lubricants.
The use of graphite as a refractory (heat-resistant) material began before 1900 with the graphite crucible used to hold molten metal; this is now a minor part of refractories. In the mid-1980s, the carbon-magnesite brick became important, and a bit later the alumina-graphite shape. the order of importance is: alumina-graphite shapes, carbon-magnesite brick, monolithics (gunning and ramming mixes), and then crucibles.
Crucibles began using very large flake graphite, and carbon-magnesite brick requiring not quite so large flake graphite; for these and others there is now much more flexibility in the size of flake required, and amorphous graphite is no longer restricted to low-end refractories. Alumina-graphite shapes are used as continuous casting ware, such as nozzles and troughs, to convey the molten steel from ladle to mold, and carbon magnesite bricks line steel converters and electric-arc furnaces to withstand extreme temperatures. Graphite blocks are also used in parts of blast furnace linings where the high thermal conductivity of the graphite is critical. High-purity monolithics are often used as a continuous furnace lining instead of carbon-magnesite bricks.
The US and European refractories industry had a crisis in 2000–2003, with an indifferent market for steel and a declining refractory consumption per tonne of steel underlying firm buyouts and many plant closures. Many of the plant closures resulted from the acquisition of Harbison-Walker Refractories by RHI AG and some plants had their equipment auctioned off. Since much of the lost capacity was for carbon-magnesite brick, graphite consumption within the refractories area moved towards alumina-graphite shapes and monolithics, and away from brick. The major source of carbon-magnesite brick is now imports from China. Almost all of the above refractories are used to make steel and account for 75% of refractory consumption; the rest is used by a variety of industries, such as cement.
According to the USGS, US natural graphite consumption in refractories comprised 12,500 tonnes in 2010.
The use of graphite in batteries has increased since the 1970s. Natural and synthetic graphite are used to construct electrodes in major battery technologies. The lithium-ion battery utilizes roughly twice the amount of graphite as lithium carbonate.
The demand for batteries, primarily nickel–metal hydride and lithium-ion batteries, caused a growth in demand for graphite in the late 1980s and early 1990s – a growth driven by portable electronics, such as portable CD players and power tools. Laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and smartphone products have increased the demand for batteries. Electric-vehicle batteries are anticipated to increase graphite demand. As an example, a lithium-ion battery in a fully electric Nissan Leaf contains nearly 40 kg of graphite.
Natural graphite in steelmaking mostly goes into raising the carbon content in molten steel; it can also serve to lubricate the dies used to extrude hot steel. Carbon additives face competitive pricing from alternatives such as synthetic graphite powder, petroleum coke, and other forms of carbon. A carbon raiser is added to increase the carbon content of steel to a specified level. An estimate based on USGS's graphite consumption statistics indicates that steelmakers in the US used 10,500 tonnes in this fashion in 2005.
Natural amorphous and fine flake graphite are used in brake linings or brake shoes for heavier (nonautomotive) vehicles, and became important with the need to substitute for asbestos. This use has been important for quite some time, but nonasbestos organic (NAO) compositions are beginning to reduce graphite's market share. A brake-lining industry shake-out with some plant closures has not been beneficial, nor has an indifferent automotive market. According to the USGS, US natural graphite consumption in brake linings was 6,510 tonnes in 2005.
A foundry facing mold wash is a water-based paint of amorphous or fine flake graphite. Painting the inside of a mold with it and letting it dry leaves a fine graphite coat that will ease separation of the object cast after the hot metal has cooled. Graphite lubricants are specialty items for use at very high or very low temperatures, as forging die lubricant, an antiseize agent, a gear lubricant for mining machinery, and to lubricate locks. Having low-grit graphite, or even better, no-grit graphite (ultra high purity), is highly desirable. It can be used as a dry powder, in water or oil, or as colloidal graphite (a permanent suspension in a liquid). An estimate based on USGS graphite consumption statistics indicates that 2,200 tonnes was used in this fashion in 2005. Metal can also be impregnated into graphite to create a self-lubricating alloy for application in extreme conditions, such as bearings for machines exposed to high or low temperatures.
The ability to leave marks on paper and other objects gave graphite its name, given in 1789 by German mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner. It stems from "graphein", meaning "to write" or "draw" in Ancient Greek.
From the 16th century, all pencils were made with leads of English natural graphite, but modern pencil lead is most commonly a mix of powdered graphite and clay; it was invented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795. It is chemically unrelated to the metal lead, whose ores had a similar appearance, hence the continuation of the name. Plumbago is another older term for natural graphite used for drawing, typically as a lump of the mineral without a wood casing. The term plumbago drawing is normally restricted to 17th and 18th century works, mostly portraits.
Today, pencils are still a small but significant market for natural graphite. Around 7% of the 1.1 million tonnes produced in 2011 was used to make pencils. Low-quality amorphous graphite is used and sourced mainly from China.
Natural graphite has found uses in zinc-carbon batteries, in electric motor brushes, and various specialized applications. Graphite of various hardness or softness results in different qualities and tones when used as an artistic medium. Railroads would often mix powdered graphite with waste oil or linseed oil to create a heat-resistant protective coating for the exposed portions of a steam locomotive's boiler, such as the smokebox or lower part of the firebox.
Expanded graphite is made by immersing natural flake graphite in a bath of chromic acid, then concentrated sulfuric acid, which forces the crystal lattice planes apart, thus expanding the graphite. The expanded graphite can be used to make graphite foil or used directly as "hot top" compound to insulate molten metal in a ladle or red-hot steel ingots and decrease heat loss, or as firestops fitted around a fire door or in sheet metal collars surrounding plastic pipe (during a fire, the graphite expands and chars to resist fire penetration and spread), or to make high-performance gasket material for high-temperature use. After being made into graphite foil, the foil is machined and assembled into the bipolar plates in fuel cells.
The foil is made into heat sinks for laptop computers which keeps them cool while saving weight, and is made into a foil laminate that can be used in valve packings or made into gaskets. Old-style packings are now a minor member of this grouping: fine flake graphite in oils or greases for uses requiring heat resistance. A GAN estimate of current US natural graphite consumption in this end use is 7,500 tonnes.
Graphite forms intercalation compounds with some metals and small molecules. In these compounds, the host molecule or atom gets "sandwiched" between the graphite layers, resulting in a type of compound with variable stoichiometry. A prominent example of an intercalation compound is potassium graphite, denoted by the formula KC8. Some graphite intercalation compounds are superconductors. The highest transition temperature (by June 2009) "T"c = 11.5 K is achieved in CaC6, and it further increases under applied pressure (15.1 K at 8 GPa). Graphite's ability to intercalate lithium ions without significant damage from swelling is what makes it the dominant anode material in lithium-ion batteries.
In 1893, Charles Street of Le Carbone discovered a process for making artificial graphite. In the mid-1890s, Edward Goodrich Acheson (1856–1931) accidentally invented another way to produce synthetic graphite after synthesizing carborundum (silicon carbide or SiC). He discovered that overheating carborundum, as opposed to pure carbon, produced almost pure graphite. While studying the effects of high temperature on carborundum, he had found that silicon vaporizes at about 4,150 °C (7,500 °F), leaving the carbon behind in graphitic carbon. This graphite became valuable as a lubricant.
Acheson's technique for producing silicon carbide and graphite is named the Acheson process. In 1896, Acheson received a patent for his method of synthesizing graphite, and in 1897 started commercial production. The Acheson Graphite Co. was formed in 1899.
Highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) is the highest-quality synthetic form of graphite. It is used in scientific research, in particular, as a length standard for scanner calibration of scanning probe microscope.
Graphite electrodes carry the electricity that melts scrap iron and steel, and sometimes direct-reduced iron (DRI), in electric arc furnaces, which are the vast majority of steel furnaces. They are made from petroleum coke after it is mixed with coal tar pitch. They are then extruded and shaped, baked to carbonize the binder (pitch), and finally graphitized by heating it to temperatures approaching 3000 °C, at which the carbon atoms arrange into graphite. They can vary in size up to long and in diameter. An increasing proportion of global steel is made using electric arc furnaces, and the electric arc furnace itself is becoming more efficient, making more steel per tonne of electrode. An estimate based on USGS data indicates that graphite electrode consumption was 197,000 tonnes in 2005.
Electrolytic aluminium smelting also uses graphitic carbon electrodes. On a much smaller scale, synthetic graphite electrodes are used in electrical discharge machining (EDM), commonly to make injection molds for plastics.
The powder is made by heating powdered petroleum coke above the temperature of graphitization, sometimes with minor modifications. The graphite scrap comes from pieces of unusable electrode material (in the manufacturing stage or after use) and lathe turnings, usually after crushing and sizing. Most synthetic graphite powder goes to carbon raising in steel (competing with natural graphite), with some used in batteries and brake linings. According to the USGS, US synthetic graphite powder and scrap production was 95,000 tonnes in 2001 (latest data).
Special grades of synthetic graphite, such as Gilsocarbon, also find use as a matrix and neutron moderator within nuclear reactors. Its low neutron cross-section also recommends it for use in proposed fusion reactors. Care must be taken that reactor-grade graphite is free of neutron absorbing materials such as boron, widely used as the seed electrode in commercial graphite deposition systems – this caused the failure of the Germans' World War II graphite-based nuclear reactors. Since they could not isolate the difficulty they were forced to use far more expensive heavy water moderators. Graphite used for nuclear reactors is often referred to as nuclear graphite.
Graphite (carbon) fiber and carbon nanotubes are also used in carbon fiber reinforced plastics, and in heat-resistant composites such as reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC). Commercial structures made from carbon fiber graphite composites include fishing rods, golf club shafts, bicycle frames, sports car body panels, the fuselage of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and pool cue sticks and have been successfully employed in reinforced concrete, The mechanical properties of carbon fiber graphite-reinforced plastic composites and grey cast iron are strongly influenced by the role of graphite in these materials. In this context, the term "(100%) graphite" is often loosely used to refer to a pure mixture of carbon reinforcement and resin, while the term "composite" is used for composite materials with additional ingredients.
Modern smokeless powder is coated in graphite to prevent the buildup of static charge.
Graphite has been used in at least three radar absorbent materials. It was mixed with rubber in Sumpf and Schornsteinfeger, which were used on U-boat snorkels to reduce their radar cross section. It was also used in tiles on early F-117 Nighthawk stealth strike fighters.
Graphite composites are used as absorber for high-energy particles (e.g. in the LHC beam dump).
Graphite rods when filed into shape are used as a tool in glassworking to manipulate hot molten glass.
Graphite is mined by both open pit and underground methods. Graphite usually needs beneficiation. This may be carried out by hand-picking the pieces of gangue (rock) and hand-screening the product or by crushing the rock and floating out the graphite. Beneficiation by flotation encounters the difficulty that graphite is very soft and "marks" (coats) the particles of gangue. This makes the "marked" gangue particles float off with the graphite, yielding impure concentrate. There are two ways of obtaining a commercial concentrate or product: repeated regrinding and floating (up to seven times) to purify the concentrate, or by acid leaching (dissolving) the gangue with hydrofluoric acid (for a silicate gangue) or hydrochloric acid (for a carbonate gangue).
In milling, the incoming graphite products and concentrates can be ground before being classified (sized or screened), with the coarser flake size fractions (below 8 mesh, 8–20 mesh, 20–50 mesh) carefully preserved, and then the carbon contents are determined. Some standard blends can be prepared from the different fractions, each with a certain flake size distribution and carbon content. Custom blends can also be made for individual customers who want a certain flake size distribution and carbon content. If flake size is unimportant, the concentrate can be ground more freely. Typical end products include a fine powder for use as a slurry in oil drilling and coatings for foundry molds, carbon raiser in the steel industry (Synthetic graphite powder and powdered petroleum coke can also be used as carbon raiser). Environmental impacts from graphite mills consist of air pollution including fine particulate exposure of workers and also soil contamination from powder spillages leading to heavy metal contamination of soil.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), world production of natural graphite in 2016 was 1,200,000 tonnes, of which the following major exporters are: China (780,000 t), India (170,000 t), Brazil (80,000 t), Turkey (32,000 t) and North Korea (6,000 t). Graphite is not yet mined in the United States. However, Westwater Resources is currently in the development stages of creating a pilot plant for their Coosa Graphite Mine near Sylacauga, Alabama. U.S. production of synthetic graphite in 2010 was 134,000 t valued at $1.07 billion.
People can be exposed to graphite in the workplace by breathing it in, skin contact, and eye contact.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for graphite exposure in the workplace as a time weighted average (TWA) of 15 million particles per cubic foot (1.5 mg/m3) over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of TWA 2.5 mg/m3 respirable dust over an 8-hour workday. At levels of 1250 mg/m3, graphite is immediately dangerous to life and health.
The most common way of recycling graphite occurs when synthetic graphite electrodes are either manufactured and pieces are cut off or lathe turnings are discarded, or the electrode (or other) are used all the way down to the electrode holder. A new electrode replaces the old one, but a sizeable piece of the old electrode remains. This is crushed and sized, and the resulting graphite powder is mostly used to raise the carbon content of molten steel. Graphite-containing refractories are sometimes also recycled, but often not because of their graphite: the largest-volume items, such as carbon-magnesite bricks that contain only 15–25% graphite, usually contain too little graphite. However, some recycled carbon–magnesite brick is used as the basis for furnace-repair materials, and also crushed carbon–magnesite brick is used in slag conditioners. While crucibles have a high graphite content, the volume of crucibles used and then recycled is very small.
A high-quality flake graphite product that closely resembles natural flake graphite can be made from steelmaking kish. Kish is a large-volume near-molten waste skimmed from the molten iron feed to a basic oxygen furnace, and consists of a mix of graphite (precipitated out of the supersaturated iron), lime-rich slag, and some iron. The iron is recycled on site, leaving a mixture of graphite and slag. The best recovery process uses hydraulic classification (which utilizes a flow of water to separate minerals by specific gravity: graphite is light and settles nearly last) to get a 70% graphite rough concentrate. Leaching this concentrate with hydrochloric acid gives a 95% graphite product with a flake size ranging from 10 mesh down.
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Garry Trudeau
Garretson Beekman Trudeau (born July 21, 1948) is an American cartoonist, best known for creating the "Doonesbury" comic strip. Trudeau is also the creator and executive producer of the Amazon Studios political comedy series "Alpha House".
Trudeau was born in New York City, the son of Jean Douglas (née Moore) and Francis Berger Trudeau Jr. He is the great-grandson of Edward Livingston Trudeau, who created Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium for the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, New York. Edward was succeeded by his son Francis and grandson Francis Jr. The latter founded the Trudeau Institute at Saranac Lake, with which his son Garry retains a connection.
His ancestry is French Canadian, English, Dutch, German, and Swedish.
Raised in Saranac Lake, Trudeau attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He enrolled in Yale University in 1966. As an art major, Trudeau initially focused on painting, but soon discovered a greater interest in the graphic arts. He spent much of his time cartooning and writing for Yale's humor magazine "The Yale Record", eventually serving as the magazine's editor-in-chief. At the same time, Trudeau began contributing to the "Yale Daily News", which eventually led to the creation of "Bull Tales", a comic strip parodying the exploits of Yale quarterback Brian Dowling. This strip was the progenitor of "Doonesbury".
While still an undergraduate at Yale, Trudeau published two collections of "Bull Tales": "Bull Tales" (1969, published by the "Yale Daily News") and "Michael J." (1970, published by "The Yale Record").
As a senior, Trudeau became a member of Scroll and Key. He did postgraduate work at the Yale School of Art, earning a master of fine arts degree in graphic design in 1973. It was there that Trudeau first met photographer David Levinthal, with whom he collaborated on "Hitler Moves East", an influential "graphic chronicle" of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
Soon after "Bull Tales" began running in the Yale student newspaper, the strip caught the attention of the newly formed Universal Press Syndicate. The syndicate's editor, James F. Andrews, recruited Trudeau, changed the strip's name to "Doonesbury", and began distributing it following the cartoonist's graduation in 1970. Today "Doonesbury" is syndicated to 1,000 daily and Sunday newspapers worldwide and is accessible online in association with "The Washington Post".
In 1975, Trudeau became the first comic strip artist to win a Pulitzer, traditionally awarded to editorial-page cartoonists. He was also a Pulitzer finalist in 1990, 2004, and 2005. Other awards include the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award in 1994, and the Reuben Award in 1995. In 1993, Trudeau was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wiley Miller, fellow comic-strip artist responsible for "Non Sequitur", called him "far and away the most influential editorial cartoonist in the last 25 years". A regular graduation speaker, Trudeau has received 35 honorary degrees.
In addition to his creating his strip, Trudeau has worked in both theater and television. He was nominated for an Oscar in 1977 in the category of Animated Short Film for "A Doonesbury Special", created for NBC in collaboration with John and Faith Hubley. The film won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Special Prize in 1978. In 1984, with composer Elizabeth Swados, he wrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical "Doonesbury", for which he was nominated for two Drama Desk Awards. A cast album of the show, recorded for MCA, received a Grammy nomination. Trudeau again collaborated with Swados in 1984, this time on "Rap Master Ronnie", a satirical review about the Reagan Administration that opened off-Broadway at the Village Gate. A filmed version, featuring Jon Cryer, the Smothers Brothers, and Carol Kane, was broadcast on Cinemax in 1988.
Also in 1988, Trudeau wrote and co-produced with director Robert Altman HBO's critically acclaimed "Tanner '88", a satiric look at that year's presidential election campaign. The show won the gold medal for Best Television Series at the Cannes Television Festival, the British Academy Television Award for Best Foreign Program, and Best Imported Program from the British Broadcasting Press Guild. It earned an Emmy Award, as well as four ACE Award nominations. In 2004, Trudeau reunited with Altman to write and co-produce a sequel mini-series, "Tanner on Tanner", for the Sundance Channel.
In 1996, "Newsweek" and the "Washington Post" speculated that Trudeau had written the novel "Primary Colors", which was later revealed to have been written by Joe Klein. In February 2000, Trudeau, working with Dotcomix, launched "Duke2000", a web-based presidential campaign featuring a real-time, 3-D, streaming-animation version of Duke. Nearly 30 campaign videos were created for the site, and Ambassador Duke was interviewed live by satellite on the "Today Show, Larry King Live, The Charlie Rose Show", and dozens of local TV and radio news shows.
In 2013, Trudeau created, wrote and co-produced "Alpha House", a political sitcom starring John Goodman that revolves around four Republican U.S. Senators who live together in a townhouse on Capitol Hill. Trudeau was inspired to write the show's pilot after reading a 2007 "New York Times" article about a real D.C. townhouse shared by New York Senator Chuck Schumer, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, and California Representative George Miller, all Democrats. The pilot for "Alpha House" was produced by Amazon Studios and aired in early 2013. Due to positive response, Amazon picked up the show to develop into a full series, streaming eleven episodes for its first season. On March 31, 2014, Amazon announced that "Alpha House" had been renewed. Production began in July 2014, and the entire second season became available for streaming on October 24, 2014.
While writing "Alpha House", Trudeau put the daily Doonesbury into rerun mode. On March 3, 2014 the "Classic Doonesbury" series began, featuring approximately four weeks of daily strips from each year of the strip's run. He continues to produce new strips for Sundays. Although "Alpha House" has not been in production since the end of 2014, Trudeau has not returned to creating daily "Doonesbury" strips; new material remains a Sunday-only event.
Trudeau has contributed to such publications as "Harper's", "Rolling Stone", "The New Republic", "The New Yorker", "New York", and "The Washington Post". From 1990–94, he wrote and drew an occasional column for "The New York Times" op-ed page, and was a contributing essayist for "Time" magazine from 1996 to 2001.
Beginning with the Gulf War in 1991, Trudeau has written about military issues extensively. In recognition for his work on wounded warriors, he has been presented with the Commander's Award for Public Service by the Department of the Army, the Commander's Award from Disabled American Veterans, the President's Award for Excellence in the Arts from Vietnam Veterans of America, the Distinguished Public Service Award from the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, the Mental Health Research Advocacy Award from the Yale School of Medicine, and a special citation from the Vet Centers.
He received several unit commendations from the field during the Gulf War, and he traveled with the USO to visit troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2005 to 2014, his website hosted "The Sandbox", a milblog posting over 800 essays by deployed soldiers, returned vets, caregivers, and spouses. For most of the strip's run, Trudeau has eschewed merchandising, but starting in 1998 he teamed up with Starbucks to create "Doonesbury" products to raise funds for local literacy programs. The items were offered for sale in Starbucks stores for nearly two years and raised over $1 million. Also for charity, Trudeau licensed the strip to Ben & Jerry's, which created a best-selling sorbet flavor called "Doonesberry".
Garry Trudeau's son Ross, a digital media producer, is also a crossword constructor who has been published in the New York Times. As part of the ongoing celebrity partnership series, Ross and Garry collaborated on a crossword puzzle that was published on Tues. May 15, 2018 in the NYT. This is the 6th NYT puzzle for Ross and the 1st for Garry.
Trudeau married Jane Pauley in 1980; they have three children. He maintains a low personal profile. A rare early appearance on television was as a guest on "To Tell the Truth" in 1971, where only one of the three panelists guessed his identity. In 1990, Trudeau appeared on the cover of "Newsweek" for "Inside Doonesbury's Brain", a story written by Jonathan Alter. This was the first interview Trudeau had given in seventeen years.
Trudeau cooperated extensively with "Wired" magazine for a 2000 profile, "The Revolution Will be Satirized". He later spoke with the writer of that article, Edward Cone, for a 2004 newspaper column in the Greensboro, North Carolina "News & Record", about the war wounds suffered by the Doonesbury character "B.D.", and in 2006 did a Q&A at Cone's personal blog about The Sandbox. Trudeau granted an interview to "Rolling Stone" in 2004 in which he discussed his time at Yale University, which he attended two years behind George W. Bush. He granted another "Rolling Stone" interview in 2010. In 2006, "The Washington Post" printed an extensive profile of Trudeau by writer Gene Weingarten. He appeared on the "Charlie Rose" television program, and at signings for "The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time", his "Doonesbury" book about B.D.'s struggle with injuries received during the second Gulf War.
On August 1, 2016, Trudeau appeared on MSNBC on "The Rachel Maddow Show". He was brought on to discuss his ability to predict and accurately write about Donald Trump's plans to run for president almost three decades earlier. Maddow presented cartoon strips from as far back as 1987. Trudeau was on her show to promote his new book "Yuge", which covers 30 years of Trump appearing in "Doonesbury". On November 7, 2016, Trudeau appeared on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross to discuss "Yuge". On the "CBS News Sunday Morning" broadcast of December 2, 2018 he was featured and was interviewed by his wife, Jane Pauley.
Trudeau has attracted criticism both for the comic strip and for his own opinions. The "Saturday Review" once voted Trudeau one of the "Most Overrated People in American Arts and Letters", stating that after his hiatus, his comic strip was "predictable, mean-spirited, and not as funny as before."
Eric Alterman, writing in "The Nation", called "Doonesbury" "one of the great intellectual/artistic accomplishments of the past half-century, irrespective of category".
Trudeau's acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving a Polk Award in 2015 for lifetime achievement stirred controversy. In the speech, Trudeau criticized the cartoonists of "Charlie Hebdo"—after a number of "Charlie Hebdo" writers, editors and cartoonists had been murdered execution style in their own Paris offices by Muslim terrorists—for "punching downward..., attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons", and thereby wandering "into the realm of hate speech" with cartoons of Muhammad. Writing in "The Atlantic", in which Trudeau had published his speech, political commentator David Frum criticized what he called Trudeau's "moral theory" that calls for identifying "the bearer of privilege", then holding "the privilege-bearer responsible". Trudeau was labelled a "terror apologist" by the editors of "The New York Post" for his comments, with his choice of the venue in which to make them "adding to the insult".
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Guild
A guild is an association of artisans or merchants who oversee the practice of their craft/trade in a particular area. The earliest types of guild formed as confraternities of tradesmen, normally operating in a single city and covering a single trade. They were organized in a manner something between a professional association, a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society. They sometimes depended on grants of letters patent from a monarch or other ruler to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials, but were generally regulated by the city government. A lasting legacy of traditional guilds are the guildhalls constructed and used as guild meeting-places. Guild members found guilty of cheating on the public would be fined or banned from the guild.
Typically the key "privilege" was that only guild members were allowed to sell their goods or practice their skill within the city. There might be controls on minimum or maximum prices, hours of trading, numbers of apprentices, and many other things. As well as reducing free competition, but sometimes maintaining a good quality of work, often these rules made it difficult or impossible for women, immigrants to the city, and non-Christians to run businesses working in the trade.
An important result of the guild framework was the emergence of universities at Bologna (established in 1088), Oxford (at least since 1096) and Paris (c. 1150); they originated as guilds of students (as at Bologna) or of masters (as at Paris).
A type of guild was known in Roman times. Known as "collegium", "collegia" or "corpus", these were organised groups of merchants who specialised in a particular craft and whose membership of the group was voluntary. One such example is the "corpus naviculariorum", the college of long-distance shippers based at Rome's La Ostia port. The Roman guilds failed to survive the collapse of the Roman Empire.
In medieval cities, craftsmen tended to form associations based on their trades, confraternities of textile workers, masons, carpenters, carvers, glass workers, each of whom controlled secrets of traditionally imparted technology, the "arts" or "mysteries" of their crafts. Usually the founders were free independent master craftsmen who hired apprentices.
There were several types of guilds, including the two main categories of merchant guilds and craft guilds but also the frith guild and religious guild. Guilds arose beginning in the High Middle Ages as craftsmen united to protect their common interests. In the German city of Augsburg craft guilds are mentioned in the Towncharter of 1156.
The continental system of guilds and merchants arrived in England after the Norman Conquest, with incorporated societies of merchants in each town or city holding exclusive rights of doing business there. In many cases they became the governing body of a town. For example, London's Guildhall became the seat of the Court of Common Council of the City of London Corporation, the world's oldest continuously elected local government, whose members to this day must be Freemen of the City. The Freedom of the City, effective from the Middle Ages until 1835, gave the right to trade, and was only bestowed upon members of a Guild or Livery.
Early egalitarian communities called "guilds" were denounced by Catholic clergy for their "conjurations" — the binding oaths sworn among the members to support one another in adversity, kill specific enemies, and back one another in feuds or in business ventures. The occasion for these oaths were drunken banquets held on December 26, the pagan feast of Jul (Yule)—in 858, West Francian Bishop Hincmar sought vainly to Christianise the guilds.
In the Early Middle Ages, most of the Roman craft organisations, originally formed as religious confraternities, had disappeared, with the apparent exceptions of stonecutters and perhaps glassmakers, mostly the people that had local skills. Gregory of Tours tells a miraculous tale of a builder whose art and techniques suddenly left him, but were restored by an apparition of the Virgin Mary in a dream. Michel Rouche remarks that the story speaks for the importance of practically transmitted journeymanship.
In France, guilds were called "corps de métiers". According to Viktor Ivanovich Rutenburg, "Within the guild itself there was very little division of labour, which tended to operate rather between the guilds. Thus, according to Étienne Boileau's Book of Handicrafts, by the mid-13th century there were no less than 100 guilds in Paris, a figure which by the 14th century had risen to 350." There were different guilds of metal-workers: the farriers, knife-makers, locksmiths, chain-forgers, nail-makers, often formed separate and distinct corporations; the armourers were divided into helmet-makers, escutcheon-makers, harness-makers, harness-polishers, etc. In Catalan towns, specially at Barcelona, guilds or "gremis" were a basic agent in the society: a shoemakers' guild is recorded in 1208.
In England, specifically in the City of London Corporation, more than 110 guilds, referred to as livery companies, survive today, with the oldest more than a thousand years old. Other groups, such as the Worshipful Company of Tax Advisers, have been formed far more recently. Membership in a livery company is expected for individuals participating in the governance of "The City", as the Lord Mayor and the Remembrancer.
The guild system reached a mature state in Germany circa 1300 and held on in German cities into the 19th century, with some special privileges for certain occupations remaining today. In the 15th century, Hamburg had 100 guilds, Cologne 80, and Lübeck 70. The latest guilds to develop in Western Europe were the "" of Spain: e.g., Valencia (1332) or Toledo (1426).
Not all city economies were controlled by guilds; some cities were "free." Where guilds were in control, they shaped labor, production and trade; they had strong controls over instructional capital, and the modern concepts of a lifetime progression of apprentice to craftsman, and then from journeyman eventually to widely recognized master and grandmaster began to emerge. In order to become a master, a journeyman would have to go on a three-year voyage called journeyman years. The practice of the journeyman years still exists in Germany and France.
As production became more specialized, trade guilds were divided and subdivided, eliciting the squabbles over jurisdiction that produced the paperwork by which economic historians trace their development: The metalworking guilds of Nuremberg were divided among dozens of independent trades in the boom economy of the 13th century, and there were 101 trades in Paris by 1260. In Ghent, as in Florence, the woolen textile industry developed as a congeries of specialized guilds. The appearance of the European guilds was tied to the emergent money economy, and to urbanization. Before this time it was not possible to run a money-driven organization, as commodity money was the normal way of doing business.
The guild was at the center of European handicraft organization into the 16th century. In France, a resurgence of the guilds in the second half of the 17th century is symptomatic of Louis XIV and Jean Baptiste Colbert's administration's concerns to impose unity, control production, and reap the benefits of transparent structure in the shape of efficient taxation.
The guilds were identified with organizations enjoying certain privileges (letters patent), usually issued by the king or state and overseen by local town business authorities (some kind of chamber of commerce). These were the predecessors of the modern patent and trademark system. The guilds also maintained funds in order to support infirm or elderly members, as well as widows and orphans of guild members, funeral benefits, and a 'tramping' allowance for those needing to travel to find work. As the guild system of the City of London declined during the 17th century, the Livery Companies transformed into mutual assistance fraternities along such lines.
European guilds imposed long standardized periods of apprenticeship, and made it difficult for those lacking the capital to set up for themselves or without the approval of their peers to gain access to materials or knowledge, or to sell into certain markets, an area that equally dominated the guilds' concerns. These are defining characteristics of mercantilism in economics, which dominated most European thinking about political economy until the rise of classical economics.
The guild system survived the emergence of early capitalists, which began to divide guild members into "haves" and dependent "have-nots". The civil struggles that characterize the 14th-century towns and cities were struggles in part between the greater guilds and the lesser artisanal guilds, which depended on piecework. "In Florence, they were openly distinguished: the "Arti maggiori" and the "Arti minori"—already there was a "popolo grasso" and a "popolo magro"". Fiercer struggles were those between essentially conservative guilds and the merchant class, which increasingly came to control the means of production and the capital that could be ventured in expansive schemes, often under the rules of guilds of their own. German social historians trace the "Zunftrevolution", the urban revolution of guildmembers against a controlling urban patriciate, sometimes reading into them, however, perceived foretastes of the class struggles of the 19th century.
In the countryside, where guild rules did not operate, there was freedom for the entrepreneur with capital to organize cottage industry, a network of cottagers who spun and wove in their own premises on his account, provided with their raw materials, perhaps even their looms, by the capitalist who took a share of the profits. Such a dispersed system could not so easily be controlled where there was a vigorous local market for the raw materials: wool was easily available in sheep-rearing regions, whereas silk was not.
In Florence, Italy, there were seven to twelve "greater guilds" and fourteen "lesser guilds" the most important of the greater guilds was that for judges and notaries, who handled the legal business of all the other guilds and often served as an arbitrator of disputes. Other greater guilds include the wool, silk, and the money changers' guilds. They prided themselves on a reputation for very high-quality work, which was rewarded with premium prices. The guilds fined members who deviated from standards. Other greater guilds included those of doctors, druggists, and furriers. Among the lesser guilds, were those for bakers, saddle makers, ironworkers and other artisans. They had a sizable membership, but lacked the political and social standing necessary to influence city affairs.
The guild was made up by experienced and confirmed experts in their field of handicraft. They were called master craftsmen. Before a new employee could rise to the level of mastery, he had to go through a schooling period during which he was first called an apprentice. After this period he could rise to the level of journeyman. Apprentices would typically not learn more than the most basic techniques until they were trusted by their peers to keep the guild's or company's secrets.
Like "journey", the distance that could be travelled in a day, the title 'journeyman' derives from the French words for 'day' ("jour" and "journée") from which came the middle English word "journei". Journeymen were able to work for other masters, unlike apprentices, and generally paid by the day and were thus day labourers. After being employed by a master for several years, and after producing a qualifying piece of work, the apprentice was granted the rank of journeyman and was given documents (letters or certificates from his master and/or the guild itself) which certified him as a journeyman and entitled him to travel to other towns and countries to learn the art from other masters. These journeys could span large parts of Europe and were an unofficial way of communicating new methods and techniques, though by no means all journeymen made such travels — they were most common in Germany and Italy, and in other countries journeymen from small cities would often visit the capital.
After this journey and several years of experience, a journeyman could be received as master craftsman, though in some guilds this step could be made straight from apprentice. This would typically require the approval of all masters of a guild, a donation of money and other goods (often omitted for sons of existing members), and the production of a so-called "masterpiece,' which would illustrate the abilities of the aspiring master craftsman; this was often retained by the guild.
The medieval guild was established by charters or letters patent or similar authority by the city or the ruler and normally held a monopoly on trade in its craft within the city in which it operated: handicraft workers were forbidden by law to run any business if they were not members of a guild, and only masters were allowed to be members of a guild. Before these privileges were legislated, these groups of handicraft workers were simply called 'handicraft associations'.
The town authorities might be represented in the guild meetings and thus had a means of controlling the handicraft activities. This was important since towns very often depended on a good reputation for export of a narrow range of products, on which not only the guild's, but the town's, reputation depended. Controls on the association of physical locations to well-known exported products, e.g. wine from the Champagne and Bordeaux regions of France, tin-glazed earthenwares from certain cities in Holland, lace from Chantilly, etc., helped to establish a town's place in global commerce — this led to modern trademarks.
In many German and Italian cities, the more powerful guilds often had considerable political influence, and sometimes attempted to control the city authorities. In the 14th century, this led to numerous bloody uprisings, during which the guilds dissolved town councils and detained patricians in an attempt to increase their influence. In fourteenth-century north-east Germany, people of Wendish, i.e. Slavic, origin were not allowed to join some guilds. According to Wilhelm Raabe, ""down into the eighteenth century no German guild accepted a Wend.""
Ogilvie (2004) argues that guilds negatively affected quality, skills, and innovation. Through what economists now call "rent-seeking" they imposed deadweight losses on the economy. Ogilvie argues they generated limited positive externalities and notes that industry began to flourish only after the guilds faded away. Guilds persisted over the centuries because they redistributed resources to politically powerful merchants. On the other hand, Ogilvie agrees, guilds created "social capital" of shared norms, common information, mutual sanctions, and collective political action. This social capital benefited guild members, even as it arguably hurt outsiders.
The guild system became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Critics argued that they hindered free trade and technological innovation, technology transfer and business development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other and against free practitioners of their arts.
Two of the most outspoken critics of the guild system were Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, and all over Europe a tendency to oppose government control over trades in favour of laissez-faire free market systems grew rapidly and made its way into the political and legal systems. Many people who participated in the French Revolution saw guilds as a last remnant of feudalism. The Le Chapelier Law of 1791 abolished the guilds in France. Smith wrote in "The Wealth of Nations" (Book I, Chapter X, paragraph 72):
Karl Marx in his "Communist Manifesto" also criticized the guild system for its rigid gradation of social rank and the relation of oppressor/oppressed entailed by this system. It was the 18th and 19th centuries that saw the beginning of the low regard in which some people hold the guilds to this day. In part due to their own inability to control unruly corporate behavior, the tide of public opinion turned against the guilds.
Because of industrialization and modernization of the trade and industry, and the rise of powerful nation-states that could directly issue patent and copyright protections — often revealing the trade secrets — the guilds' power faded. After the French Revolution they gradually fell in most European nations over the course of the 19th century, as the guild system was disbanded and replaced by laws that promoted free trade. As a consequence of the decline of guilds, many former handicraft workers were forced to seek employment in the emerging manufacturing industries, using not closely guarded techniques formerly protected by guilds, but rather the standardized methods controlled by corporations.
Interest in the medieval guild system was revived during the late 19th century, among far right circles. Fascism in Italy (among other countries) implemented corporatism, operating at the national rather than city level, to try to imitate the corporatism of the Middle Ages.
Guilds are sometimes said to be the precursors of modern trade unions. Guilds, however, can also be seen as a set of self-employed skilled craftsmen with ownership and control over the materials and tools they needed to produce their goods. Some argue that guilds operated more like cartels than they were like trade unions (Olson 1982). However, the journeymen organizations, which were at the time illegal, may have been influential.
The exclusive privilege of a guild to produce certain goods or provide certain services was similar in spirit and character with the original patent systems that surfaced in England in 1624. These systems played a role in ending the guilds' dominance, as trade secret methods were superseded by modern firms directly revealing their techniques, and counting on the state to enforce their legal monopoly.
Some guild traditions still remain in a few handicrafts, in Europe especially among shoemakers and barbers. Some ritual traditions of the guilds were preserved in order organisations such as the Freemasons, allegedly deriving from the Masons Guild, and the Oddfellows, allegedly derived from various smaller guilds. These are, however, not very important economically except as reminders of the responsibilities of some trades toward the public.
Modern antitrust law could be said to derive in some ways from the original statutes by which the guilds were abolished in Europe.
The economic consequences of guilds have led to heated debates among economic historians. On the one side, scholars say that since merchant guilds persisted over long periods they must have been efficient institutions (since inefficient institutions die out). Others say they persisted not because they benefited the entire economy but because they benefited the owners, who used political power to protect them. Ogilvie (2011) says they regulated trade for their own benefit, were monopolies, distorted markets, fixed prices, and restricted entrance into the guild. Ogilvie (2008) argues that their long apprenticeships were unnecessary to acquire skills, and their conservatism reduced the rate of innovation and made the society poorer. She says their main goal was rent seeking, that is, to shift money to the membership at the expense of the entire economy.
Epstein and Prak's book (2008) rejects Ogilvie's conclusions. Specifically, Epstein argues that guilds were cost-sharing rather than rent-seeking institutions. They located and matched masters and likely apprentices through monitored learning. Whereas the acquisition of craft skills required experience-based learning, he argues that this process necessitated many years in apprenticeship.
The extent to which guilds were able to monopolize markets is also debated.
For the most part, medieval guilds limited women's participation, and usually only the widows and daughters of known masters were allowed in. Even if a woman entered a guild, she was excluded from guild offices. It's important to note that while this was the overarching practice, there were guilds and professions that did allow women's participation, and that the Medieval era was an ever-changing, mutable society—especially considering that it spanned hundreds of years and many different cultures. There were multiple accounts of women's participation in guilds in England and the Continent. In a study of London silkwomen of the 15th century by Marian K. Dale, she notes that medieval women could inherit property, belong to guilds, manage estates, and run the family business if widowed. The "Livre des métiers de Paris (Book of Trades of Paris)" was compiled by Étienne Boileau, the Grand Provost of Paris under King Louis IX. It documents that 5 out of 110 Parisian guilds were female monopolies, and that only a few guilds systematically excluded women. Boileau notes that some professions were also open to women: surgeons, glass-blowers, chain-mail forgers. Entertainment guilds also had a significant number of women members. John, Duke of Berry documents payments to female musicians from Le Puy, Lyons, and Paris.
Women did have problems with entering healers' guilds, as opposed to their relative freedom in trade or craft guilds. Their status in healers' guilds were often challenged. The idea that medicine should only be practice by men was supported by some religious and secular authorities at the time. It is believed that the Inquisition and witch hunts throughout the ages contributed to the lack of women in medical guilds.
Professional organizations replicate guild structure and operation.
Professions such as architecture, engineering, geology, and land surveying require varying lengths of apprenticeships before one can gain a "professional" certification. These certifications hold great legal weight: most states make them a prerequisite to practicing there.
Thomas W. Malone champions a modern variant of the guild structure for modern "e-lancers", professionals who do mostly telework for multiple employers. Insurance including any professional liability, intellectual capital protections, an ethical code perhaps enforced by peer pressure and software, and other benefits of a strong association of producers of knowledge, benefit from economies of scale, and may prevent cut-throat competition that leads to inferior services undercutting prices. And, as with historical guilds, such a structure will resist foreign competition. The free software community has from time to time explored a guild-like structure to unite against competition from Microsoft, e.g. Advogato assigns journeyer and master ranks to those committing to work only or mostly on free software.
In many European countries guilds have experienced a revival as local trade organizations for craftsmen, primarily in traditional skills. They may function as forums for developing competence and are often the local units of a national employer's organisation.
In the City of London, the ancient guilds survive as livery companies, all of which play a ceremonial role in the City's many customs. The City of London livery companies maintain strong links with their respective trade, craft or profession, some still retain regulatory, inspection or enforcement roles. The senior members of the City of London Livery Companies (known as liverymen) elect the sheriffs and approve the candidates for the office of Lord Mayor of London. Guilds also survive in many other towns and cities the UK including in Preston, Lancashire, as the Preston Guild Merchant where among other celebrations descendants of burgesses are still admitted into membership. With the City of London livery companies, the UK has over 300 extant guilds and growing.
In 1878 the London livery companies established the City and Guilds of London Institute the forerunner of the engineering school (still called City and Guilds College) at Imperial College London. The aim of the City and Guilds of London Institute was the advancement of technical education. "City and Guilds" operates as an examining and accreditation body for vocational, managerial and engineering qualifications from entry-level craft and trade skills up to post-doctoral achievement. A separate organisation, the City and Guilds of London Art School has also close ties with the London livery companies and is involved in the training of master craftworkers in stone and wood carving, as well as fine artists.
In Germany there are no longer any "Zünfte" (or "Gilden" – the terms used were rather different from town to town), nor any restriction of a craft to a privileged corporation. However, under one other of their old names albeit a less frequent one, "Innungen", guilds continue to exist as private member clubs with membership limited to practitioners of particular trades or activities. These clubs are corporations under public law, albeit the membership is voluntary; the president normally comes from the ranks of master-craftsmen and is called "Obermeister" ("master-in-chief"). Journeymen elect their own representative bodies, with their president having the traditional title of "Altgesell" (senior journeyman).
There are also "craft chambers" ("Handwerkskammern"), which have less resemblance to ancient guilds in that they are organized for all crafts in a certain region, not just one. In them membership is mandatory, and they serve to establish self-governance of the crafts.
In India there are Students Guild, Indian Engineers Guild, Safety Guild and other various Professional Associations are common like Indian medical Association, Indian Engineers, Indian Dental Association, United nurses Association, etc.
Most of them use Union, Association or Society as suffix.
In the United States guilds exist in several fields.
In the film and television industry, guild membership is generally a prerequisite for working on major productions in certain capacities. The Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild of America, Writers Guild of America, East, Writers Guild of America, West and other profession-specific guilds have the ability to exercise strong control in the cinema of the United States as a result of a rigid system of intellectual-property rights and a history of power-brokers also holding guild membership (e.g., DreamWorks founder Steven Spielberg was, and is, a DGA member). These guilds maintain their own contracts with production companies to ensure a certain number of their members are hired for roles in each film or television production, and that their members are paid a minimum of guild "scale," along with other labor protections. These guilds set high standards for membership, and exclude professional actors, writers, etc. who do not abide by the strict rules for competing within the film and television industry in America.
The Newspaper Guild is a labor union for journalists and other newspaper workers, with over 30,000 members in North America.
Real-estate brokerage offers an example of a modern American guild system. Signs of guild behavior in real-estate brokerage include: standard pricing (6% of the home price), strong affiliation among all practitioners, self-regulation (see National Association of Realtors), strong cultural identity (see realtor), little price variation with quality differences, and traditional methods in use by all practitioners. In September 2005 the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors, challenging NAR practices that (the DOJ asserted) prevent competition from practitioners who use different methods. The DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission in 2005 advocated against state laws, supported by NAR, that disadvantage new kinds of brokers. "U.S. v. National Assoc. of Realtors", Civil Action No. 05C-5140 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 7, 2005).
The practice of law in the United States also exemplifies modern guilds at work. Every state maintains its own bar association, supervised by that state's highest court. The court decides the criteria for entering and staying in the legal profession. In most states, every attorney must become a member of that state's bar association in order to practice law. State laws forbid any person from engaging in the unauthorized practice of law and practicing attorneys are subject to rules of professional conduct that are enforced by the state's high court.
Medical associations comparable to guilds include the state Medical Boards, the American Medical Association, and the American Dental Association. Medical licensing in most states requires specific training, tests and years of low-paid apprenticeship (internship and residency) under harsh working conditions. Even qualified international or out-of-state doctors may not practice without acceptance by the local medical guild (Medical board). Similarly, nurses and physicians' practitioners have their own guilds. A doctor cannot work as a physician's assistant unless (s)he separately trains, tests and apprentices as one.
Australia is home to several guilds including the Australian Butcher's Guild (a fraternity of independent butchers) which provides links to resources like Australian meat standards and a guide to different beef cuts. Another guild is The Pharmacy Guild of Australia, created in 1928 as the Federated Pharmaceutical Services Guild of Australia, which serves "5700 community pharmacies," while also providing training and standards for the country's pharmacists. Australia's craft guilds include, among others, the Australian Director's Guild, representing the country's directors, documentary makers and animators, the Australian Writer's Guild, and The Artists Guild, a craft guild focusing on female artists.
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Gradius (video game)
The arcade version of "Gradius" was released internationally outside Japan under the title of Nemesis, although subsequent home releases have the original title. Home versions were released for various platforms, such as the NES, the MSX home computer, and the PC Engine.
The player controls the trans-dimensional spaceship Vic Viper, and must battle waves of enemies through various environments. The game became synonymous with the phrase, "Destroy the core!", as the standard of boss battles in the "Gradius" series involved combat with a giant craft, in the center of which would be situated one to several blue colored spheres. These bosses would be designed in such a way that there would be a straight passage from the exterior of the giant craft which leads directly to one of these cores. The player must fire shots into this passage while avoiding attack patterns from weapon emplacements on the body of the boss. However, small but destructible walls are situated in this passage, impeding the bullet shots from damaging the core, and must be whittled away by repeated well-placed shots. In a way, these tiny walls represent the boss' shielding gauge until its core is finally vulnerable to attack. Some bosses have the ability to regenerate these walls. When the core has sustained enough hits, it usually changes color from blue to red, indicating that it is in critical condition and its destruction is imminent. Upon the destruction of a core, a piece of the boss may be put out of commission, seeing that it is no longer powered by a core, or if all of the cores are destroyed, the entire boss is defeated and explodes satisfyingly. Note that these cores are not present on the more organic bosses of "Gradius". Such bosses have weak spots in places such as a mouth, head or eye.
When gameplay begins, the Vic Viper is relatively slow and has only a weak gun. This level of capability is generally insufficient for engaging enemies, but the Vic Viper can gain greater capabilities by collecting and using power-up items. While most arcade games utilize distinct power up-items that each correspond to a specific effect on the player character, "Gradius" has a single power-up item. The effect of this power-up item is to advance the currently selected item in a power-up menu that appears at the bottom of the screen. When the desired power-up is highlighted, the player can obtain it by pressing the power-up button, returning the menu to its initial state in which no power-up is highlighted.
"Gradius" was the creation of Konami game designer Machiguchi Hiroyasu, being the first video game he publicly released. Joining the company in the early 1980s originally as a programmer, Konami was trying to transition from being a producer of medal machines to a video game developer, and assigned him to a small team to try and create a game that could put the company on the map. He asked the team what kind of game they'd like to work on, responding that they'd like to make another shooting game. The shoot'em up genre had seen a resurgence at the time with Namco's "Xevious", with the goal of the project being to make a shooter that could surpass it. The project was at first intended to be a followup to Konami's earlier game "Scramble", being titled "Scramble 2" and reusing many of its material and game mechanics.
Development of "Gradius" lasted for about a year, which Hiroyasu says was filled with anxiety and worry from the production team due to it being their first game, lacking confidence in what they were doing. Members of the project came up with ideas that were then tested on the arcade monitor to see if they worked or not. While designing the Option satellites, the team tested over 20 different movement patterns for them, which were cut through process of elimination based on those that didn't work. The game was produced for the Konami Bubble System arcade hardware, which gave the team more hardware capacity and memory to experiment with. Hiroyasu wanted the game to have a visually distinct world with unique enemies and locations, something relatively uncommon for shooters at the time. Inspiration for mechanics and the story were derived from films such as "" and "Lensman", with the Laser weapon being directly taken from those in "Lensman". The idea for the power meter mechanic stemmed from the team's desire to give players freedom to select whichever weapons they pleased. Early versions had the player collecting individual pick-up icons, which were cut for not being "satisfying" enough; it was instead replaced with a selection bar where players collected capsules to allow access to other weapons, an idea based on the function keys on a keyboard. The Moai enemies were added to pay homage to "Xevious" and its Nazca lines, and as a way to give the game a sense of mystery.
"Gradius" was first released in Japan for Konami's Bubble System, an arcade board which allows operators to change the software through the used of a proprietary magnetic-based media called "Bubble Software". The game was distributed as a standard printed circuit board in North America and Europe under the title of "Nemesis". The North American version of "Nemesis" features a considerably increased difficulty compared to the Japanese and European version. To balance this, the game spawns a fleet of orange enemies when the player loses a life in order to provide as many power-up capsules as possible in order to recover as many upgrades as possible. The title screen was also updated, showing an in-game reproduction of the promotional artwork behind the logo.
The first home conversion of "Gradius" was released for Nintendo's Famicom console on April 25, 1986 in Japan. Due to the hardware limitations of the Famicom, many of the level designs were simplified (the Moai stage, for example, lacks the vertical scrolling present in the arcade game) and the maximum amount of options that the player can upgrade to was reduced from four to two. This version added a cheat code that can be entered while the game is paused that grants the player's ship almost all the power-ups. This code would appear again in many later Konami on the NES and other consoles (such as "Contra" and "Life Force"), becoming known as the Konami Code.
The NES version of "Gradius" was released in North America in December 1986. It is the first NES game to have been released by Konami in the region and unlike the original arcade game, the title was kept unchanged between regions. The NES version was made available in arcades as a Nintendo VS. System board (under the title of "VS. Gradius") and as a PlayChoice-10 cartridge. "VS. Gradius" was distributed to arcades by Nintendo.
The MSX version of "Gradius" was released on July 25, 1986 in Japan, a few months after the Famicom version. It was also released in Europe under the "Nemesis" title. This version underwent changes similar to the Famicom version, but adds its slew of exclusive content to make up for the downgrade. A new stage, the bone planet was added between the Inverted Volcano stage and the Antennoid stage, featuring exclusive enemy types. There also four hidden warp zones and the ability to play as the titular ship from "TwinBee" if the MSX version of that game is played alongside "Nemesis".
The PC Engine version of "Gradius" was released on November 15, 1991 exclusively in Japan. Released on a 2-Megabit HuCard, it had relatively few omissions compared to the NES and MSX versions and added a Desert Planet stage similar to the Bone Planet stage from the MSX version. Because of the lower resolution of the PC Engine compared to the original arcade hardware, the PC Engine features some slight vertical-scrolling.
In addition to the MSX, "Gradius" was also ported to other microcomputers shortly after its release, such as the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 in Europe (as "Nemesis: The Final Challenge"), as well as the PC-8801 and X1 in Japan. A port for the X68000 computer was also included in the early models of the computer. The original "Gradius" is also included in collection such as "Gradius Deluxe Pack" for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn and "Gradius Collection" for the PlayStation Portable. The arcade version was digitally released on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch as part of the Arcade Archives series, with the option to play all four regional variants of the game.
The game went to number 2 in the UK sales charts, behind "Feud". The Western cover art for the NES version claimed that it had sold one million copies in Japan.
"GameSpot" stated that "Gradius" was one of the toughest side-scrolling shooter games available on the NES, second only to "Contra". "IGN" has given the game a rating 7 out of 10 for its re-release on the Wii Virtual Console and has hailed it as one of the greatest classic side-scrolling shooter games.
"Gradius" spawned several sequels, the first of which was 1986's "Salamander". The series has continued into the seventh generation with "Gradius ReBirth".
It was also re-released on Windows Store on December 20, 2013, GameNow in May 2014 and for PlayStation 4's Arcade Archives on January 25 in Japan. An NES port was re-released for the Nintendo Switch Online on September 19, 2018 in Worldwide and Update release as on November 14, 2018 in Worldwide. Another Update release titled Gradius SP: Second Loop was released worldwide on August 22, 2019.
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Gamemaster
A gamemaster (GM; also known as game master, game manager, game moderator or referee) is a person who acts as an organizer, officiant for regarding rules, arbitrator, and moderator for a multiplayer role-playing game. They are more common in co-operative games in which players work together than in competitive games in which players oppose each other. The act performed by a gamemaster is sometimes referred to as "Gamemastering" or simply "GM-ing".
The role of a gamemaster in a traditional table-top role-playing game (pencil-and-paper role-playing game) is to weave the other participants' player-character stories together, control the non-player aspects of the game, create environments in which the players can interact, and solve any player disputes. The basic role of the gamemaster is the same in almost all traditional role-playing games, although differing rule sets make the specific duties of the gamemaster unique to that system.
The role of a gamemaster in an online game is to enforce the game's rules and provide general customer service. Also, unlike gamemasters in traditional role-playing games, gamemasters for online games in some cases are paid employees.
In Dungeons & Dragons, the game master is referred to as the dungeon master.
The term "gamemaster" and the role associated with it could be found in the postal gaming hobby. In typical play-by-mail games, players control armies or civilizations and mail their chosen actions to the GM. The GM then mails the updated game state to all players on a regular basis. Usage in a wargaming context includes Guidon Games 1973 ruleset, "Ironclad".
In a role-playing game context, it was first used by Dave Arneson while developing his game "Blackmoor" in 1971, although the first usage in print may have been "Chivalry & Sorcery".
Each gaming system has its own name for the role of the gamemaster, such as "judge", "narrator", "referee", "director", or "storyteller", and these terms not only describe the role of the gamemaster in general but also help define how the game is intended to be run. For example, the Storyteller System used in White Wolf Game Studio's storytelling games calls its GM the "storyteller", while the rules- and setting-focused "Marvel Super Heroes" role-playing game calls its GM the "judge". The cartoon inspired role-playing game "Toon" calls its GM the "animator". A few games apply system- or setting-specific flavorful names to the GM, such as the Keeper of Arcane Lore (in "Call of Cthulhu"); the Hollyhock God ("Nobilis", in which the hollyhock represents vanity), or the most famous of such terms, "Dungeon Master" (or "DM") in "Dungeons & Dragons".
The gamemaster prepares the game session for the players and the characters they play (known as player characters or PCs), describes the events taking place and decides on the outcomes of players' decisions. The gamemaster also keeps track of non-player characters (NPCs) and random encounters, as well as of the general state of the game world. The game session (or "adventure") can be metaphorically described as a play, in which the players are the lead actors, and the GM provides the stage, the scenery, the basic plot on which the improvisational script is built, as well as all the bit parts and supporting characters. Gamemasters can also be in charge of RPG board games making the events and setting challenges.
GMs may choose to run a game based on a published game world, with the maps and history already in place; such game worlds often have pre-written adventures. Alternatively, the GM may build their own world and script their own adventures.
A good gamemaster draws the players into the adventure, making it enjoyable for everyone. Good gamemasters have quick minds, sharp wits, and rich imaginations. Gamemasters must also maintain game balance: hideously overpowered monsters "or" players are no fun. It was noted, in 1997, that those who favor their left-brain such as skilled code writers usually do not make it in the ethereal gamemaster world of storytelling and verse.
In early virtual worlds gamemasters served as a moderator or administrator; in MUD game masters were called "wizards". Gamemastering in the form found in traditional role-playing games has also been used in a semi-automatic virtual worlds. However, human moderation was sometimes considered unfair or out of context in an otherwise automated world. As online games expanded, gamemaster duties expanded to include being a customer service representative for an online community. A gamemaster in such a game is either an experienced volunteer player or an employee of the game's publisher. They enforce the game's rules by banishing spammers, player killers, cheaters, and hackers and by solving players' problems by providing general customer service. For their tasks they use special tools and characters that allow them to do things like teleport to players, summon items, and browse logs that record players' activities. Often, players who feel dissatisfied with the game will blame the GMs directly for any errors or glitches. However, this blame is misdirected as most GMs are not developers and cannot resolve those types of problems.
The now defunct America Online Online Gaming Forum used to use volunteers selected by applications from its user base. These people were simply referred to as OGFs by other members, and their screennames were indicative of their position (i.e., OGF Moose, etc.). While membership in the Online Gaming Forum had only one real requirement (that is, be a member of AOL), OGFs were given powers quite similar to AOL "Guides" and could use them at will to discipline users as they saw appropriate.
"World of Warcraft" has employees of Blizzard Entertainment that serve as gamemasters to help users with various problems in gameplay, chat, and other things like account and billing issues. A gamemaster in this game will communicate with players through chat that has blue text and they will also have a special "GM" tag and Blizzard logo in front of their names.
"RuneScape" has more than 500 moderators employed by Jagex to assist players and perform administrative duties in-game and on the site forums. These "Jagex Moderators", as they are called, usually have the word "Mod" and a gold crown preceding their account names which ordinary players are not permitted to use. The game also has "Player Moderators" and "Forum Moderators" who are player volunteers helping with moderation, having the ability to mute (block from chatting) other players who violate rules.
"Battleground Europe", a medium-sized MMOFPS has a team of "Game Moderators", anonymous volunteers who moderate the game.
"Miniconomy", a smaller text-based MMO has a team of "Federals", experienced players that help moderate the game and interactions.
"Transformice", an MMORPG, has a team of volunteer moderators called "Mods" who are experienced players that help moderate the game and interactions.
Note that a few games, notably "Neverwinter Nights" and "", are video game adaptations of tabletop role-playing games that are played online with one player acting as a traditional gamemaster.
Gamemastering, sometimes referred to as Orchestration is used in pervasive games to guide players along a trajectory desired by the game author. To ensure proper gamemastering can take place, four components are needed: some kind of sensory system to the game allowing the game masters to know current events, providing dynamic game information; dynamic and static game information lets game masters make informed decisions; decisions need to be actuated into the game, either through the game system or through manual intervention; and finally a communication structure is needed for both diegetic or non-diegetic communication. Effective gamemastering can require specialized user interfaces that are highly game specific.
Sometimes, tabletop GMs simply can not find players interested in either the same setting, product line, or play style in their local neighborhood. The advent of the networked personal computer provided a solution in the form of online chat programs. Appropriately equipped gamemasters can find players online and a group can meet via chat rooms, forums, or other electronic means.
In contrast to standard tabletop procedure (and to games "designed" to be played online), this online chat format significantly changed the balance of duties for a prospective gamemaster. Descriptive text required more preparation, if only via cut-and-paste; acting and voice skills could not be utilized to get the personality of NPCs and monsters across, increasing the value of background music ('assigned' in advance or individually chosen) as a playing aid. The GM was likely to need copies of player-character records, being unable to glance at the originals as in normal face-to-face procedure. The format also forced the issue (particularly when participants were not personally acquainted) of whether to leave all rolling of dice to the GM (making one's own rolls is a privilege not readily surrendered by some players), or to trust all players to honestly report the results of their rolls (the honor system may be strained when it is in a player's best interest to roll well).
However, workarounds to these challenges have only increased over time. The use of Wiki software helps GMs and players alike keep track of all manner of game data, sometimes evolving into a home-made gaming supplement. Scripting software allows unwieldy mechanics (e.g. a complicated formula or repetitive die-rolling) to be resolved at the push of a button. Teleconferencing enhances group communication through voice, video, and a shared whiteboard. The use of technology to enable online play is growing, as reflected in products like the D&D Insider.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12373
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